Hating your neighbour

Here is Horatio Bottomley (1860-1933), editor of John Bull, politician, swindler, Hun-hater, British patriot. No man did more to create a division between two Englands. I thought of him today while reading Frost's Notebooks.

'You must love your enemies at home at least better than your enemies abroad or it ends the nation.' --- Robert Frost, Notebooks, p. 304.

'I wish the Bosche would have the pluck to come right in & make a clean sweep of the Pleasure Boats... and all the stinking Leeds and Bradford War-profiteers now reading John Bull on Scarborough Sands.' --- Wilfred Owen, Collected Letters, p. 568.

'Besides my hate for one fat patriot
My hatred of the Kaiser is love true.'
--- Edward Thomas, 'This is no case of petty right or wrong'.

I take it that the fat patriot is Bottomley, although on this question Edna Longley's otherwise exhaustive edition remains silent.

Patrick Deer: Culture in Camouflage

Patrick Deer's Culture in Camouflage: War, Empire, and Modern British Literature is newly published by OUP. It is (in all respects but one) a strong and meticulously researched book: the endnotes and bibliography constitute more than a quarter of its 330 pages. Deer announces in his introduction that his study 'aims to remap the history of British war culture by insisting on the centrality and importance of the literature of the Second World War.' Literature is shown to play its part in a larger 'cultural field', as a kind of propaganda intended to normalise war and represent conflict in officially acceptable ways. Whereas, Deer maintains, the First World War did not produce a helpfully coherent war culture at home, every effort was made to ensure that the later war was bolstered by the arts. Those are huge and dangerous generalisations, and Deer's task (which he performs with some subtlety) is to make them seem persuasive.

This is an essential study for any account of Home Front cultural life before and during the Second World War. However, the list of writers named in chapter titles and subtitles betrays something of a bias: Ford Madox Ford, Rex Warner, Virginia Woolf, Humphrey Jennings, Henry Green, James Hanley, Graham Greene, Elizabeth Bowen, George Orwell, Evelyn Waugh, Alexander Baron. Deer's study is not the first to suggest (albeit through omission) that poetry is distinct from 'literature'; the ghettoising of poetry in recent critical developments has been widely remarked. But what a shame that a scholar as good as Deer should spend such little time on poetry. It may be, of course, that after Owen and Sassoon, poetry during World War 2 is less susceptible than other literary forms to the blandishments of power. Even so, that case needs to be prosecuted.

Those small portions of the book devoted to poetry are by far the weakest. Early on, Deer badly misquotes 'Dulce et Decorum Est' ('Behind that wagon we flung him in' is a wooden version of what Owen wrote: 'Behind the wagon that we flung him in'). On the subject of mistranscription, who shall 'scape whipping? (Cf. 'Futility' in my Modern English War Poetry). But when Deer gives two perfunctory pages to Keith Douglas, one paragraph to Sidney Keyes, and three name-checks to Alun Lewis, we suspect that here may be someone uninterested in poetry. For example, quoting from Douglas, Deer misses stanza breaks; Alamein to Zem Zem becomes 'From Alamein to Zem Zem'; 'simplify me when I'm dead' turns into 'simplify me when I am dead'; and the great ending of 'Desert Flowers' --- 'Lay the coin on my tongue and I will sing / of what the others never set eyes on' --- gets mangled into 'of what others never set eyes on'. Deer mulls over the 'ambiguity' of 'others': needlessly, because the ambiguity is caused by his own error.

In studies of Second World War literature, it can sometimes seem as if every prose hack of the period has been lavished with attention. Meanwhile, major poets are dismissed in a page or two of slapdash references. Deer has written an insightful and provocative study of what he inaccurately calls the 'literature' of the war. Someone needs to do the same for the poetry.

A Short Post About Killing

I have always been fascinated by those very few post-Homeric poems which deal with the subject of killing on the battlefield. They are vastly outnumbered by poems about dying, or watching comrades dying, and it is not hard to guess why. Even though it is the job of soldiers to kill the enemy, both they and their civilian readers have a vested interest in disguising that fact. One of the reasons why Keith Douglas's 'How to Kill' seems to me to be one of the greatest of modern war poems is that Douglas refuses to connive with his audience. 'Look', he insists, obliging the reader to gaze with him through his 'dial of glass' at an enemy 'who is going to die'. What the soldier does, he does for us. If we look, we acknowledge that we are incriminated ('damned'); worse still, if we turn away squeamishly, we are moral hypocrites.

