Remembrance Day 2011: Podcasts, Publications, Poets Laureate

Over the past fortnight, discussions of war poetry have abounded.

The Guardian's excellent series of podcasts included an Armistice Day edition featuring Michael Morpurgo, Louisa Young and Andrew Motion. My usual complaint about Motion---a passionate advocate for war poetry--- is that he tends to reduce it to pity and waste. In Motion's hands, war poetry sounds strangely comforting; it is well behaved in saying what he wants to hear. Yet when he has the right subject, he is extremely eloquent, and he talks movingly and truthfully here about contemporary soldier-poets.

Michael Morpurgo is another whose absolute faith in the futility myth avoids inconvenient truths about the necessity of fighting in order to survive as a nation ('lest / We lose what never slaves and cattle blessed', as Edward Thomas put it). Morpurgo argues in the podcast that our only way of approaching the war now is through the experience of an individual (whether it be a human as in Private Peaceful, or the horse of War Horse). This runs counter to Geoffrey Hill's argument in The Triumph of Love, which grotesquely parodies the Spielberg approach to genocide: 'refocus that Jew---yes there, / that one.' Morpurgo and Hill share a starting point: we can make sense of one death, not of millions. Morpurgo implies that we can extrapolate. Hill insists that the act of making sense falsifies the magnitude of the suffering. Thinking that we understand, we only betray. Hill's is the most discomforting assault on the easy sentimentality underlying so many modern-day representations of war. I wish that the Guardian would bring together Morpurgo, Motion and Hill for unflinching discussion: the podcast would be superb.

An earlier Guardian podcast examined rhetoric in the Iliad, and featured Alice Oswald whose Memorial is based on Homer's epic. I look forward to reading Oswald's book, which is the subject of a positive review by Simon Turner here. I am less persuaded by Oswald's comments in an interview given previously to the Guardian: 'That [Homer's Iliad] turned into this public school poem, which I don't think it is. That glamorising of war, and white-limbed, flowing-haired Greek heroes–it's become a clichéd, British empire part of our culture.' So Oswald doesn't like public schools, glamorising war, or the British Empire: she is, after all, speaking to the Guardian. But does anyone really hold that 'public school' view about Homer? Because of Owen's influence, the misreading of Homer is likely to be in the other direction: that Homer is about nothing but the pity of war. I only wish that public schools did still teach Homer.

I must end with a few words about Carol Ann Duffy, accepting that the poet laureateship is an anachronistic public challenge which the incumbent can never win. Even so, when she remarks of a new anthology of soldier-poetry that it is 'humbling, allowing the voices of those whose lives have been changed by war to speak to us', I wonder at her use of 'allowing'. And when she serves up her annual slop of First World war clichés in the Guardian (which, on this occasion, really should know better), she would do well to remember that she is writing about something more significant than the latest royal engagement, or whether sherry tastes of the sea. This is Great-War-by-Numbers. Next year, expect to read about shell-shocked Tommies shot at dawn by General Haig.

Remembrance of Things Past

It's the time of year when visitors turn up in vast numbers at this blog looking for Laurence Binyon's 'For the Fallen'. I like to be helpful, so here in one handy blogpost are all your Remembrancetide needs. Binyon is your man if you are prepared to wait until stanza 4; McCrae is punchier, certainly more pugilistic: you will need to ignore the final stanza's call to arms, or at least pretend that, as long as it is read in a suitably sombre tone, no one need worry about what it means.

Laurence Binyon, 'For the Fallen'

John McCrae, 'In Flanders Fields'

Then there is David Cameron's favourite poem, Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est'; or, if you want something more unusual, you could choose Charlotte Mew's 'The Cenotaph'. Mew tells us the uncomfortable truth---which politicians of all stripes never fail to confirm---that remembrance can be conveniently reduced to nothing more than a public gesture, a performance, a token monument. As Geoffrey Hill, our greatest living poet, bitterly complains, England has become 'a nation / with so many memorials but no memory'.

American Poets of the Second World War

From this distant perspective, the American attitude towards its war poets has always seemed perplexing. War poetry is something peculiarly English. Ask a literate American to name a war poet, and she is more likely to mention Owen than Whitman or Melville.

Recent years have seen the publication of a number of books which suggest that, at last, American awareness of its own war poetry may be growing. Lorrie Goldensohn's anthology of American war poetry demonstrated the extent of the tradition with poems from the colonial wars to Afghanistan; Cynthia Wachtell's War No More proved that it was the American Civil War which first challenged poets to write of industrialised slaughter; and the recent rediscovery of John Allan Wyeth has given Americans a Great War poet who can rank among the best of the Brits.

Diederik Oostdijk's new study, Among the Nightmare Fighters: American Poets of World War II, ought to inspire a new map of twentieth-century American poetry in which the poetry of war is no longer occluded. Until now, the 'middle generation' of poets, falling between Modernism and the various movements which came to prominence in the 1950s and 1960s (Confessionalism, the Beats, the Black Mountain), has been squeezed or altogether ignored: powerful though they are, the five lines of Randall Jarrell's 'The Death of the Ball-Turret Gunner' should not be a synecdoche for such a vast and diverse body of war poetry. Oostdijk's book retrieves into prominence a group of poets who were mostly (but not all) servicemen---not just Jarrell but Anthony Hecht, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov, James Dickey, Robert Lowell, William Stafford, Lincoln Kirstein. Like the greatest of their English contempories, Keith Douglas, they were haunted by the examples of earlier war poets. Oostdijk takes the title of his first chapter from a comment made by Karl Shapiro in a letter home: 'Im [sic] no Wilfred Owen, darling'.

Oostdijk writes pellucid English like only a Dutchman can. He has a pitch-perfect ear for nuances of meaning: this is a learned and historically-informed study, but its greatest strength is in close readings. Those readings draw on vast reserves of research, and display an impressive knowledge of previous war poetry (particularly from the American Civil War and the Great War). Fighting his corner, Oostdijk is also convincing when it comes to giving reasons why American poetry of the war has been neglected, and he is not averse to attacking Modernism or New Criticism on behalf of his charges. The thoroughness and detail of Oostdijk's readings disguise the fact that, on the sly, his is a profoundly polemical study. It points out, for example, that his poets often 'contradict the American victory narrative'---which is a key reason for their neglect. Oostdijk quotes Michael C C Adams, author of the bitterly-titled history, The Best War Ever: America and World War II: '[the war] has been converted over time from a complex, problematic event, full of nuance and debatable meaning, to a simple, shining legend of the Good War.' Oostdijk's poets undermine that legend, and in doing so, their fate has been to go unheard. Thanks to Oostdijk's attention, the time has come to reassess their achievement and their legacy.