War Poetry and the Blogs

George Simmers reports here the appeal by the Rupert Brooke society to raise enough money to buy a painting by Brooke's inamorata (well, one of them), Phyllis Gardner (far left). And, here, George picks up on my blogpost denouncing the AQA GCSE syllabus , this time to point out that its prose is as bad as its poetry: 'The AQA policy seems to be that teenagers should be protected from difficult, troubling literature.' We can't have impressionable minds subjected to Kipling's sadistic masterpiece, 'Mary Postgate'.

Gists and Piths I discovered relatively recently. Here it is on Bernard Bergonzi and war poetry, here on books by Nicholas Murray and Harry Ricketts, here on Daniel Swift's Bomber County, here on Ted Hughes's 'Griefs for Dead Soldiers', and here on 'the trouble with war poetry'.

English Association: Poetry of the Great War

The English Association has recently established a Special Interest Group on Poetry of the Great War, to be overseen by yours truly. We will be planning a number of events as the centenary of the outbreak of the War approaches.

War Anthologies ---- National v. International

Last month I attended a symposium in Amsterdam on 'Poetry and the Unpoetic'. It was a wonderful event, despite its regular focus on poets I had never read or even heard of. My own talk on Robert Frost examined his ability to incorporate speech rhythms into blank verse.

At the conference I met Geert Buelens, who has edited a vast international anthology of First World War poetry. Het lijf in slijk geplant [The body planted in mud] runs to nearly 700 pages; it contains poems from 40 nations, in thirty different languages. All poems appear in the original and are translated into Dutch on the facing page. I cannot comment on the merits of the introduction because it, too, is in Dutch, and my language skills only extend to Latin and a little nervous French.

I came away with the feeling that Geert did not entirely approve of my project to edit an anthology of British First World War poetry for Oxford World's Classics. Often, a polyglot's disdain is deserved, and the particular case for the prosecution against my anthology is also bolstered by another understandable reaction: hasn't it been done many times before? Yet there are powerful reasons why anthologies of war poetry should be sequestered along linguistic and even national lines.

Some of those reasons are to do with war, and some are to do with poetry. War, by its nature, obliges us urgently to think about nationhood, nation-building and nation-defending. This is even true of civil war, when a nation turns against itself to decide between competing arguments about national identity. All such arguments being rooted in perceptions of the past, war also encourages poets to engage with, resist, revise and enhance existing national traditions. To a foreign eye, those engagements may prove puzzling. This is not to deny the value of a comparative approach, by which a French poet at Verdun might share many of the cultural attitudes of the German poet whom he is trying to kill. (For that matter, think of Jules et Jim.) But although those cultural attitudes may inform his poetry, if he is a gifted writer they are never what is most valuable about his poetry. All of which brings me back to Robert Frost, and his dictum that 'Poetry is what gets lost in translation'.

Having made a hurried case for my own project, I must confess that Geert's book is extraordinarily impressive in its scope. Even so, if the anglophone poems are isolated, they comprise a curious canon. Geert has divided his book year-by-year, and the anglophone poems occur as follows:

1914: Rudyard Kipling, 'For All We Have and Are'; Lawrence [sic] Binyon, 'For the Fallen'; Rabindranath Tagore, 'The trumpet lies in the dust'; Jessie Pope, 'No!'; Rupert Brooke, 'Peace'.

1915: Charles Sorley, 'To Germany' and 'All the Hills and Vales' [sic]; John McCrae, 'In Flanders Fields'; Siegfried Sassoon, 'Absolution'; Charles Sorley, 'When you see millions of the mouthless dead'.

1916: Rustam B. Paymaster, 'Ancient and Modern Warfare'; Charles Wood, 'National Anthem'; Isaac Rosenberg, 'Break of Day in the Trenches'.

1917: Ivor Gurney, 'Servitude'; Francis Ledwidge, 'Soliloquy'; Wallace Stevens, 'Life contracts and death is expected'; Wilfred Owen, 'Dulce et Decorum Est'; Carl Sandburg, 'The Four Brothers'; Isaac Rosenberg, 'The Immortals'.

1918: W. B. Yeats, 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death'; Siegfried Sassoon, 'Suicide in the Trenches'; Lucian B. Watkins, 'The Negro Soldiers of America: What We Are Fighting For'; Wilfred Owen, 'The Sentry'.

A short post-war sample includes fragments from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley and The Waste Land.

