Fields of Agony : British Poetry of the First World War 9781847600271

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Fields of Agony British Poetry of the First World War Stuart Sillars

Publication Data © Stuart Sillars, 2007 The Author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Published by Humanities-Ebooks.co.uk Tirril Hall, Tirril, Penrith CA10 2JE

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ISBN 978-1-84760-027-1

Fields of Agony: British Poetry of the First World War Stuart Sillars

Bibliographical Entry: Sillas, Stuart. Fields of Agony: British Poetry of the First World War. Literature Insights. Tirril: Humanities-Ebooks, 2007

A Note on the Author Stuart Sillars is Professor of English at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has written extensively on the literature and visual art of the twentieth century: his books include Art and Survival in First World War Britain (Macmillan, 1987), British Romantic Art and the First World War (Macmillan, 1991) and Structure and Dissolution in English Writing, 1910–1920 (Macmillan, 1999). He has been a visiting professor in Texas, Washington, Zagreb and New Delhi. His most recent book is Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720–1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2006).

ISBN xxxx-xxxxx

Contents A Note on the Author List of Illustrations Chapter 1: ‘What ������ did ��������� they expect?’: ���������� The �������������� nature of ��������� war poetry 1.1 The Invention of War Poetry 2.2 The Place of Poetry in 1914 2.3 Issues of Gender 2.4 Thomas Hardy (1840–1928): ‘Men who March Away’ 1.5 Conclusion 1.6  A Note on Texts Chapter 2: ‘To battle for the truth’: Popular Poetry 2.1 Defining ‘Popular’ 2.2 Responses to war in popular art forms 2.3 Ideal, Order and Consolation 2.4 Structure, idea and ideology in popular poetry 2.5  Anthologies 2.6  Other voices Chapter 3: ‘Nobody asked what the women thought’: Poetry by Women 3.1 Approaching War Poetry by Women 3.2 The Variety of Poetry by Women Chapter 4: ‘Young blood and high blood’: Canonical writers 4.1 Displaced nature: Graves, Blunden and Gurney 4.2 Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) 4.3 Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) 4.4 Edward Thomas (1878–1917) 4.5 Other cultures, other nations 4.5.2 David Jones (1895–1974) 4.5.3 Irish poetry 4.5.4. Scottish poetry Chapter 5: Placing War Poetry 5.1 War poetry and Modernism 5.2 Last thoughts Bibliography

List of Illustrations Cover

Deniécourt Wood at Sunset. The Somme, Volume 1. Illustrated Michelin Guides to the Battle-Fields (1914–1918). (Clermont-Ferrand: Michelin, 1919)

21

F. H. Townsend. ‘Bravo, Belgium!’ Mr. Punch’s History of the Great War (London: Cassell, 1919). First published in Punch, 1914.

21

Louis Raemakers. ‘This is how I deal with small fry’. Raemakers’ Cartoon History of the War, Vol. I, compiled by J. Murray Allison (New York: Century, 1918).

22

L. Raven Hill. ‘Fair Ypres’. The Queen’s Gift Book (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1915).

23

Eugène Hastain. ‘Victory day’. The Queen’s Gift Book.

24

L. Raven Hill. ‘After one year’ Mr. Punch’s History of the Great War. First published in Punch, 1915.

25

Front cover. Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke. (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1918).

30

John McCrae. ‘In Flanders Fields’, Punch 8 December 1915.

40

Sebastian E. Scott. British Troops leaving for the Front. From The War 1915 for Boys and Girls, by Elizabeth O’Neill, M. A. London: T. C. and E. C. Jack, 1915

48

Women munition workers, with original caption, from The War Illustrated, 1915

50

Thiepval Wood. The Somme, Volume 1. Illustrated Michelin Guides to the BattleFields (1914-1918). (Clermont-Ferrand: Michelin, 1919)

83

Ploegsteert Wood. Twenty Years After. The battlefields of 1914-18: Then and Now. Edited by Ernest Dunlop Swinton. (London: George Newnes, 1938)

Chapter 1 ‘What did they expect?’: The nature of war poetry What did they expect of our toil and extreme Hunger – the perfect drawing of a heart’s dream? —Ivor Gurney: ‘War Books’ 1.1 The Invention of War Poetry ‘War poetry’ is commonly read, discussed and taught as a very specific genre. The term is used to refer almost exclusively to poetry from the First World War (1914– 18), and within that to a very limited group of poets, among whom Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are the most prominent. But poetry about war has been in existence for a very long time. Homer’s Iliad has strong claims to be called a war poem, and literature in English frequently discusses the theme of war. Sir Philip Sidney’s love sonnets often use images of war to describe the strife of love; Wordsworth’s ‘Salisbury Plain’ poems discuss the after-effects of war in terms of injury and widowhood; Tennyson’s ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ either celebrates or condemns the loss of life in one moment of the Crimean war; and several writers during the South African wars of the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries address a complex of issues of patriotism, heroism and suffering. Why, then, has the poetry of the First World War come to assume its place in the academic tradition? The answer to this question has a great deal to do with the larger processes in which the literary canon is created, and history written. Both involve a dialogue between the present and the past, in which each generation tries to explain and understand the decisions of its predecessors. If we return to the years of the war themselves and explore the kinds of poetry being published, we would find that hardly any of the poems now familiar were popular, or in many cases were even published. The best-selling anthology The Muse in Arms, edited by E. B. Osborn, appeared in 1917   The sonnet form is discussed online at http://www.writing.upenn.edu/~afilreis/88/sonnet.html.

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and included nothing by Wilfred Owen and only two poems by Sassoon. Much of its content was of poetry that celebrated the war in styles from the openly jingoistic to the sadly accepting of death in battle as the price of a cause worth defending. A vast amount of other poetry was published during the war years, in national and local newspapers, magazines of every kind, presentation volumes sold in aid of war charities, and books published privately as memorials to the sons of wealthy families. The great majority of this, it must be said, represented what was the prevailing view of the war – that its destruction and waste of life was appalling, but that no individual action should be undertaken or voice raised in the effort to bring it to an end. Although some poets, notably Siegfried Sassoon, used their poetry to convey outrage at the continued prosecution of a war they felt could never be won, it was not until the late 1920s that a flood of books revealing the horror of the war began to appear. In England, among the most influential were Edmund Blunden’s Undertones of War, a prose memoir which included a collection of poems; Richard Aldington’s searingly ironic novel Death of a Hero; Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That, a memoir that moved from experiences in public school to the disillusionment of the trenches. These were matched in France by Le Feu (Under Fire) by Henri Barbusse and in Germany by Im Westen nichts neues (All Quiet on the Western Front) by Erich Maria Remarque. Within this setting, Edmund Blunden produced his edition of the poems of Wilfred Owen, published with a memoir in 1931. Among those who were strongly influenced by it was the young W. H. Auden, whose early sonnets strongly resemble Owen’s writing, showing his work as a genuine contribution to the dialogue of poetic change. In a socio-political dimension, it contributed to the general mood of pacifism that facilitated the appeasement of Hitler in the 1930s, helping to build the overwhelming feeling in Britain that there must be ‘no more war’. The popular image of Owen the soldier-poet, sacrificing his life to defend his troops and his country, killed only a week before the Armistice in 1918 and, like thousands of others, betrayed by the idiocy of the military commanders, was a powerful symbol of everything that must never, ever, be repeated. Later historians have questioned this view, stressing the strategic value of the leadership of Haig and others, but it still has a large claim for many. It was in the 1960s that ‘war poetry’ began to attain prominence in the educational system in Great Britain. The fiftieth anniversary of the outbreak of war was marked in 1964 by the recently-created BBC2 television channel with a 26-part documentary history series called The Great War which combined original newsreel film from the war years with recollections spoken by men and women who had lived through

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them. Its stress on the sufferings of war and its military blunders acquired increasing resonance with the mounting protest against American actions in Vietnam: in the face of this and the prevailing concerns of the 1960s with political and social freedom, and radical departures in schools and universities, the poetry of the war became a significant focus for contemporary values. Since then, concerns with the social and political functions of literary texts in theoretical movements such as Marxism, New Historicism and varieties of Feminism and Gender Studies have all sharpened and redirected the attention that the poetry of the First World War has attracted. These features of its reception history do not in any way invalidate the poems of the First World War as entities in themselves; but they have led to the privileging of a specific kind of text within the larger outpouring of poetry during the war years. Popular poetry, poetry that actively or with regret advocates the continuance of the war, and poems by women have until very recently been largely overlooked. The result is a view of the poetry of the war years that is highly selective, limited in breadth and in the understanding it offers even of those poems on which it concentrates, by a rejection of the larger conventions and assumptions that they directly contested. Within this book it is not possible to present a comprehensive survey of the poetry of the First World War. Its aim instead is to offer an introductory account of some of its main directions and concerns, to place the work of the major figures within the larger frame of popular writing and the concerns that it reveals, and thus strengthen awareness of the poems themselves and, at the same time, of the ‘fields of agony’ from which they were written. 1.2 The Plac Poetry While the distinction between popular and élite cultural forms was distinctly present in 1914, it did not have quite the same form as that which it has come to adopt nearly a century later. Whereas many present-day critics and cultural institutions, for example broadcasting and university decision-makers, reject many artistic forms as elitist, in the early twentieth century there was demonstrably a genuine desire among people of all social backgrounds to acquire greater knowledge of what have since become minority, ‘high culture’ works of literature, music and visual art. This was a result largely of the Victorian ideal of self-improvement, which saw knowledge of the arts as a social and a moral imperative. The Education Act of 1870 made primary education available to all, making literacy almost universal; advances in printing and

