Keith Douglas Redivivus

'Ted did a beautiful [BBC] programme on a marvelous young British poet, Keith Douglas, killed in the last war... Both of us mourn this poet immensely and feel he would have been like a lovely big brother to us. His death is really a terrible blow and we are trying to resurrect his image and poems...'—Sylvia Plath to her mother, 7 June 1962.

24 January is Keith Douglas's birthday. He would have been 92 today, had he survived the War. His work has meant at least as much to me as that of any other modern poet. I began Modern English War Poetry with the sole objective of honouring his achievement. And although poems about poets are not to be encouraged, I had to write a poem about him. If you aren't familiar with his work, start with the poems, then read that wonder among war memoirs, Alamein to Zem Zem.

What if? By the age of 24, Douglas had already written some of the finest lyrics. Is there a more honest war poem than 'Vergissmeinnicht'? A more brutal description of battlefield detritus than 'Cairo Jag'? A better animal poem than 'The Marvel' or 'The Sea Bird'? Contrast what his near-contemporary, Philip Larkin, had managed at that age. Douglas is the great lost poet of his century.

War Horse Poetry

The most famous horse in war poetry was made out of wood. The Trojans do not seem to have been especially bright.

Poetry of the First World War mentions horses rarely. Hardy's 'In Time of "The Breaking of Nations"' and Thomas's 'As the team's head-brass' describe horses ploughing the English countryside, and there are passing references to horses at the Front in Hardy's '"And There Was a Great Calm"', Borden's 'At the Somme', Grenfell's 'Into Battle' and Gurney's 'Pain'. The last of these is particularly powerful:

Seeing the pitiful eyes of men foredone,
Or horses shot, too tired merely to stir,
Dying in shell-holes both, slain by the mud.

The story which comes closest to full-blown Spielbergian sentimentality, however, is told by Charlotte Fyfe in The Tears of War, an account of the doomed love affair between May Wedderburn Cannan and Bevil Quiller-Couch (son of Q). In August 1918, Cannan was working for a branch of M15 in the War Office Department in Paris. Two days after the Armistice, she became engaged to Bevil Quiller-Couch, who had come to Paris on leave to propose. Having survived the War and won the Military Cross, Quiller-Couch rejoined his battery in Germany early in 1919, but became ill in early February, and died of pneumonia following flu. The poems in Cannan's second book, The Splendid Days, chart the descent from the exhilaration of the Armistice and reciprocated love, to the devastation caused by her fiancé’s death.

Q acquired his son's warhorse, Peggy, at auction, and brought her back to Fowey where she lived out her remaining years. On first meeting her, Q felt the bond: 'Whether or not she detected something familiar in my footstep when I went into the loose box, she was waiting for me. Took no notice of the stableman, but came straight to me, snuffled me all over the chest and then bent down her neck like "Royal Egypt". While I stroked her, she nuzzled my wrist and back of my other hand... It sounds silly, but it seemed as if the creature really did know something and was trying to say it.'

May remained close to her would-have-been father-in-law, and rode Peggy on her visits to Fowey. She wrote a 32-line poem called 'Riding', which is published only in The Tears of War:

The roads are narrow in Cornwall and set between
Stiff wind-cropped hedges that shelter as you ride;
They were sadder roads and bare that he knew in France
The poplars on each side...

He must have ridden her often, felt the lilt
Of the sure swift strength moving between his knees,
And I came near him a second, riding so,
Dreams, but Love lives by these.

Any other horses?

Edmund Blunden

Edmund Blunden is a war poet about whom I have said next to nothing on this blog. His work will not pass out of copyright in the UK until 2045, which is a long time to wait. So---taking his death date of 20 January 1974 as the slenderest of hooks---I now comment on his achievement via some of the resources which are freely available online. The best of these are the official website, including such gems as a recording of Blunden reading one of his war poems, and the large Edmund Blunden Collection at the First World War Digital Archive.

His biographer, Barry Webb, has suggested that Blunden ‘spent more time in the trenches than any other recognised war writer’. He came through two years at Festubert, Ypres and Passchendaele unscathed, and was awarded the Military Cross in 1916 after reaching the German line on a reconnaissance mission. During a distinguised post-war academic career, Blunden became a champion of war poetry. He edited Owen (1931) and Gurney (1954), wrote the foreword to Frederick Brereton's An Anthology of War Poems (1930) and Brian Gardner's Up the Line to Death (1964), and at Merton College, Oxford, tutored Keith Douglas, who would become the most brilliant poet of the Second World War.

As for his own work, Blunden remained unfailingly modest. In his prose memoir, Undertones of War (1928), he recalled his youthful self as a 'harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat'. The pastoral and the martial pull against each other in all his best poetry. Blunden often gives the impression that he wants to be nothing more than a minor Georgian, complete with archaic diction and mellifluous syntactical inversions; but like his friend Siegfried Sassoon, he is transformed into a significant poet at the point when the War forces him to confront a more modern and brutal world. It is artistically regrettable---if psychologically explicable---to find that in The Waggoner (1920) the 'harmless young shepherd' should have so quickly and thoroughly usurped the soldier.