I can think of only two other poems about killing which deserve to be bracketed with 'How to Kill'. The first is Hardy's Boer War poem, 'The Man He Killed', in which the protagonist tries to escape from his own experience ('I shot at him as he at me') into the generalities of the second-person pronoun ('You shoot a fellow down'). The second is Siegfried Sassoon's 'The Kiss':

To these I turn, in these I trust;
Brother Lead and Sister Steel.
To his blind power I make appeal;
I guard her beauty clean from rust.

He spins and burns and loves the air,
And splits a skull to win my praise;
But up the nobly marching days
She glitters naked, cold and fair.

Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this;
That in good fury he may feel
The body where he sets his heel
Quail from your downward darting kiss.

Sassoon wrote some years later that the poem had been inspired by a lecture on the use of the bayonet in which the lecturer, a major, had spoken with 'homicidal eloquence'. Bullet and bayonet, the major reported, were brother and sister. Sassoon was puzzled by 'The Kiss', feeling that he never could have 'stuck a bayonet in anyone', but admitting that the poem 'doesn't show any sign of satire'.

There is, as Sassoon admits, little reason not to take the poem as a strange sadistic fantasy. The bayonet is eroticised --- but eroticised, disturbingly enough, as the soldier's naked 'sister' whose very kiss is fatal. The 'kiss' is itself a curious description, covering up a sexual metaphor which is more obviously thrusting and penetrative. And yet the bayonet's gender resolutely resists the metaphor's logic, so that the poem is at war with itself, at once revealing and withholding, accepting agency and shifting agency from soldier to bayonet. Paradoxically, in its tongue-tied confusions 'The Kiss' comes as close to homicidal eloquence as any poem from the First World War.

Send Andrew Motion to Afghanistan

In a valedictory essay as Poet Laureate summarised in today's Guardian, Andrew Motion strikes a familiarly self-pitying note. Writing Laureate poems has been hard. Worse still, editors of newspapers phone round to find someone willing to say how bad each of his official poems is: 'Then they have their story --- poet laureate writes another no-good poem.' On the bright side, Motion reveals that he has friends in high places: 'I've certainly never looked for thanks from the royal family, and have only been surprised and touched when it has come. (Which it has, from the Queen, Prince Charles and --- for the poem I wrote about her 100th birthday --- the late Queen Mother).' The parenthetical elaboration is priceless.

Some of Motion's own poetry I quite like, but when it comes to war poetry he is of the 'sad shires' school, uselessly wringing his hands over the pity and futility of it all. His afterword to 101 Poems Against War, with its bland anti-war rhetoric and its assumption of an easy consensus, infuriated me. Motion doesn't want war poems to challenge or dismay or unsettle him; he only wants poems which keep harmony with his melancholic mood music. As he has approvingly stated, 'We can guess what attitude poets will take to a conflict before we read a line they have written about it.' Predictability has become a poetic strength.

Motion acknowledges one regret during his tenure as Poet Laureate: 'I wish ... that someone had flown me to Iraq and Afghanistan and encouraged me to write about the wars in those places.' Andrew, with your connections you could have made it happen, and you didn't. You still can. Instead of sighing like a poor man's Edward Thomas about what might have been, why not take inspiration from a Canadian poet, Suzanne Steele, who will be going out to Afghanistan as a war artist later this year? I, for one, would be genuinely keen to read your poetry from the war zone. Rather that than an official poem about the Queen Mother's birthday.

Frost/Gurney/Haines

I spent Wednesday at the University of Leicester, proselytising to staff and MA students on behalf of Ivor Gurney. Driving back to Devon yesterday, I stopped off at the Gloucestershire Archives to see Philip Lancaster and Sebastian Field. Philip is creating a digital catalogue of Gurney's papers, while simultaneously writing a Ph.D. on Gurney. All the work will eventually go towards our 3-volume edition of Gurney's Complete Poetry and Prose, which should appear in or around 2013. We estimate that not much more than a quarter of Gurney's surviving poetry has been published to date, so it's a huge undertaking. Perhaps uniquely for such a major 20th-century writer, the best of Gurney's unpublished work is at least as good as the published. On which subject, more later.