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publishing made cheap editions of books widely available; and popular journalism, producing newspapers including the Daily Mirror and the Daily Mail – radically different from their current incarnations in content and style – offered advice in achieving these higher goals. As a result, poetry was a genuinely popular cultural form. Palgrave’s Golden Treasury of English Verse, an anthology of English poetry from Shakespeare to the present, sold in hundreds of thousands, and the leading poets – Thomas Hardy, John Masefield, Henry Newbolt and others – were themselves figures of popular adulation, their volumes bestsellers. Rather than for its sophistication of form, poetry was read largely as a form of moral guidance, and often of consolation. When Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H. appeared in 1851, it was subtitled ‘The Way of the Soul’; Queen Victoria reportedly kept it by her bedside and found reading it a source of comfort in her bereavement of Prince Albert. The writings of Matthew Arnold, himself both a poet and a social and educational theorist, enhanced the view of the poet as seer and social reformer, and in consequence, there was a large audience eager for poetry that offered an engagement with contemporary social, moral and ethical issues. Although poetry in the 1890s embraced the so-called ‘decadent’ writers influenced by French writing, there were others, such as W. E. Henley and John Davidson, who concentrated on exposing social ills. The group known as the ‘Georgians’ wrote with the intention of reinvigorating poetry in response to contemporary life. Including Gordon Bottomley, Walter de la Mare and James Elroy Flecker, their work appeared in a series of anthologies titled Georgian Poetry, the title drawn from the name of the new king in an effort to show their contemporary relevance. However, much, though by no means all of their work was concerned with rural idyll and escape, and the term ‘Georgian’ soon came to be used as one of condescension, if not abuse. Ironically, Edward Marsh, the volumes’ editor, was a patron of the visual arts who did much to encourage important modern painters. One poet whose work could not easily be classified was A. E. Housman, whose collection A Shropshire Lad achieved very wide popularity when it appeared in 1896. It adopted a distanced perspective towards the young men of the countryside who strove to enjoy the pleasures of life while always, if unwittingly, under the weight of mortality, using regular structures that appealed to those favouring ballad forms yet with a meticulous metrical armature borrowed from the Latin poetry that was Housman’s concern as a professor of Classics. Housman’s homosexuality, then carefully concealed, sharpened the poems’ sense of loss and inflected them with a grief that would attain greater urgency in the work of many of the trench poets. Less widely

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known, but similar in their sense of time and loss, were the poems of Thomas Hardy. In them, the irony is much darker, the sombre inevitability of fate both more insistent and more frequently ironic, while their formal qualities move closer towards a kind of Modernism in their reflection of thought and perplexity. These writings provided, in different ways and for different poets, a fertile ground from which themes and forms would grow in poems from the war. They included a concern with mortality given direct force through the circumstance of war, sharpened in some cases by a homoerotic awareness of the beauty of the suffering young men; a rejection of prevailing systems of social order; and – most powerfully and widely present – an awareness of the beauty of the countryside, both in itself and as a symbolic value of many kinds. The variety of moral and social concerns thus generated, within a range of writers and consumed by a range of readers, meant that, when war was declared on 4 August 1914, it was to the poets as much as to politicians or divines that people turned. The desire for aesthetic accomplishment both questioned and reinforced one of the dominant features of English society in 1914: its apparently rigid social stratification. The idea of self-improvement that was itself produced largely by literary texts, of which Dickens’s Great Expectations was an important example, paradoxically worked to reinforce rather than erode the hierarchy: those who had made the upward movement did all they could to maintain their superiority over those who had not. This class hierarchy was, however, counteracted by the importance of literature: it was available to all, and genuinely sought by many in all strata. During the war years, it became a form of solace that frequently broke through class divisions: it was only later, when the aggressively anti-war poems more recently regarded as the authentic voice of the war years appeared, that divisions of readership and response became obvious. If reading war poetry was a source of consolation, the process of writing it was similarly therapeutic to its writers. It should be remembered that present-day psychotherapy in part derives from the so-called ‘talking cure’ developed by Dr W. H. H. Rivers at the Craiglockhart War Hospital, where his patients included Sassoon and Owen. Patients suffering from what was termed shell shock or neurasthenia were encouraged to talk and write about the horrific experiences that had caused their conditions: many less celebrated writers discovered the cure for themselves, and found eager readers. One other reason for the popularity of poetry was its simply informative role. Especially in the early months of the war, news from the front was very heavily cen-

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sored; throughout the war, a great barrier existed between those fighting and those at home. In different ways, all of the poets confronted this barrier: while Owen, Sassoon, Blunden and Graves sought to overcome it through shocking detail, others did so by offering reassurance in the rightness of the cause. This opposition is itself a reflection of a larger social uncertainty that grew to increasing importance as the war dragged on after the apparent certainties with which it was approached in August 1914. 1.3 Issues o�� Gen�er 1.3.1 Women and the war The years immediately preceding the war saw an upsurge in campaigning for female suffrage, itself part of a larger movement towards the greater social, political and intellectual – and, not least, economic – freedom of women. This was, of course, applicable largely to the middle classes, since working class women had always been forced to work through economic need. Education was still limited in comparison with that offered to men, although universities had begun to admit them to classes, in some cases without allowing them to qualify for degrees. One result of these changes, aided by the rapid growth of popular publishing, was that women not only made up a large percentage of the reading public, with periodicals directed specifically at them, and some women had begun to build careers as periodical journalists. Jessie Pope, whose poetry is discussed later, was one of them, writing for The Daily Mail, The Daily Express and Punch. In 1913, for example, the articles by ‘Miss J. Pope’ included a comic piece on the problem of obtaining reliable servants, some mocknature notes, and an article making fun of the post-Impressionist exhibitions of contemporary art. At the outbreak of war, many women demanded the right to work in support of the military effort: after initially opposing this, the Government soon realised it was the only way to maintain essential services and production, so that in 1918 nearly 7 ½ million women – very nearly one in three of the total female population – were employed in transport, munitions (one million of the total), farming, the police, and administrative duties. This brought independence in both financial and many other aspects of their lives. Others worked as nurses, often close to the front line; and in 1917 the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps (WAAC) was established, the work including driving heavy lorries or labouring as well as clerical or cleaning work. In different ways, all women employed in such activities became directly involved in the war effort. While many others, mainly from the wealthier classes, had no such

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duties, the overwhelming majority also suffered the anguish of separation from male relatives involved in the fighting. But, whatever the specific demands of these circumstances and relationships, responses to war were as complex and varied as those of men. In consequence, women’s writing of the war years offers a response of great variegation and complexity, and demands consideration, like that of the better known male writers, both as social and human documentation and for its aesthetic structures and identities. 1.3.2 Changing relationships between men The period was also significant in its reassessment of relationships between men. Recent criticism of First World War poetry has emphasised its homoeroticism, with particular stress on the same-sex orientation of Sassoon and Owen. There is much truth in this, but it needs to be seen within a frame that is more inclusive both in terms of these individuals’ identities and in its awareness of a range of relationships extending from a higher male friendship to a general exploration of sexuality then current. It is also important to consider how these imperatives are evident in the poems, and here again the boundary between literary analysis and social anthropology requires careful exploration. Two events are significant in the growth of homoeroticism and its influence on contemporary writing. The first is the development of ideas of sexuality in the work of Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter. This stressed desire between men as ‘sexual inversion’, spoke of the soul of a woman in the body of a man, and for the first time in English (1890) used the word ‘homosexual’ to describe a single, lifelong orientation. The novelist E. M. Forster was one of those among literary and artistic circles strongly influenced by Carpenter’s theories: his novel Maurice, written in 1913–14 but not published until 1971, and several short stories from the same time, explore male relationships. The second was the trial of Oscar Wilde in 1896, which led to his imprisonment under the Offences Against the Person Act of 1861 that prohibited sexual acts between men. The result of this in literary terms was to aid the growth of a particular kind of writing that was carefully coded in its sexual direction. In particular, following the success of Wilde’s story ‘The Portrait of Mr. W.H.’, Shakespeare’s sonnets became an emblem of male love, especially those addressed to the ‘lovely boy’. The writing of sonnets in itself became a fashionable inscription of this code.   Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1889

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These elements were strongly concentrated during the war, most powerfully among young soldiers who had come straight from the public school Officer Training Corps to the battle fronts. It had long been accepted that strong attachments between older men and younger, with various elements of sexual activity, were a major part of classical Greek education and military service. Coupled with the close living conditions of warfare, and the importance of companionship and reliance on one’s comrades that this fostered, the awareness of homoeroticism became strong, if unacknowledged. The publication of the anthology Lads in 1989 made clear the degree to which this permeated the troops, revealing that it was not only those educated at public schools who produced such writing. The significance of this should not be over emphasised, nor should it be seen as the primary concern of the poetry; but the presence of a range of feelings from human compassion to active sexual engagement is a factor that needs to be considered as a textual and sub-textual element in much of the poetry of the war years, as the discussion in Chapter 4 will make clear. 1.4 Thomas Har��� (1840–1928): ‘Men wch Aw The issues discussed in the preceding sections help to constitute the intellectual and social frames that surround and help to construct the poems of the war. A more literal frame is provided by the material circumstances in which the poems themselves were published – the volumes, newspapers and magazines and the other material they contained which were read by the original audiences alongside the poems that have since become canonical. Examining the poems within this frame helps the presentday reader to experience something of their original resonance, as well as once more stressing the relation between the poetic and experiential that is constantly present, but by no means simply defined, in any discussion of these works. When ‘Men who March Away’ appeared, Hardy was established as one of the nation’s major literary figures. The author of novels including Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) and Tess of the d’Urbevilles (1891), he had rejected fiction after the poor reception of his radical Jude the Obscure in 1895, and had since written only poetry. His poem was seen as a major literary and moral response to the war, a point of guidance at a time of national and personal displacement. It can be found at http:// pages.ripco.net/~mws/Poetry/107.html. Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914. Hardy’s poem was published   Lads: Love Poetry of the Trenches. Compiled by Martin Taylor. London: Constable, 1989.