The reprieve was temporary; the War never released Blunden. 'I must go over the ground again', he wrote in Undertones of War, and spoke of a similar compulsion in an interview from the 1960s: 'My experiences in the First World War have haunted me all my life and for many days I have, it seemed, lived in that world rather than this.' Where his wartime poems juxtapose soldier and shepherd, the best of his post-war work creates a similar juxtaposition of past and present, soldier and veteran. Blunden is not a poet of protest like Sassoon, or a poet of witness like Owen, or a documentary poet as Gurney and Jones can sometimes be. Blunden is one of the great poets of memory: of what can and cannot be remembered; of what must be remembered; of what would be better forgotten if only that were possible. The act of remembering is itself the drama of his poetry. 'Can you Remember?', written in January 1936, begins with the promise that the poet can 'still remember / The whole thing in a way', although there are gaps and hesitations: 'Edge and exactitude / Depend on the day'. Place-names, Blunden goes on to admit, may be forgotten. But the scene can become suddenly and unexpectedly vivid with an intensity which will not distinguish the happy from the horrific:

       at the instance
Of sound, smell, change and stir
   New-old shapes for ever
Intensely recur.

And some are sparkling, laughing, singing,
   Young, heroic, mild;
And some incurable, twisted,
   Shrieking, dumb, defiled.

And so on, until Blunden's final poem, 'Ancre Sunshine', which Rennie Parker and Margi Blunden have called 'the last poem about the war published by any surviving soldier poet'. Visiting the battlefields with his wife fifty years later, Blunden ends his poem with a luminous vision:

All that had fallen was in its old form still,
For her to witness, with no cold surprise,
In one of those moments when nothing dies.

Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen

Last Remembrance Day saw the publication of a new Penguin anthology. Three Poets of the First World War: Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen is edited by Jon Stallworthy and Jane Potter. The book can be strongly recommended, not only for the poems but for its editorial apparatus. The detailed annotations for each poem enrich even the most familiar texts.

Why these poets? Penguin has always liked to publish poets in threes, so the number is unsurprising. But Owen, Gurney and Rosenberg have little in common except their genius. Gurney survived the War, Owen and Rosenberg did not; unlike Owen, Gurney and Rosenberg excelled at two arts; Gurney and Rosenberg were 'common privates', Owen an officer; Owen and Rosenberg have been central to any discussion of war poetry since the 1920s, whereas Gurney's reputation was much slower to develop; Owen and Rosenberg have been served by world-class textual scholars (Jon Stallworthy and Vivien Noakes respectively), Gurney has not---at least not across the bulk of his writings. The introduction tries to insist on coherence by claiming that these are 'three young men of the English underclass', but that's a stretcher: Owen's family was more genteel than Gurney's, and Rosenberg endured a desperate poverty far beyond the ken of either of his fellow poets. As Ezra Pound inimitably put it, Rosenberg 'has something in him, horribly rough but then "Stepney, East"… we ought to have a real burglar… ma che!!!'

Although the editors don't quite spell it out, the selection of the poets for this anthology is motivated by value judgement. There can be no more honourable criterion than that. (Were I allowed five poets, I would add Sassoon and Jones and be confident that---Sorley having died so soon and Thomas having written almost nothing in France---all the best English soldier-poets were included.) Owen and Rosenberg are represented by all their familiar works and a few unfamiliar; if you own this anthology, you have their essential poems. The situation with Gurney is more complicated, not least because so much of his best work remains unpublished; and the poetry which did appear in his lifetime was, with one or two astonishing exceptions, fairly average. It takes an act of faith to read through the first half-dozen poems in Gurney's selection, until with 'Half Dead' the reader is overwhelmed with an extraordinary vision of terrestrial hell and of brutal redemption:

Half dead with sheer tiredness, wakened quick at night
With dysentery pangs, going blind among dim sleepers
And dazed into half dark, illness had its spite.
Head cleared, eyes saw; pangs and ill body-creepers
Stilled with the cold---the cold bringing me sane....

Like so many of Gurney's poems, 'Half Dead' goes askew a few lines later. Gurney is unprecedented in his ability to juxtapose genius and incompetence, and for that reason he seems to have caused Stallworthy and Potter the most problems. But they bravely accept the challenge by including more of Gurney's poems than Owen's or Rosenberg's.

The anthology is dedicated 'with affection and gratitude' to the memory of Vivien Noakes, 'editor and champion of Isaac Rosenberg'. It is a fitting tribute to a woman whose work on Rosenberg provides an exemplary model for any textual scholar.