The more inclusive a book attempts to be, the more conspicuous its omissions. Notable omissions are Owen's 'Strange Meeting' and 'Futility', Sassoon's 'Everyone Sang', Kipling's 'Epitaphs of the War', Mew's 'The Cenotaph', all of Hardy's war poetry, Frost again, Blunden, Graves, David Jones, Housman, Lawrence, and the entire Antipodean contribution to the war.

Het Lijf in slijk geplant is a brilliantly ambitious book, and I wish that there were an English equivalent. But it cannot supplant detailed selections from individual poets, groups of poets, and most importantly of all, nations of poets. We need both national and international anthologies if we are fully to appreciate the poetry of the First World War, and those anthologies must always be challenged and remade as each generation addresses the prejudices and blindnesses of the last.

The AQA GCSE English---Does It 'Teach Anything Meaningful'?

Some traffic has come to this site lately, looking for analysis of Jane Weir's 'Poppies'. Not wanting to disappoint my readers (see the final paragraphs below), and having a vague recollection that I had read the poem somewhere before, I looked it up. All was revealed: 'Poppies' is included in an anthology which is part of the AQA GCSE English syllabus.

I sat my O level English Literature exam in 1985. The selected texts were Julius Caesar and The Pardoner's Prologue and Tale, which we studied deeply and painstakingly. Unfortunately, that was a long time ago. Nowadays, even undergraduates are protected from Chaucer, either by avoiding him altogether or by reading him in editions with modernised spelling. It is doubtful that students have become less intelligent during the intervening decades. Yet the level of challenge has dropped steadily, in inverse proportion to the number of students achieving the highest grades.

It is worth remembering that the GCSE syllabus is not created with the wishes of university professors paramount, nor should it be. Most students who take English at GCSE will not go on to study English Literature at A level; most who study it at A level will not read English at university. All the more reason, then, that the 16-year-olds who end up studying sciences or some different area of the humanities, or leaving school and getting a job, should have been exposed during their education to a profound engagement with the finest literature which our language has to offer.

Which brings me, by force of negative example, to the AQA poetry anthology which goes by the moody title Moon on the Tides. The poems, we are told, 'have been chosen by teachers and examiners to appeal to a range of students. They range from classic texts to brand new, previously unpublished poems from popular contemporary writers.' Do not mistake 'classic' for 'classical'---the overwhelming majority of poems are contemporary, and only 10 come from before 1900; just one (Shakespeare's sonnet 116) is pre-Romantic. The recommended task for that sonnet---no I'm not making this up---is to consider the following question: 'Does the poem tell us anything meaningful or is it just "an exercise in poetic cleverness"?'

That question is not posed of more obviously relevant (i.e. contemporary) poems, among which can be found the good, the bad and the downright terrible. At some point in the early 1990s some government committee must have decided that Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy were the appropriate poets to inflict on the nation's youth: they are here represented by 6 poems and 3 poems respectively, while apparently minor poets like Hardy, Heaney and Yeats must make do with one, and Auden, Douglas and Hill don't appear at all.

The poems are divided into 'clusters', each cluster having been 'arranged by themes that have been chosen because they address universal and timeless issues'. One such cluster is titled 'Conflict', and here is where Jane Weir's 'Poppies' can be found alongside thirteen other poems. The selection is, to be kind, utterly bizarre. It includes a so-so poem by e.e. cummings, although it remains unclear which out of the 'English, Welsh [or] Irish Literary Heritage' his work is meant to represent. (There is no Eliot, no Plath, no Bishop, no Stevens, no Frost, no Lowell, no Moore, no Crane, no Berryman---but at least we have e.e. cummings!). Great War poets are represented solely by Owen's 'Futility' and Margaret Postgate Cole's 'The Falling Leaves'. Ted Hughes's 'Bayonet Charge', written early in his career before he realised that there was no future in trying to out-Owen Owen, takes up room which might have been given to Rosenberg, Sassoon or Gurney.

And then there is 'Poppies', by Jane Weir, in relation to which students are encouraged by the AQA to 'consider some statistics from recent conflicts'. Click on the link to read it. I confess that I have read no other poems by Jane Weir, so it may be that she is a fantastic poet. 'Poppies', however, is irredeemably poor. Ezra Pound famously stated that 'A poem should be at least as well written as prose'. But imagine reading this in a novel: 'I was brave, as I walked with you, to the front door, threw it open, the world overflowing like a treasure chest.' Or this: 'Before you left, I pinned [a poppy] onto your lapel, crimped petals, spasms of paper red, disrupting a blockade of yellow bias binding around your blazer.' Even as prose, it seems clunky, especially in its habitual recourse to asyndeton. The metaphors trip each other up. Take this one: 'All my words / flattened, rolled, turned into felt, // slowly melting'. If the words are flattening, wouldn't that stop any rolling? Are they turning into felt and then melting, or are they melting into the form of felt? And what is the felt all about anyway? Or take the dove (Please, somebody, take the dove!): who would have guessed that that particular bird would appear? And, as it flies out of its pear tree, are we meant to wonder why the first two days of Christmas are prominently muddled in a poem set just before Remembrance Sunday? As a last example: the poem's speaker describes leaning against a war memorial 'like a wishbone'. I have pondered that image long and hard, and can make no sense of it whatsoever. If anyone has any ideas, please post below.