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in The Times on 9 September 1914 and The Times Literary Supplement the day after, making it one of the very first poems published nationally in response to the war and endowing it with a dual identity through the different natures of the two publications. In The Times, the national newspaper of record and organ of establishment opinion, the poem could be said to be endorsed by those responsible for the nation’s government and the formulation of opinion. In the Supplement [TLS], then as now consisting primarily of reviews of the latest books of fiction, poetry and subjects of academic research, as well as occasional theatre reviews or articles about important intellectual or artistic issues and original poems, Hardy’s stanzas became an aesthetic entity, a work of art in its own right. This dual character sums up the larger ambivalence of war poetry, as well as revealing the importance of the material circumstances in which poems of the war years appeared. As a response to the war and the idea of war, in the first of its two published contexts, the poem is ultimately a statement of the right and justice of the cause. Although it begins with the question ‘What of the faith and fire within us/ Men who march away’, it moves from the second stanza’s questioning ‘Is it a purblind prank’ to the assertion that ‘We well see what we are doing’. The penultimate stanza’s ‘In our heart of hearts believing/ Victory crowns the just’ is a direct expression of faith; the final stanza, changing the first line’s ‘What of’ to ‘Hence’ and directly repeating the rest of the first stanza, alters the opening uncertainty to an unwavering confidence, supported by the logical progress that the poem has travelled through, offering the reassurance of an algebraic proof to buttress the emotion of leaving with an assurance of right. Seen as a poetic entity, as it would more likely have been by the readers of the TLS, the text becomes rather less certain. Its structure is finely polished, its movement still logically secure; but the questioning of the opening may not be wholly cancelled by the assured closure, and some of the diction is troubling. Who exactly is the ‘you’ addressed in the second stanza, and what is the nature of the ‘purblind prank’? Any reader familiar with Hardy’s novels, and the sombre tone of the collection Satires of Circumstance that would appear later the same year, and which included in its second edition ‘Men who march away’, would be aware of the writer’s dark views of the destructive powers of fate. Those who read in that volume ‘The Convergence of the Twain’, a poem about the loss of the Titanic in 1912, would have recalled it as an iteration of the hubristic arrogance of man in challenging the destructive forces of destiny: it is hard to believe that this would not have coloured their reading of the war poem. The readers of the TLS would not have heard these echoes, but even without them

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the ending of the third stanza is particularly troubling in its attitude to authority: ‘Nay. We well see what we are doing,/ Though some may not see!’ That these lines occur just before the assertion of inevitable victory in a sense makes them the pivot of the poem, and may also reveal the idea that, despite the ignorance of ‘some’, the ‘men who march away’ fully understand the nature of warfare – an inscription of a social division between the ‘us’ of the opening and the ‘you’ of the second stanza that perhaps reveals the poem’s sense of the enlisted soldiers coming to the aid of the unimaginative leaders. The larger point here is that when read sympathetically the poem may disclose an ambivalence that radically undermines its apparent certainty. This reveals not only the dual identity of the poem in its two initial appearances; it shows that the act of reading, involving the ability to hear multiple levels of meaning, is perhaps of greater significance in its inflection with war poetry than with poetry with other thematic concerns. 1.5 Conclusion This chapter has presented some of the forces driving and surrounding the poetry of the First World War. As stressed earlier, a full understanding of the range and complexity of the material the term covers is beyond the scope of this book. Rather than attempting a survey, it will instead concentrate on key poems to suggest something of this diversity, and locate it where possible within larger social, political and poetic currents. In one significant dimension, the poems themselves are constantly changing. The reader of 1916 will have brought a series of anxieties and fears to a text by Owen or Jessie Pope more immediate than those experienced by one of 1938; the anti-war protestor outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square in the 1960s will have read Sassoon in a manner quite different from one trying to make sense of bereavement as a result of the war in Iraq. And those concerned with the study of poetry will explore, and in some cases learn to mistrust, the devices of logic, rhetoric and persuasion used by many of the writers here discussed. Some of the poems of these years offer consolation at the expense of honesty; some record an anger that can never be assuaged. At times, discussing them as poetry, exploring structures of metaphor, patterns of allusion or the effects of rhyme, can seem irrelevant to the larger issues they address. But in using these forms to engage with their central themes the poems offer a survival mechanism for both reader and writer, and in that surely they demonstrate the power and, ultimately, the value of the poetic act.

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1.6  A Note on Texts This is a critical work, not an anthology, and in order to make full use of it you will need to read the poems themselves alongside their discussions here. The bibliography lists the main collections: the most comprehensive is probably The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, edited by Jon Silkin. Volumes by individual poets will be available from academic libraries; in the UK many county libraries will have special collections of work by local writers, or archives of local newspapers that will almost certainly include poetry. These will prove an invaluable extension to the material discussed here. In addition, many of the poems are available on the internet. The complete poems of Wilfred Owen, for example, with notes on their manuscripts, may be consulted at http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/jtap/warpoems.htm . There are many sites that discuss the events of the war, with varying degrees of accuracy and sensitivity. A clear and reliable short history of the main events can be found at http://www.bbc.co.uk/ history/worldwars/wwone/. A site that contains chronological summaries with the texts of poems, recordings of songs and some contemporary images is http://www. firstworldwar.com/timeline/index.htm. Other relevant links will be given where appropriate, and can be supplemented by using one of the common search engines. However, the usual cautions apply: web sites can include inaccuracies, and others will change or move for various reasons. Special care is needed for websites that purport to offer critical discussion or analysis. In the UK, sites bearing the suffix .ac.uk are produced by universities; in the USA, schools, colleges and universities all use the .edu suffix. This may help to assess the value of a site.

Chapter 2 ‘To battle for the truth’: Popular Poetry Let’s play life’s game as men, And not as pampered youth; Knocked down, let’s rise again To battle for the truth. —Anonymous poem, The Dundee Advertiser, 25 August 1915 2.1 Defining ‘Popular’ The idea of what constitutes popular poetry, or popular works of any artistic form, has several different forms. In much present-day discourse it refers to an art form that avoids any idea of sophistication or intellectual pretension, which is often rejected as ‘élite’ – as shown, for example, in the difference between grand opera and the Hollywood musical. It assumes that the popular lacks sophistication, and that the élite is in some way inaccessible to the majority, both suppositions that are suspect for a number of reasons. It does, however, have the advantage of offering a frame within which to see poetry written for large numbers of readers who might be called nonspecialist – those who would not normally read poetry but were drawn to war poems because of the subject they addressed. Another definition distinguishes between that which is popular by origin and that which is popular by destination. An example of the first in present-day terms would be a chant that emerges from a group of people watching a game of football, and of the second a verse written in a greetings card. This distinction is far from easy to maintain, since the two often overlap: in the discussion of First World War poetry, one might assume that the popular by origin is represented by songs written collectively by soldiers on the march – but since these were often parodies of songs from pre-war music-halls, which would be defined as popular by destination, the categories become blurred. Greater consideration to the ideological basis of the work is evident in the work

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of Pierre Bourdieu, who sees popular writing as the site of a power conflict between special interest groups, always of a higher social class, who seek to impose their symbolic systems, through language, on members of lower social orders. Seen in this light, First World War poetry is the site of a struggle between representatives of various ideologies who compete to win power over the beliefs of the mass of people who constitute their audience. In a sense, this is a valid view, since certain kinds of poetry, most notably that which opposed the war or its capitalist basis, clearly failed to assume mastery; but in many other ways it is less easy to see in action. Much of the poetry sought to reinforce attitudes already widely held, and achieved the status of popularity, by which is meant a widespread readership, because of its reinforcement of these ideas. This approach is, however, particularly suggestive when it is applied to poems that, because of their place of publication, or subsequent use by those in authority, can be described as being aimed at those in the lower social orders. It places such writing within a critical debate about whether it is overtly propagandist, seeking to impose an establishment ideology, or consensual, stating ideas and feelings already present in the readers. These are issues that are ultimately for the reader to explore, if not finally decide. This chapter will explore a range of writings that are popular for a number of reasons. There are those that were very widely read at the beginning of the war, before ideas of pointless suffering and betrayal had become common themes in the poetry of those who sought to inform and warn. There are those that appeared in newspapers and periodicals whose circulations, while not wholly inclusive, nonetheless reached very large sections of the reading public. There are those selected for a best-selling anthology that included work of many different kinds, by writers from many kinds of social backgrounds. And there are those created by the soldiers themselves, marching songs that are perhaps the only form that can be termed genuinely popular. All are part of the war’s vast output of poetry; whatever their political and social purpose, they deserve serious attention as part of its aesthetic and moral landscape, and form a major part of the territory within and against which the work of the better-known canonical poets should be seen.

  See, for example, ‘The Production and Reproduction of Legitimate Language’, Language and Symbolic Power. Edited by John B. Thompson and translated by Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991, pp. 43-65.

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2.2 Responses to war in popular art forms Fully to understand the significance of poetry of the war years it is helpful to know something of the popular forms beside and against which it was produced. Particularly important here are popular songs, and illustrations of various kinds appearing in newspapers and magazines, and in official forms such as recruiting posters. Before the war the music halls were perhaps at their most popular, offering entertainment, food and drink to an audience that was primarily working-class. The term is not intended as dismissive, nor does it indicate a lack of subtlety or sophistication in the music or lyrics of the songs. Many that were popular before the war, or date from its first months, assumed a new meaning when adopted by soldiers departing for the front. ‘Its a Long Way to Tipperary’ (1912) becomes almost a statement of exile; ‘There’s a Long Long Trail a-winding’ (1915) assumes a dark literal force when sung by a marching column of men. In both cases, the words are given greater poignancy by the simple, yet sentimental music to which they are set. The songs may be heard in wartime recordings at the following sites: http://www.firstworldwar.com/audio/itsalongwaytotipperary.htm http://www.firstworldwar.com/audio/theresalonglongtrailawinding.htm. Songs written during the war years certainly helped to maintain morale, among those at the front and those at home. The contributions of women in making clothes for soldiers were celebrated in ‘Sister Susie’s sewing shirts for soldiers’, like most songs of the time combining a contextual narrative with a memorable, forceful refrain, often including double entendres or, as here, a contemporary version of a tonguetwister, in either form helping to bring humour to the pain and separation of war. The song may be heard in a recording of 1914 at: http://www.firstworldwar.com/audio/sistersusiessewingshirts.htm. The range of visual imagery is extremely large and beyond consideration here, but some examples (see next page) will suffice to suggest the way in which it operated, and some points of difference and similarity with poems of the time. The invasion of Belgium by Germany in the early months of the war was treated by artists and cartoonists in a manner that reveals many important strands of imagery.