The Gloucestershire Archive also holds the papers of John (or 'Jack') Haines. Haines became what archivists call a 'hub'. He knew all the important people, and they knew each other through him. Haines was a solicitor, a poet and poetry-lover, and a keen amateur botanist, and he and Robert Frost struck up a close friendship during 1914, wandering the Gloucestershire countryside together in search of rare flowers. Frost continued to correspond with Haines after returning to the States, and visited Haines in England in 1928 and 1957.

Haines serves as the bridge between Frost and Gurney. Those two poets never met; unknowingly, they lived just a few miles apart in Gloucestershire for a year. The closest Gurney came to any of the Dymock poets was when he walked to Dymock to call unannounced on Lascelles Abercrombie. Abercrombie, as it happens, was away in Manchester working at a munitions factory, so Gurney passed a few hours chatting to his wife before continuing his walk.

Haines considered Gurney 'the most dynamic creature [he] ever met'. Pamela Blevins quotes Haines's description of Gurney: 'a remarkable figure, tall, handsome, powerful, crammed with vitality, excessively opinionated and somewhat violent in his critical views.' Gurney was 'a rebel who hates being a rebel and worships the order and discipline he finds so incompatible with his nature.' Reading Haines on Gurney, it is impossible not to wonder why he didn't bring Frost and Edward Thomas and Gurney together in one room; and impossible, as well, not to speculate about what might have happened at such a meeting.

Gurney was introduced to Thomas's poetry through Haines, who had written an essay of appreciation after Thomas's death. Haines remained a loyal friend to Gurney during the asylum years, although there is some evidence that Gurney turned against him around 1928. For reasons which aren't clear, Haines never brought to publication an edition of Gurney's poetry which he had been planning.

I was glancing through Haines's papers yesterday when I came across an unpublished letter from Robert Frost. The date given is June 1914, when Frost was living at Liddle Iddens in Ledington, just outside Dymock. Many other of Frost's letters to Haines have been printed in Selected Letters; if the editor, Lawrance Thompson, knew about this one, it is odd that he didn't include it. Frost talks candidly about the relative merits of poems in his first book, A Boy's Will, comments that the 'second paragraph' of 'My Butterfly' was the first time that he had succeeded in capturing 'the speaking note', and wishes that he had left other poems out of the book for their lack of that 'note'.

Which leads me, as I wind down this most peripatetic of postings, to wonder why there is no Collected Letters of Robert Frost. The Selected was published in 1964, and is long out of print. The past few years have given us Frost's Notebooks and his Collected Prose. I believe that his selected lectures are on their way. Time for some young American scholar to produce a thorough and scholarly edition of the letters.

Update: for more on Haines and Gurney, see Philip Lancaster's blog here.

Dymock Poets and Friends

The latest issue of Dymock Poets and Friends, the journal of the Friends of the Dymock Poets, has just appeared. It has my essay on Frost and Thomas; Adrian Barlow on John Drinkwater; Richard Harries on Thomas and religion; Matthew Hollis on Thomas and 'the road to war'; and Kelsey Thornton on Gurney, Thomas and walking.

So, quite a lot of Thomas; and that emphasis is borne out by the checklist at the back of the issue which collects together all the books and articles published on any of the six Dymock poets during 2008. Thomas has thirteen items listed, Frost six, Brooke two, Gibson and Abercrombie one, and Drinkwater none at all. Thomas's reputation has never been higher. Matthew Hollis has chosen the right time to publish a biography (due from Faber next year). I might as well confess that, much as I believe Thomas to be a terrific poet at his best, I would choose Frost every time. Thankfully, I don't have to choose.

The Friends of the Dymock Poets deserves support for all its excellent work. Its regular meetings (of which the next is on 28 March) give members a chance to hear interesting talks in a friendly atmosphere. 5 miles south of Ledbury, and a dozen miles from the Malverns, Dymock is set amidst some of the finest scenery in England. I never need very much of an excuse to visit the area.

Is there an American War Poetry?

My post on Gerald Dawe's Irish War Poetry made me think about what is, as its title suggests, the nearest thing to a U.S. counterpart: American War Poetry, edited by Lorrie Goldensohn. War, like nothing else, obliges an urgent consideration of topoi of national identity; at the same time, most languages (and therefore most literatures) cross national boundaries. To what extent, then, does it make sense to think of war poetry in national terms? Is there an American war poetry?