'Poppies' performs all the right gestures: the poppy itself, the dove, the churchyard, the soldier who was once a child, the war memorial at which (inevitably) the inscriptions are 'traced' by the protagonist. It is well-meaning and weak, which makes it perfectly suited for the AQA syllabus.

Postscript: For an account of Ted Hughes's 'Bayonet Charge', see here.

Forthcoming Events

The Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship Conference will be held at Stratford-on-Avon on Sunday 10 September.

On Friday 25 November, a symposium will take place in Belfast on Robert Graves and Ireland.

Kate Kennedy will be running a two-day course titled 'Discovering Ivor Gurney' at Madingley Hall, near Cambridge, on 10-12 June.

And here is advance notice of a conference on Hardy's poetry to be held on 7-8 June next year at the University of Artois in Arras. Note the early deadline for submitting proposals.

Kate McLoughlin: Authoring War

Kate McLoughlin's Authoring War describes itself accurately as 'an ambitious and pioneering study of war writing across all literary genres from earliest times to the present day'. Its scope is astonishing: McLoughlin writes authoritatively about Homer and Heller, Virgil and Vonnegut. She crosses genres and periods sure-footedly, arguing that 'while it is indisputable that all wars are different, it is simultaneously also the case that all wars have certain elements in common: violent death, adverse conditions, the requirement to kill and risk one's own life'.

Her book is the best advocate of her approach, filled as it is with the most unlikely but (it transpires) mutually illuminating case studies. Chapter 1, for example, brings together Gascoigne's The Fruites of Warre, several Shakespeare plays, Defoe's Memoirs of a Cavalier, poems by Longfellow and Browning, Mary Seacole, and Auden and Isherwood's Journey to a War. There are undoubtedly losses in attempting such a range, because the peculiarities of texts risk being overlooked in favour of their shared characteristics. Even so, those losses are outweighed by McLoughlin's ability to expose common concerns across centuries, genres, languages and nations.

McLoughlin's argument is signalled by her title: what does it mean to 'author' war? To put it another way, what is the consequence of the fact that 'the gap between the experience and the representation of conflict can be narrowed but never completely eliminated'? We might say the same about representations of love, or sex, or eating, or watching television, but McLoughlin's argument places war in a special category because of the extremity of the experience and the ethical challenges which it poses for the artist or reporter. Claiming that 'the First World War's natural form was the lyric poem, that the Second World War's was the epic novel, that the Vietnam War's was the movie, [and] that the Iraq War's may well turn out to be the blog', McLoughlin finds a similar crisis of representation in every genre.

My disagreement with Authoring War has nothing to do with the book's execution: it is impeccably scholarly and well written (albeit with a sporadic penchant for obscure polysyllables), and I would strongly recommend it to anyone interested in the relationship between war and literature. The book does, though, seek to make tentative claims for war literature as morally improving. 'Can war literature stop war?', McLoughlin wonders in her conclusion. She fears that the answer is negative, although she does concede on the other side that 'war representation can also occasion delight in violence'. The thought makes her uneasy, but the translating of violence into art is always and necessarily bound up with that delight. However various our motivations, one reason for being drawn to war literature is spelt out by David Bromwich in his brilliant commentary on Edmund Burke: we have 'an active and to some degree a delighted interest in scenes of suffering'. Or, as Burke himself puts it: 'I am convinced we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others; for let the affection be what it will in appearance, if it does not make us shun such objects, if it makes us dwell upon them, in this case I conceive we must have a delight or pleasure of some species or other in contemplating objects of this kind.'

By contrast, McLoughlin's final paragraphs float a number of uplifting arguments. One such is 'that war literature reveals and recommends love'. So it may do, about as often as literature about love discovers within itself an overt or sublimated violence. Authoring War surrenders to sentimentality when it ends by approvingly quoting Carol Ann Duffy's anthology-of-clichés, 'Last Post'. It is a weak conclusion to an extraordinarily impressive book.