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In L. Raven Hill’s cartoon from Punch (above left) the two nations are personified and domesticated, Germany represented by the Kaiser as a bully while Belgium is a gallant country schoolboy. As well as playing on the stereotype of the German – the string of sausages is important here – it reflects an English sympathy for the underdog. Personification of a darker kind is used in a cartoon by the Dutch artist Louis Raemakers (above right), which shows the Kaiser suppressing by force two women representing Belgium and Luxembourg. The invasion was frequently described as ‘The rape of Belgium’: Remakers’ cartoon comes close to this metaphor of sexual violence. Another frequent kind of reference was to a mythical age of chivalry. It can be seen in another reference to Belgium (see next page), a drawing by L. Raven Hill that illustrated ‘Ypres (September. 1915)’, a poem by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in The Queen’s Gift Book, one of a number of collections of poems, stories and illustrations sold during the war in aid of charities – in this case for Queen Mary’s Convalescent Auxiliary Hospitals. The image presents a vision of the medieval City, light bursting

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from its ancient cathedral while a couple in stylised medieval costume look on from the foreground. In part this refers to the ancient architecture of the city, but it also

reflects a larger theme – the importance of imagery of the Christian values of an earlier period in which knights acted in accord with a strict chivalric code of honour. It is seen again in another image from the same volume, a painting by Eugène Hastain

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in which St. George, the patron saint of England, appears as a knight above a dead soldier and his comrade (see below).

Images of knightly combat are frequent in early images of war, and also have a significant role in writing about the war. Interestingly, however, their use is strongest in the early years of the fighting and again as elements of memorial verse or in the statuary of war memorials, which often depict soldiers in the pose of knights on medieval tombs. At the height of the war, when few could recognise the fighting in elevated accounts of courtly combat, the references are far fewer. The one exception is in writing about the war in the air, which often compares battles between individual aeroplanes with the single combat of the medieval joust, reflecting the perception of

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the fighting as somehow cleaner and more honourable than the use of machine guns and poison gas in the trenches (see Sillars, 1987).   Another popular device is the personification not of a country but of an abstract quality such as ‘peace’. Such personified abstractions are frequent in both visual and poetic imagery. The image on this page demonstrates well the way in which such figures were used. A drawing from Punch at the end of the first year of the war, it shows ‘Liberty’ appearing to fighting men of all the Allied nations. Like the imagery of chivalric honour, such abstractions are more obviously present in imagery from the earlier years of the war. They are also unusual in finding almost equal use in poetry and popular visual art. Images of these kinds are balanced by many other visual forms that contributed to the intellectual and moral landscape within which the poetry of war needs to be seen. The Imperial War Museum in London holds a vast collection of paintings and drawings commissioned from Official War Artists. Many can be seen on its website, http:// www.iwmcollections.org.uk/. Most of the leading newspapers and magazines had their own artists and photographers who recorded events as far as they were able under censorship regulations. Notable among them was The Illustrated London News, a leading society journal whose drawings of the war achieved wider circulation by being used by more popular magazines. Often they presented optimistic visions of events: the drawing of the advance on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, for example, gives no idea of the scale of the suffering. The image may be seen here and the page has links to large numbers of other drawings and photographs from the Illustrated London News. Reproductions of each page from an issue from 1915 can be seen at: http://www.iln.org.uk/iln_years/year/1915feb27.htm. Full use was made of visual material for the design of posters, especially those encouraging recruitment in the first two years of war, before conscription was introduced in 1916. The earliest posters made simple appeals to duty and patriotism, but

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later ones used more subtle methods of persuasion. ‘Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?’ shows children in the imagined future peace asking the question, while their father looks conscience-stricken out of the image towards the viewer. The drive towards guilt was not always successful: a popular reply amongst those who objected to the war on religious or moral grounds was ‘I tried to stop the bloody thing’. Another poster, ‘Women of Britain say Go’ plays upon a young man’s more immediate fear of rejection. Reproductions may be found at: http://www.firstworldwar.com/posters/images/pp_uk_07.jpg http://www.firstworldwar.com/posters/images/pp_uk_24.jpg. 2.3 Ideal, Order and Consolation Chapter 1 discussed Thomas Hardy’s ‘Men who march away’ as one of the most significant early poems, achieving wide readership in its several published settings. Others had even greater impact, and perhaps the most widely read was the first poem from a sequence of five sonnets, called simply 1914, by Rupert Brooke. Brooke had already established a reputation as a poet while at Cambridge, and when he died from septicæmia while awaiting the Gallipoli offensive in 1915 he became the subject of immense adulation as the embodiment of the classical young hero who gave his life for his nation. The poem itself can be read as a statement of supreme sacrifice in gratitude for the homeland, the idea that the ‘richer dust’ The cover of Brooke’s 1918 Collected Poems, contained within the body of the soldier showing the poet in a classical memorial. buried in ‘some foreign field’ has been shaped by England and becomes ‘A pulse in the eternal mind’ that ensures the continuity and renewal of ‘hearts at peace, under an English heaven’.

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The use of the sonnet form, then associated largely with Shakespeare and seen as a specifically English form, enhanced the sense of identity and purpose, aided by the simple, direct diction in strong contrast to the more complex and to many readers deliberately obscure forms of pre-war Modernism (for a brief definition of the term, see http://www.english.uga.edu/~232/voc/Modernism.voc.html). It is easy to see this poem today as superficially patriotic, written without experience of the horror of battle; it has also been seen as one of the most complete statements of colonial appropriation, in the colonisation of the ‘foreign field’ by the soldier’s body. But at a time when the nation was in need of a simple statement of purpose and consolation the poem met with great success – even though many of Brooke’s earlier poems have a satirical edge that may suggest that, in its title ‘The Soldier’, the poet is adopting a voice that may be ironical, undermining the poem’s apparently direct expression of feeling. In its attitude, form and diction, Brooke’s poem is representative of many of the first poetic treatments of the war to reach wide audiences. Its reference to the English countryside, its concern that the values implicit within it should live on, and with them the spirit of the dead soldier, are found in many early war poems. Related to them is a theme implicit within the cult surrounding Brooke and made explicit in another of the poems from his sequence 1914: the idea of a generation of heroic, aristocratic young men who, finding new purpose in war, embraced death quite willingly not for glory but because it gave them a renewed sense of manhood. The ‘swimmers into cleanness leaping’ who are the central figures of Brooke’s sonnet beginning ‘Now God be thanked who has matched us with his hour’ make this clear. That the poem goes on to reject ‘all the little emptiness of love’ continues the sense of renewed purpose, and that Brooke uses the sonnet form, traditionally associated with plaints of love, is a formal expression of the same notion. This has a particular social relevance: immediately before the war there was much concern for the physical and moral deterioration of the young, coupled with the idea that all the strong figures had left for the colonies and a fear that the cities were being over-run by an underclass of clerks who were poorly nourished in both body and mind, and lacked the stamina to defend the nation. Another poem that received acclaim early in the war, and that reflects similar attitudes, is ‘Into Battle’ by Julian Grenfell. In stressing the closeness with nature, and the idea of purpose and release felt by the soldiers who will die, the poem acted powerfully on national morale. That Grenfell was the Hon. Julian Grenfell, son of Lord Desborough, was educated at Eton and Balliol College, Oxford, and had won

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the Distinguished Service Order for gallantry, marked the poem as an embodiment of the vigour of the nation’s social and intellectual élite. That the poem was published in The Times on 27 May 1915, the same day that Grenfell died of wounds, endowed with a mythic force; it was as if the poem’s prophecy of a death of noble sacrifice, at one with nature, had been fulfilled, and with it the sense of consolation that it had expressed. In its claim that ‘All the bright company of heaven/ Hold him in their high comradeship’ the poem adopts the language of Christian hymns to reassure those at home that the dead soldiers live on, adding personal reassurance and to the grief felt by the bereaved. Jon Silkin is surely correct in describing the ‘inadequacy of the poetic equipment’ (Out of Battle, p. 74), referring particularly to the use of imagery of the natural world as a parallel to the speaker’s new-found resolution. But that is in a sense irrelevant to the poem’s effect on its first readers, and may well have aided in its power: it was not perfectly-formed poetic conceits that readers wanted in 1915 but a sense of purpose, reassurance and consolation. That the poem was received in this way is shown in the opening lines of a sonnet published in The Times on 5 June 1915, nine days after Grenfell’s death: Because of you we will be glad and gay, Remembering you, we will be brave and strong: And hail the advent of each dangerous day, And meet the great adventure with a song. 2.4 Structure, idea and ideology in popular poetry Many of the most popular poems of the war years fulfilled the functions discussed in section 1 above, which may be summarised as conveying a consolatory justification of the war and its sufferings in elevated, ritualised form. This complex brings together the poem’s identity as a social and psychological concretion and as a formal, literary construct. That many of the popular poems are as simple in utterance as they are unqualified in political foundation cannot be denied; but there are others that achieved currency because their ideas are conveyed through formal devices of no little sophistication. This fact not only serves to remind us that subtle relations of structure and sentiment are not the preserve of the poems most familiar within the canon of ‘war poetry’ – those that both reflected and furthered the pacifism of the 1930s, and those admitted to the academic canon in the progressive political atmosphere of the 1960s and 70s. While some of these poems respond to the war in ways hard for later

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readers to share, they gave genuine comfort and reassurance in the rightness of the cause to their original readers. In so doing, they achieve the unity between a concern for poetry and a concern for war that was earlier discussed as the intellectual and aesthetic nexus at the centre of ‘war poetry’. This can be shown by detailed examination of three important examples. 2.4.1 Jessie Pope (1870–1941): ‘The Call’ Jessie Pope was a popular journalist and poet in the years before the First World War, writing prose and verse for newspapers and magazines. While little regarded today, her work was among the most popular poetry of the war years, and she published three collections: War Poems (1915), More War Poems (1915) and Stirring Rhymes for Stirring Times (1916). The title of the last of these suggests the tone of much of her poetry – simple and direct in structure and undemanding in patriotic fervour. This made it ideally suited to the popular press, and ‘The Call’, her best-known poem, appeared first in this setting – The Daily Mail of 26 November 1914. From the first the Mail was resolutely in support of the war, reflecting the attitude of its readers, who mostly came from the very centre of the middle classes. The poem’s tone is reassuring and confirmative rather than challenging and confrontational – this is not a poem which demonstrates the technique of ‘defamiliarisation’ of the Russian formalists, developed as a theory of poetry only a matter of months before. The tone adopted by the poem is direct and conversational, the speaker identifiable as one of an older generation. The recurrent use of ‘my laddie’ suggests a relationship between the speaker and the implied addressee that is parental, or has the assumed authority of a parent or guardian in its combination of intimacy and patronage. It reflects a system of order between generations, and perhaps also classes, that is hierarchical and unchallenged, and again common to the poem’s speaker and reader. In this lies the poem’s success: by developing this alliance, the poem locates the implied addressee firmly between the two forces, by implication making it impossible for him to deny the ‘call’ of the title. This general effect is given more direct focus by the poem’s pattern. The series of questions is the same in each stanza: the first three emphatically assume the answer ‘Yes’, and the last requires a similarly forceful ‘No’. In this way the implied addressee is forced, almost shamed, to answer appropriately, rather than being caught out by giving the wrong answer to the final question. The pattern is simple, but effective,