Having published a book titled Modern English War Poetry, I am in no position to be dismissive about national categories. Had I referred to British rather than English, I would still be writing it now. All books need to end somewhere, and as I had a large temporal range --- from the Boer War to the present --- I felt entitled to narrow the geographical focus. But there was a political imperative as well. Whatever the various reactions of English poets to the nation and their government, Scottish and Welsh nationalisms take a fundamentally different attitude both to Westminster and to established symbols of Englishness. More than that, I wanted to claim that the ways in which English war poets talk to each other during the last century do constitute a tradition; not a simple tradition, not even a linear tradition, but a tradition perhaps in the sense of a shared awareness, community or engagement. For example, when Keith Douglas decorates a photograph of himself in his army finery with the words 'Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori', he looks to assault a poetic tradition (while reinstating an allegiance to an Horatian one); but that breaking is itself an acknowledgement and a continuation of a drama played through Wilfred Owen's poetry. Owen uses his predecessors to create a discordant antiphony; Douglas uses Owen in the same way.

I am not sure that the same can accurately be said of American war poetry. Goldensohn doesn't say it, although the book's blurb does: 'While the birth of a national identity is documented in early poems, the anthology also conveys the growing sophistication of a uniquely American style.' Reading the many wonderful and not-so-wonderful poems from the eighteenth-century Colonial Wars to (many would argue) those new colonial wars in the Persian Gulf, I am not convinced that the anthology's contents support that claim. Poetry is not a branch of science: it does not progress. And talk of a 'uniquely American style' risks belittling a nation which upholds among its self-evident truths the freedom of the individual; the freedom, that is, to choose to be different. America is nothing if it is not various; it seems too vast to have one 'style'.

None of this detracts from Goldensohn's anthology, which is quite appropriately a collection of the best war poems written out of a particular nation. War poetry does not seem to be part of a national psyche in the States as it is in England; there is no Yankee Brooke or Owen. The best poets in the book --- Emerson, Whitman, Stevens, Frost, Bishop, etc. --- are what we might term occasional war poets. Whitman (as always) comes closest to an exception, and the story of how Drum Taps influenced English war poets like Gurney and Rosenberg has still not been fully told. Whitman is, with 8 poems, the most heavily-represented poet in Goldensohn's anthology, and as war poet he stands head and shoulders above the others. Yet when we think of Whitman's crowning achievements, we probably think first of 'Song of Myself', 'I Sing the Body Electric', or the elegy for Lincoln.

Goldensohn's introductions to each war are excellent, but one line made me smile: 'The United States is still considered the key to the victory of 1918.' Far be it for me to want to start a transatlantic bunfight at a time when we British attempt to salvage a 'special relationship' from our position of utter powerlessness, but this comes close to the Oh What a Lovely War version of history. The hundreds of thousands of American soldiers who fought in the war certainly didn't harm the Allied cause... and yet it would be more diplomatic to drop the definite article. American entry into the war was, undeniably, 'key'.

Modern English War Poetry

is published in paperback today by Oxford University Press.

Edward Thomas's Birthday

Edward Thomas's diary entry for 3 March 1917, his 39th birthday:

No post. Morning dull spent in office. But afternoon with Colonel to Achicourt to see O.P.s and then to new battery positions. A chilly day not good for observing. Court of Inquiry on a man burnt with petrol --- Lushington presiding and afterwards I went back with him to 244's new billet and saw my new quarters to be. Wrote to Mother and Helen.

And here, written two years previously, is Thomas's poem, 'March the 3rd':

March the 3rd

Here again (she said) is March the third

And twelve hours singing for the bird

'Twixt dawn and dusk, from half past six

To half past six, never unheard.

'Tis Sunday, and the church-bells end

With the birds' songs. I think they blend

Better than in the same fair days

That shall pronounce the Winter's end.

Do men mark, and none dares say,

How it may shift and long delay,

Somewhere before the first of Spring,

But never fails, this singing day?

When it falls on Sunday, bells

Are a wild natural voice that dwells

On hillsides; but the birds' songs have

The holiness gone from the bells.

This day unpromised is more dear

Than all the named days of the year

When seasonable sweets come in,

Since now we know how lucky we are.