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perhaps echoing that used in popular music-hall songs. It is reinforced by the rudimentary rhyme-scheme, metre and diction. Only one word has more than two syllables, and that word – ‘procession’ – is almost presented within quotation marks as a statement of the formal recognition of the ‘the Empire’s thanks’, becoming a word from the vocabulary of officialdom rather than that of the world inhabited by the speaker, addressee and Mail reader. In narrative terms, the poem moves from the situation of eager recruitment in the first stanza, through training – ‘getting fit’ to ‘show his grit’ – in the second, to receiving the rewards of victory – ‘the Empire’s thanks’ and participation in the victory ‘procession’ – in the third and last. This does, of course, skilfully omit the battle itself, by moving from recruitment and enthusiastic training to victory, reflecting an attitude prevalent in the opening weeks of the war, when the poem appeared. It persuades the potential volunteer through applying parental pressure, the idea of duty to the Empire, and perhaps most forcefully the fear of being left out of the assumed responses of his peers. It echoes the rhetoric of early recruiting posters such as that showing a woman pointing into an unrealised distance to a man wearing the social uniform of a city clerk, with the legend ‘Go! It’s your duty, lad’. 2.4.2 John McCrae (1872–1918): ‘In Flanders Fields’ John McCrae was a Canadian doctor who had a distinguished medical and academic career before serving in the Royal Canadian Artillery in the Boer War of 1900. On the outbreak of war in August 1914 he volunteered and became a surgeon with the same regiment. The poem was written in April 1915 when McCrae was working at a field dressing station immediately behind the front line during the Second Battle of Ypres. Casualties were heavy, largely the result of the use of poison gas; the many soldiers who died were buried close by, and meditating on the rows of graves may have provided the literal stimulus for the poem. That the poem grew out of this immediate circumstance perhaps reveals a function of poetry that balances its consolatory role: the psychological release and catharsis that it provides for the writer, both in the formulation of a response to the war and in the act of expressing it. The poem first appeared in the magazine Punch in its issue of 8 December 1915. At the time, Punch was the leading humorous weekly, read by the upper and uppermiddle classes, representing a social échelon perhaps a little higher than that of the   Major-General Sir Edward Morrison, Letter to The Ottawa Citizen, 1918

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Daily Mail reader. It contained cartoons, theatre reviews, humorous articles and poems. Its attitude was firmly in support of the war, which it approached in what would later be regarded as a ‘typically British’ way, making light of its difficulties, attacking the ‘slackers’ who organised strikes in the shipyards, but at the same time publishing cartoons that praised ‘gallant little Belgium’ and presented abstractions such as ‘peace’ and ‘victory’ embodied in figures perhaps best described as a cross between the Virgin Mary and an idealised vision of a beautiful young Englishwoman. It is within this frame that the poem was first read. The location has an immediate effect, making the poem reassuring and reaffirming even in anticipation: it would not have appeared in such a setting unless it was so, and it therefore builds to itself what might be termed a kinetic energy of ideological confirmation. This is, of course, only true of its first readers: but the poem’s engagement with its circumstances and subject makes them very much an element of the poem itself, so that rather than seeing them separately we should consider them an extension of the poem’s own identity and form. Two main structural principles work together as the poem’s intellectual and emotional propellant. The first is the use of the symbol of the poppies. This has the effect of changing suffering into something enduring – both through the implicit assertion that their suffering was part of a natural sequence, and therefore inevitable and right, and by offering a sense of consolation through the continuity in the growth of the flowers in the battlefield cemetery. Critics may attack this because it rejects any mention of the horror of war, turning .

McCrae’s poem as it originally appeared in Punch

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it into an abstract transfiguration, and this is certainly true. But in doing so it offers consolation and continuity, something gravely needed by the soldiers’ relatives who read the poem on its first appearance. The idea of continuity also features in the poem’s other structural force: the integration of the poppies into a syntactic structure that makes inevitable the prolonging of the war, since its cessation would be an act of betrayal of the suffering of those who have died. That the speaker is the collective voice of the dead who now lie beneath the poppies is a striking imaginative conceit. Acting as an extension of the relationship between the dead and the living, it offers a further level of consolation: but the poem’s structure, in returning to the poppies at the end, makes inevitable the continuation of the war as a duty imposed on the reader through the sharing of the symbol of the poppies with which the poem began. In thus returning to its opening, the poem’s form echoes the inevitability of the war’s continuation by linking it to the memorialisation of the dead in the poppies: if the reader accepts the one, he or she is forced to accept the other. There are other features of the poem that aid in its success. One is the ‘torch’ of the final stanza, a symbol used frequently in the verbal and visual rhetoric of the time, belonging to the same category of symbol as the personifications of the cartoons close to which the poem originally appeared. Another is the general use of images of the natural world – ‘larks’, ‘sunset’, ‘fields’ – that develop the imagery and tone of much English poetry of the years before the war, and reflect a closeness between the soldier and the countryside that, without explicit statement or overt jingoism, locates them in a shared love of the country with the reader. Finally, there is the poem’s straightforward diction and movement. No word has more than two syllables, and all are part of an everyday vocabulary that is in no sense poetic. The poem has a simple and direct metre and rhyme-scheme, yet its sentences flow across the regular line-lengths in a rhythm of thought that is at once strongly assertive and simply authoritative. It also talks of the war in terms that are general and conceptual, reflecting an ideological approach rather than, like most of the better-known poems of Owen, Sassoon and others from later in the war, involving the reader in a single event and offering ironic or angry commentary. In short, the poem speaks to its readers in a manner that uses complex poetic devices to make it appear strikingly unpoetic: for these reasons it became one of the most widely read poems of the period, and one that still attracts attention from popular historians of the war years.

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2.4.3 Laurence Binyon (1869–1943): ‘For the Fallen’ At the outbreak of war, Binyon was a writer and art critic, working in the Department of Printed Books at the British Museum. After the war he became keeper of prints and drawings there, an important figure in the revival of interest in British art of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: he published his Collected Poems in 1931, and taught literature at Harvard University and the University of Athens. In some ways, then, his poetry different from both of those considered earlier in this section, being far more obviously a product of poetic tradition. Like the other poems, however, it first appeared in a newspaper, being published in The Times on 21 September 1914. Like the other papers it was firmly behind the war in principle and, in offering a focus of establishment opinion, in publishing Binyon’s poem it initiated the process in which the text became part of a national ritual of mourning. The poem displays many features familiar from the rhetoric of the early years of the war. It uses the metaphor of mother and child to convey the nation’s approach to the dead soldiers, placing the war in a much more general metaphor to avoid direct personal feeling and locate it instead within an arena of duty. It also uses the personified abstractions familiar from early images and poems – ‘Death’ and ‘Night’, the idea of England as a ‘mother’, and the imagery of shining ‘glory’. The final stanza’s affirmation of the soldiers’ immortality of is couched in similarly general terms: they are ‘stars that are starry in the time of our darkness’. The fourth stanza of the poem has achieved greatest familiarity. It achieves its effect through the use of very simple language to stress the immunity of the dead from the ravages of age, presenting their death as a moment of liberation that has the power of a religious transfiguration but, in accord with the upper-class British stance of the time, avoids direct mention of spirituality. For this reason, it was taken up as part of services of remembrance held on Armistice Day, 11 November, in countless churches throughout England, with the final line being repeated by the congregation after the first lines had been read by the presiding clergy. In this way it became part of a national ritual of mourning, and continues to be so in many enactments of the same service of remembrance. It is also engraved on many war memorials erected in the 1920s, and is carved in the entrance hall of the British Museum. Its continuing power is evidenced in the fact that a handwritten copy of the verse was pinned to the notice board of a university in Beijing shortly after the massacre of Tiananmen Square. Perhaps because its language recalls the combination of personal immediacy and near-universal applicability found in Thomas Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer,

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(for its history and text see http://www.wmcarey.edu/carey/bcp/bcp.htm), the fourth stanza demonstrates the power of poetic statement to instil itself within the mourning rituals of nations and communities, and in this way to fulfil a deep need of the bereaved in offering a way of bringing into utterance deep and desolate feelings of loss and of indebtedness to the dead. That the poem itself inscribes feelings of patriotism and duty not shared by many from later generations, and questioned with passion in poems written later in the war, should not negate its value, or its effectiveness as a piece of literary ritual. Like the other poems discussed in this section, it embraces a complex of feelings that when they were written must have come close to overwhelming those involved: as such it performs a major psychological and consolatory function. 2.5  Anthologies One of the earliest wartime anthologies reveals a great deal about its approach to the conflict in its very title. Pro Patria et Rege: Poems on War and its Characteristic Results appeared in 1915, and was edited by William Angus Knight, Professor of Philosophy at the University of St Andrews. Rather than recent verse, it contained poems by Scott, Wordsworth and others, reflecting a common approach to the fighting that sought to place it within the frame of earlier events, often the most heroic episodes of British military history. Its title translates as ‘For country and king’. A second volume appeared in 1916, containing poems written by those serving in the forces and some work by five women poets. The most celebrated collection of the war years appeared two years later: E. B. Osborn’s The Muse in Arms. The complete text of this volume is available online at http://www.firstworldwar.com/poetsandprose/mia_intro.htm. Osborn was a journalist and literary editor of the Morning Post, a newspaper occupying the middle ground between The Times and the Daily Mail, a competitor to the Daily Telegraph by which it was absorbed in the 1930s. His other writing includes a history of Canada and books on Socrates, the Middle Ages and Greek and Roman civilisation. That it appeared in 1917, when it was quite evident this was not a war of rapid conquest but one of protracted and bloody attrition, makes it particularly significant as a poetic response to the actualities of the fighting. Overall, it may be deduced that his approach to poetry was that of an educated general reader, concerned more with political and social issues than with poetic ones: that the anthology achieved large sales and was republished in 1918 suggests that it was in the broadest sense the most popular anthology of the war years.

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The book is divided into sections according to subject, beginning with ‘The Mother Land’ and including ‘Battle Pieces’, ‘The Future Hope’, ‘School and College’, ‘Chivalry of Sport’, ‘The Ghostly Company’, ‘Moods and Memories’ and others on the war at sea and in the air. The divisions are revealing, suggesting a concern to locate events within an emotional as well as a narrative setting, and to relate them to circumstances and relationships before and after the fighting. In this, they may be taken as representative of the large numbers of other poems published elsewhere and directed at large general readerships Osborn’s introduction is especially suggestive in its discussion of the poems. It begins by celebrating the production of poetry as an ‘efflorescence of the spirit’(vii) that reveals ‘the ultimate significance of war’ (v), by implication a triumph over adversity. Like Brooke, Osborn links together the idealised sacrifice of the soldiers with the landscape as a repository of English values: ‘the bravery of her lost sons will add to the beauty of the land adored’(xviii). The introduction then discusses ‘the all-engrossing love of the regimental officer for his men’(xxi), a statement that needs careful reading in the light of a more recent stress on homoeroticism in the trenches, to restore the focus to a concern for nurturing comradeship. Its final comment declares the volume ‘a book of the munitions of remembrance and hopefulness’ (xxi), using military image to reveal once again the role of poetry in the process of grieving. It is also conscious of the technical approaches used by the poets: they have preferred stare super antiquas vias; to keep to conventional forms (such as the sonnet) and to use the traditional currency of thought even when they were thinking in a new way. (xx) The assertion that the poets have ‘stood on the old ways’ confirms the concern with the perpetuation of tradition seen repeatedly in the poems. That the claim is made in Latin itself redoubles the concern with the past, and also with a very particular kind of education that values the classics above other literature. Those poets who, because of their savage denunciations of the fighting, became more widely read after the war, are largely absent from the anthology. The only exceptions are two poems by Sassoon, which present directly the shift from acceptance and consolation to outrage and unresolved experiential immediacy. The first, ‘Absolution’, claims ‘War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise’, echoing the idea of war as an experience of fulfilment and maturation found in the work of Grenfell and others. The second, ‘The Rear-guard’, is a fragment of experience in which a soldier encounters

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the unburied body of a soldier while stumbling through a trench, finally emerging and ‘Unloading hell behind him, step by step’. In its form and diction it is typical of Sassoon’s mature style, but is markedly different from the mainstream of poems within the anthology. What emerges from Osborn’s collection, his introduction and from the poems explored in this section, is a series of related concerns. Popular poetry is concerned less to record direct experience in war than to locate it within a spiritual landscape that makes mystical the English countryside by endowing it with heroic virtues, and immortalises its young men by showing their renewed moral integrity. From this develops the consolatory mood of hope and resolution that is the fundamental force of the poems for their contemporary readers. That they use forms that have grown out of the traditions of English poetry is a further source of consolation, as a further embodiment of continuity and nationhood. These are values quite different from those embedded in the poems now more celebrated as statements in response to war, but they are just as important in any attempt even partially to grasp the identities, forms and effects of First World War poetry. 2.6  Other voices All of the material discussed so far might be said to reflect a centralised, metropolitan view of the war, appearing in publications based in London and aimed largely at a readership either middle-class or aspiring towards such status. It was directed towards a readership that was in favour of the war and sought in various ways to make sense of its great human cost. While the processes of publishing, and of literary history, perhaps inevitably favour such writing, there were other voices, reflecting other views of war. Each demands far more space than is possible here, but the introductory discussions that follow are offered to balance the views reflected in the preceding sections, and also to encourage further reading and individual research among the wealth of little-known material. 2.6.1 Poems of political dissent There is a long, albeit often overlooked, tradition of poetry of radical dissent in England, which is perhaps at its strongest with Blake and Shelley, but which continues through the self-educated poets of the nineteenth century. Much of the writing of this kind that might have surfaced during the First World War was suppressed by the very severe censorship laws, but in an atmosphere that saw strikes by munition and

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shipyard workers and even, in 1918, by the police, there was clearly both room for the production and a demand for the consumption of such writing. It is often omitted from discussion, and space allows only a brief mention here. J. M. Denwood’s poem ‘For Whom?’, written in December 1914, is unusual is presenting this outlook, as this passage reveals: My countrymen, when Europe peace declares Midst thousands of our noble soldiers slain, Who but the ruling class shall reap the gain In all the lands? Toil’s slaves shall be the heirs Of yet more arduous toil, and only they Shall have to earn the tax war’s debt to pay. The sentiment here is familiar, that the cost of the war will be borne by the working people, but the idiom is archaic. The inverted syntax, the formal address, the use of ‘shall’ instead of the more familiar ‘will’ all suggest a popular idea of poetic language employed by those unfamiliar with poetry, so that there is a curious blending of radical thought and an expression that is closer to a parody of tradition than its continuation. 2.6.2 Regional poems As the battalions of the army were organised according to their places of origin, a strong sense of regional pride was present within and around them, reflected in the publication of poems in local newspapers and journals throughout the war years. The great majority of these remain uncollected and largely unread, although the collection edited by Hilda D. Spear and Bruce Pandrich and the inclusion of a section of poems from the Ilkeston Pioneer and Ilkeston Advertiser in Simon Featherstone’s anthology have gone some way to remedy this. Many of these poems use very simple forms, often parodying popular songs, and show little awareness of poetic effects. Yet they fulfil two basic functions of war poetry, in expressing a response to the circumstance and so providing a release for the writer, and in offering an occasion for consolation or sharing and thus furnishing a common experience for the readers. The majority of poems published in local settings display their origins not through local allusion or dialect, although in some cases these are evident. Instead, what marks them out is their function within a care-

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fully delimited community, in which their writers are known and remembered. This adds a further dimension to the function of offering hope and consolation: in extending this to a more individual locale, the regional publication of poems was a powerful force in maintaining a sense of community, even in shared suffering. 2.6.3 Soldier’s songs All of the discussion so far has been concerned with poetry published and read in Britain, the work of individual writers addressing their own experiences from a variety of motives, aesthetic, personal or – increasingly as the war progressed – monitory. There is another major category of popular poetry not generally recognised as such but in no measure less important: the songs produced by the soldiers, generally to accompany long marches and to relieve some of the tedium of military life. E. B. Osborn (viii–xi) considers these not fully popular or traditional, since they were produced under the influence of the music-hall song. This is certainly true, but given the circumstances of their composition, such songs approach most directly the status of genuine folk-song as popular by origin. Many others are extremely effective in appropriating tunes or words associated with the ruling orders and turning them to their own uses, often for satirical purposes. Paul Fussell’s claim in The Great War and Modern Memory (throughout, but especially pp. 4–35) that irony was the major mode of the First World War is not completely sustainable, but it is certainly valid for many of the songs. Singing ‘We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here’ in endless repetition to the words of ‘Auld lang syne’ presents an irrefragable argument against the pointlessness of military life, and the powerlessness of the soldiers to change it. At the same time, the words present a complete, ironic opposite to the situation of renewal and hope in which the tune’s original words are sung, New Year’s Eve. A related effect is produced by the use of the hymn tune ‘Holy, holy, holy’ for words that turn the hymn to the Holy Trinity into an endless, futile cycle: Raining, raining, raining, Always bloody well raining. Raining in the morning, And raining all the night The subsequent verses substitute the words ‘marching’, ‘grousing’ or ‘lousing’, to

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generate the same result. A variation on this is provided by ‘Lloyd George knew my father, father knew Lloyd George’, sung to Arthur Sullivan’s tune for the popular revivalist hymn ‘Onward Christian soldiers’. The sentimentally chromatic Victorian hymn tune, the sexual innuendo of the endlessly repeated words, implying the bisexuality of the man who was Prime Minister from 1916, and the rejection of the militant Christianity of the text of the hymn all work together to provide a complex but powerful effect, at once mournful and vigorously satirical. Irony and satire are not always directed at the commanders. ‘We are Fred Karno’s Army’, sung to another hymn tune, ‘The Church’s one foundation’, describes the army as ‘The ragtime infantry’. This song can be read and heard by visiting http:// www.ww1photos.com/FredKarnosArmy.html. The last lines make clear the force they contain:

And when we get to Berlin The Kaiser he will shout Hoch! Hoch! Mein Gott, what a bloody fine lot Are the ragtime infantry.

Other songs function differently. Some reject military life by imagining a state of perfection ‘When this lousy war is over’; others record the sexual athleticism of, for example, ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières.’ One of the most striking in its shift from comic parody to dark acceptance begins with the lines ‘If you want to know the sergeant / I know where he is’, and progresses through several verses referring to the ‘quarter-bloke’, the sergeant-major, and the C.O. (Commanding Officer), giving an ironic location for each in the final line. The last stanza refers instead to ‘the old battalion’ and gives a sombre answer: I’ve seen ‘em, I’ve seen ‘em, Hanging on the old barbed wire I’ve seen ‘em, Hanging on the old barbed wire This is not quite as bleak as it may appear. The use of the word ‘old’ suggests a kind of intimacy or tolerance, as in the phase ‘my old woman’. Here it betrays a state of acceptance of the inevitability of warfare and suffering, absorbed into a vocabulary and shaped into a form that is as close to being popular by origin as anything to emerge

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from the war years. Brooke and others make reference to the English countryside and use the sonnet to express continuity; these songs adapt a colloquial style to absorb the horror of fighting and loss into a suffering made commonplace. The psychological and consolatory function of poetry is strong in each, and it is wholly inappropriate to judge which is the more effective.

Chapter 3 ‘Nobody asked what the women thought’: Poetry by Women ‘Fight on!’ The Armament kings besought: Nobody asked what the women thought —S. Gertrude Ford: ‘A Fight to a Finish’ 3.1 Approaching War Poetry by Women The lines just quoted offer a helpful way in to the discussion of poetry by women. The opposition they state provides a subtle elision, since in opposing ‘the Armament kings’ against ‘women’ it not only implies, with inevitable truth, that the former are all male, but suggests that all those who did not consult the women were male, and automatically in league with the armaments trade. From this it is easy to suppose that all poetry by women opposed the war; but, as the discussion of Jessie Pope’s writing in Chapter 2 has shown, this is far from true, and the anger implicit within these lines may in other writing be directed at the women’s exclusion form participating in the war rather than at its very existence. In general, however, it should be made clear that a large number of poems, including many that appeared in very popular anthologies and periodicals, were forcefully in favour of the war. Relating this to views of gender politics, then and later, has caused much uncertainty and debate, and may also account for the comparative neglect of a great deal of this poetry which was amongst the most widely read during the war years. British Troops leaving for the Front, by Sebastian E. Scott.

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  Gertrude Ford’s lines also reveal another key issue. Their simple rhyme and direct language, and their adoption of a deliberately archaic poeticism of diction made clear in the word ‘besought’ are both typical of much poetry by women at the time: its techniques lack sophistication and are outdated. Such writing was not, of course, the unique possession of women writers: a vast amount of poetry by men was weakly expressed, ridden with clichés and full of self-consciously archaic poeticisms. But the production of such writing by women poses rewards as well as problems for the later critic seeking to find qualities unique to women. Janet Montefiore has addressed this in the opening of a study of the material: ‘to dismiss the poems as plain bad is unfair: few are wholly achieved, but many are interesting if uneven’ (Montefiore, p. 54) As has been pointed out with reference to popular poetry in the preceding chapter, the use of conventional, clichéd or even downright clumsy expression does not necessarily make the poetry less effective for its original purpose and effect. Archaic poeticism is the kind of language that the majority of non-specialist readers will automatically associate with poetry; and clichés only achieve their familiar status through a repeated use that itself confers an idea of safety through immediate recognition. Both qualities thus make the poems that use such devices accessible and immediate in their ideas; and, at a time when safety and reassurance was needed by all, and perhaps more especially by women, left out not only of the decision-making surrounded by the war but also by its consequences, and left alone with the responsibilities not only of child-care but also of bereavement and the anguish of not knowing the fate of loved ones, such familiarity could be of great reassurance. This reassurance is matched by the concern in many of the poems to support the war. At the outset, the Suffragette movement of Emmeline Pankhurst fell immediately into line behind the soldiers, and according to most readings it was this, and the practical form it achieved through women’s war work of all its kinds, that achieved the grant of the vote to women (though only those aged over 30) in 1918. Familiarity of utterance is used to voice confirmation in the rightness of the cause, and if the resultant poetry now sounds both constrained and stilted in ideology and form, for its original audience it offered consolation and a renewed sense of purpose that, while in the long term might well be seen as corrosive and misleading, offered short-term support and sustenance. And, dealing with all kinds of suffering, separation and loss, it was exactly this kind of immediate support that women on what was increasingly referred to as ‘the home front’ sorely needed. Alongside poetry of this kind, there is writing by other women that addresses other issues of war in diction and forms far more original. Voices that record the effects

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of work in a munition factory or the exhaustion of nursing the wounded in France or Salonika, or the anger and frustration of fighting an increasingly powerful and overwhelmingly male bureaucracy all form part of this range, as do those few that offer innovation in structure or diction. The degree to which such voices are uniquely female will remain a subject of debate, and whether they should be discussed in an aesthetic ghetto fenced around by definitions of gender is similarly controversial. In 1996 Kathleen Raine and Laura (Riding) Jackson refused to allow their poems to be reproduced in an anthology of women’s poetry of the 1930s, despite the fact that the best-selling anthology of poetry of the decade and a leading study of the writing of the period both ignored their work. Whether separate discussion aids understanding of the unique quality of such writing or continues their exclusion from the attempt to construct a truly representative literary history is for the reader to decide. The work that is discussed in this chapter is chosen because it is representative, was popular during the war years, or is important in its idea or utterance in some other way. It all provides a counter to the poetry that has become much better known in the last halfcentury as the authoritative voice of the war, and for this reason it deserves to be read, studied and argued over. 3.2 The Variety of Poetry by Women The aggressive tone of the poetry of Jessie Pope, coupled with its skilful use of argument, has already been demonstrated in Chapter 2, and it is clear from the popularity of her writing that it represented views that were very broadly held. It is also true that the great majority of poetry written by women was strongly, if regretfully, in support of the war. Many writers approached this with versions of the idea of nobility and sacrifice in war evident in earlier poems by men. Margaret Peterson’s ‘The Truth of Life’ (1915) demonstrates this, and also represents a diction that blends diluted Victorian poeticism with elements of religious discipline: Out of the mists that hide the face of God The soul of man lifts feeble hands on high; Teach him, O Christ, how best to fight his fight, Then teach him how to die. The reference to ‘feeble hands’ is perhaps an echo of similar terms in Tennyson’s In Memoriam A. H. H., the most celebrated mid-Victorian poem of consolation in

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loss; the address to Christ is a direct prayer, made without any of the associations of blasphemy or swearing with which it would be used by Wilfred Owen in record of the phrase in the mouths of wounded soldiers. The idea of learning how to die reaches much further back, into the theological manuals of preparation for death that were prepared in the seventeenth century. The poem moves towards a conclusion that offers fulfilment through the entry of the soldiers into heaven: So shall they pass before the throne of God, Their sins forgiven and their anguish past, And find within the radiance of Thy Love The Truth of Life at last. If this appears simplistic to modern eyes, it should be read with the knowledge of its similarity to many Victorian and Edwardian hymns, not least among them ‘For all the saints’ by Bishop W. Walsham How, which was set to music not only by Joseph Barnby but, in the English Hymnal of 1906, by Ralph Vaughan Williams, and which talks of the ‘soldiers, faithful, true and bold’ as ‘faithful warriors’ who, in ‘the calm of Paradise the blest’ will experience ‘a yet more glorious day’. Other poems use similar imagery. Katharine Tynan’s ‘To the Others’, from a collection significantly titled The Holy War published in 1916, talks of ‘the dream that lured, nor lured in vain’ with reference to the ‘knight’s armour and the battle shout’. Some adopt the idea of regeneration through nature after death in battle: representative here is ‘Spring in War-time’ by the prolific children’s novelist Edith Nesbit. Beginning with a description of the ‘lovers’ lane/ Where last year we used to go’ it moves to a conclusion that, while accepting that no consolation is yet possible, hints that some sense of renewal may come: ‘Not yet have the daisies grown/On your clay’. The pattern of consolation and recovery suggested in these poems is matched in others that are direct outpourings of grief. The sense of desolation and the bleak fracture of normal relationships is conveyed by Diana Gurney’s ‘Leave is Stopped’ (The Poppied Dream, 1921). After the bleak avowal that ‘Leave is stopped’ comes the question ‘when – if ever – will he come?’ and the suggestion ‘later when the corn is red?’, before the uncomprehending ‘he said/ He would come soon’. The language is simple, only a single word in the poem having more than one syllable, but the expression of anger, encompassing almost a sense of betrayal in the man’s failure to appear, would surely have aroused empathy in many women readers in the years following the war.

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In other poems the anger becomes much more explicit, as in these lines from Nora Bamford’s ‘Drafts’ (Poems of a Pantheist, 1918): O damn the shibboleth Of sex! God knows we’ve equal personality, Why should men face the dark while women stay To live and meet the sun each day Here, it is the inability to bear the pain of war alongside men that is the source of anger. In Helen Hamilton’s ‘The Romancing Poet’ (Napoo, 1918) the force is directed, with ironic restraint, against the poet who is ‘making glad romance/Of this most hideous war’ which has ‘no glamour/Save man’s courage,/His indomitable spirit’. What seemed at the outset to be satiric anger approaching in tone that of Sassoon is dispelled in a statement of the heroism of death in battle, and the poem turns into a complaint about the inadequacy of poetic statement, not a cry against the futility of the war, revealing its ultimate sympathy with the sentiments of Peterson and Tynan. Some of the women writers approach the war in more directly biological terms. An untitled poem in Janet Begbie’s collection Morning Mist (1916) begins ‘We were the children you should have borne’; but it is Sylvia Townsend Warner’s ‘London Churchyard’ that takes this theme much further. It is one of a very small number of poems by women that employ the technique frequent in later poems written by men in the trenches, of moving from an account of an event to a broadening and ironic comment on it. Here, though, the effect is not ironic: it moves towards popular poeticism that has the effect of making the event immediately accessible through its use of poetic archaism and inversion. The poem’s title, ‘London Churchyard’, makes the situation clear: ‘Dead and buried with you Lies my child’ Piteously, piteously, Thus did she rave And wrung her hands and scratched on the grave. If we object to the explicitness of this poem, we must surely also object to a lot of Sassoon and Owen: its event, and its implication, perhaps offer themselves as one of the few equivalents of the war poems of immediate event that offer no larger solution to the horror they inscribe.

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A contrasting effect is perhaps provided in Eleanor Farjeon’s ‘Easter Monday’. Its subtitle ‘(In Memoriam E. T.)’ and date April 9th, 1917 reveals it as an elegy for the poet Edward Thomas who was a close friend of the writer. The full text is available at http://www.geocities.com/dunkinwedd/texts/3ww.doc. It makes use of many of the effects of the sonnet form, but in making the ‘volta’ or turn not between the eighth and ninth line, the traditional shift from the octave to the sestet, and by the physical blank line between the sections, it emphasises both the shift in time and the fracture that is the emotional core of the poem, that is echoed in the final line and the incompleteness it presents. While the experience of bereavement that the poem records is not uniquely female, the poem records circumstances of separation that were shared by an immense number of women during the war. Perhaps more important, it offers no solution or consolation: as a statement of emotion, tightly controlled by its images of apples and eggs, and the idea of Easter, associated with resurrection in the Christian tradition, it moves a long way away from the ideas of consolation and purpose found in the poems of Tynan and Peterson discussed earlier. There are poems that more specifically record uniquely female responses. Mary Gabrielle Collins’ ‘Women at Munitions Making’ is intriguing for a number of reasons. Its opening presents an ideal of female purpose that reflects many contemporary reactions to the idea of women making high-explosive shells: Their hands should minister unto the flame of life, Their fingers guide The rosy teat, swelling with milk, To the eager mouth of the suckling babe It is a view in opposition to those of women eager to help with the war effort for patriotic reasons, and of those who welcomed the high wages and freedom that war work offered, and it suggests a remarkably traditional view of the role of women, echoed in its very conservative use of language. Yet as the poem develops it becomes clear that it is voicing protest against the destruction of the war: They must take part in defacing and destroying the natural body Which, certainly during this dispensation Is the shrine of the spirit. Its conclusion is an appeal to God against the ‘seeming annihilation/Of thy work’, moving to a rejection of the whole process of war and its destruction. That it does this within language that resembles that of the nineteenth-century hymn, and perpetuates

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a view of womanhood from an earlier period that would be rejected by its Suffragette contemporaries, and that it is, in short, a poem of the kind that Montefiore might well have approached with misgivings, illustrates the difficulty of writing of this kind. As a statement of protest it is remarkable; as a poem it is, at best, uneven. There are other poems, however, that both move towards innovative directness and reflect an attitude to the war that does not follow conventional contemporary ideals. Helen Dircks’ ‘London in war’ (Passenger, 1920) adopts an idiom recalling the sparseness of the pre-war Imagists, moving from an account of ‘faces,/ Like helpless petals on the stream’ which may well be an echo of Ezra Pound’s famous ‘In a Station of the Metro’ to a personal response: I see the brightness Through a throbbing gloom, While death rattles To a tripping melody. While this seemingly goes against the Imagist dictate that feeling should not be separated from the Image, it achieves through its sparseness a quality of suffering that has the power of originality through the immediacy with which outer experience and inner state are closed together. Strangely, it contrasts with one of the rare war poems by Amy Lowell, important as the main woman contributor to the Imagist anthologies. Her poem ‘Convalescence’ is a modified sonnet, in which the experience of a convalescing soldier is presented in terms of a man struggling from ‘the dragging vastness of the sea’ until he finally achieves the land where ‘there blooms the sky of May’. Its presentation certainly lacks the sense of spiritual renewal through God or nature of many earlier poems by both women and men, and in avoiding any explicit attempt at consolation it moves further towards an original poetic inscription of a complex, isolating experience. Yet it lacks the lapidary precision apparent in the Dircks, and shares the unevenness of expression so common among poems of the period, regardless of their authorship. Alice Corbin’s ‘Fallen’ at first sight is highly unusual in attempting to depict the death of a soldier in battle without either the religious carapace of early poetry of justification or the circumstantial detail and bitter irony of canonical trench poetry. Instead it offers a sharing of last moments that seem to move from the actual to the halucinatory, ending with an imagined unity with an unnamed ‘her’. Four of the poem’s last six lines end with an ellipsis, and the text itself collapses with the line ‘He felt her near him, and the weight dropped off – / Suddenly...’. The fragmentation of

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language is bold, and perhaps matches that which appears in Owen and Sassoon, and the poem’s use of images of nature to suggest nurture and support develops earlier conventions in a manner that parallels that of Blunden and perhaps Gurney, as later chapters will make clear. It is unusual and striking, not least because it avoids so many of the traditional forms, roles and linguistic formulae used in so many poems about the war and its suffering, and achieves something rare in combining a moment of the male soldier’s suffering with what at the time of its composition would have been regarded as a feminine sensitivity to the senses and the nurturing world. This very brief survey does not provide enough material for a final judgment on the nature of women’s poetry of the First World War, or even offer sufficient evidence for the use of such a title. Certainly, a great deal was written, addressed to women readers, and much explored situations that were uniquely female within the circumstances of war. The question why so much poetry by women is uneven or unsatisfying needs address, but it also needs severe qualification. If the poetry is judged according to its therapeutic effect, then much of it that is apparently unsatisfactory in aesthetic terms must be judged as successful – in the manner that the sympathetic circularity of clichéd utterance and gesture can offer reassurance and a sense of continuity. It is important, too, to avoid judging by anachronistic measures the writing of an earlier period, with social, political and religious beliefs that were both very diverse and quite other than many held in the early twenty-first century. In their history of writing by women, Gilbert and Gubar suggest that the women’s poetry of the war is energised by a sense of release from the circumscription of their lives before the war, seeing it as an engagement that many women, especially in the constrained world of the middle-classes, unconsciously desired. This rejects any sense of the massive suffering that women of all classes endured. It may also be true that the limitations of much of the writing reflect the constraints that women writers have habitually suffered, having few female models to follow. But this does not explain the fact that the war years produced some very powerful prose writing by women, in the form of memoirs, autobiographies and fictional accounts of war experiences. Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth is only one example; others are Enid Bagnold’s A Diary Without Dates, and writing by Mildred Aldrich, Mrs John Lane – and also the large number of personal accounts and diaries held in archives such as those of the Imperial War Museum and the Liddle Archive: http://www.iwmcollections.org.uk/ http://www.leeds.ac.uk/library/spcoll/liddle/index.htm

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These present powerful and direct accounts of the effects of war, and perhaps record an experience that is quite different from that of most men in the armed forces in a form that is markedly different for a very clear reason. Fighting is made up of small moments of intense concentration, driven by adrenalin and fear, separated by large wastes of inactivity, boredom or institutional activity. Given the model of poetic composition prevalent at the time – either the Imagist concern with fusing an experience and a response, or the Romantic model of the ‘fading coal’ of inspiration that must be caught and rendered permanent in language, this model favours the composition of poetry. Some women shared this structure, but for the great majority the war was a time of continual struggle and deprivation; the circumstances might not have had the constraints of a bourgeois marriage, but they demanded similar qualities of endurance to be survived. Such circumstances tend towards the composition of extended prose work rather than the intensity of lyric poetry, and this is apparent in the writing of women during the war. Much of the women’s poetry is limited by its archaisms and unevenness; but this is true also of large swathes of poetry by men. It would be inappropriate adversely to judge the poems solely on grounds of gender, and instead they need to be seen within a much larger social, political and literary field, in which the importance of prose writing as a means of therapy for both writer and reader should be properly recognised as a formal parallel to the situation in which so many women found themselves in the war years. Women munition workers, with original caption, from The War Illustrated, 1915

Chapter 4 ‘Young blood and high blood’: Canonical writers Daring as never before, wastage as never before. Young blood and high blood, Fair cheeks, and fine bodies —Ezra Pound: ‘E. P. Ode pour l’élection de son sepulchre’ 4.1 Displaced nature: Graves, Blunden and Gurney 4.1.1. Edmund Blunden (1896–1974) Although he spent longer in the front line in France than any of the other war poets, Blunden’s work is as much concerned with the long tradition of English poetry about the countryside and the changing rhythms of the seasons as with the war itself. He was not associated with the Georgian poets, but much of his later poetry and prose writing addressed the relationship between the onlooker and the natural world. Perhaps the best approach to his war poems is to see them as meditations on the landscape both as an actuality and as a metaphor for suffering, loss and the passage of time, and as using these forces as a means of coming to terms with the desolation of war. His first volume, Poems, was published in 1914 while he was still at Christ’s Hospital School. ‘October 1914’ is unusual in seeing the war as a disruption of the countryside, using a vocabulary that is genuinely ancient rather than the affected archaism of much writing of the early war period – ‘stithy’ is an Old Norse word, ‘byre’ Old English. From many-acred mansions they are gone, And from the stithy, and the builder’s shed; By oast and rick and byre there linger on Old men alone of bowed and hoary head. The use of iambic pentameter, the metre of Shakespeare, Milton and Wordsworth, is another implicit reflection on tradition and its displacement.

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Blunden’s best-known war poem is probably ‘Thiepval Wood’, named after the scene of intense bombardment during the Somme offensive (online hyperlink). The poem is read by the poet’s widow Claire Blunden on the Blunden website, http://www. edmundblunden.org/. Like most of the later poems of the war it is concerned with one incident of the fighting, but focuses on the destruction of the wood, and the effects on the observer, rather than the suffering of the soldiers. In this way it becomes a brutal continuation of the Wordsworthian tradition of poetry about the perception of nature, simultaneously voicing the fracture of tradition and asserting its continuation.

Thiepval Wood after the battle

The desolation of landscape figures frequently in Blunden’s poems, often, as in ‘Zillebeke Brook,’ in contrast to English fields, a comparison matched by the opposition between past and present in the experience of the land. This becomes part of one of Blunden’s most insistent themes, a disorientation seen in the title of ‘Death of Childhood Beliefs’ and in many other poems, especially ‘The Estrangement’, from the collection The Waggoner (1920). The speaker’s displacement is both physical and psychological, and the relation between England and France is intensified into an uncertainty as to whether the poem’s situation is the No Man’s Land between the trenches or in an England from which the speaker is distanced by his experience of   For the poem’s text click on: http://roundyourway.com/e/edmundblunden/documents/ThiepvalWood.rm

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war. This indeterminacy adds to the poem’s effect, and the iambic pentameter assumes a force approaching irony when heard against the separation from the landscape. While the diction retains some agrarian references, it is tautened by a syntax sharper than that of the earlier poems, and allusion is continued in the speaker’s description of himself as a ‘kern’, a term for a mercenary soldier used by Shakespeare in Macbeth. A hounded kern in this grim No Man’s Land, I am spurned between the secret countersigns Of every little grain of rustling sand In these parched lanes where the grey wind maligns The poem ends with the speaker describing himself as ‘the soul grown strange in France’. In ‘The Avenue’ (The Shepherd, 1922), the displacement is expressed through the figure of the speaker returning, but whether to his home or to the scene of the fighting is not clear, resulting in a double displacement from landscape: the men Are lying in their thankless graves agen, And I a stranger in my home pass by To seek and serve the beauty that must die. Here, as in many of Blunden’s poems, the death of the landscape and the death of the soldiers – actual or through the spiritual isolation of war – act as metaphors for each other, in a sombre inversion of the Wordsworthian equation between land and observer. ‘Report on Experience’ is perhaps Blunden’s most fully achieved poem. It draws together the sense of dislocation of the earlier poems and their allusiveness within an ironic tone that goes beyond bitterness. The result is a distanced, puzzled ambivalence that, despite the apparent optimism of the poem’s conclusion, leaves the reader ultimately uncertain, sharing something of the speaker’s disorientation. The title appropriates the military language of the ‘Report’ but locates it in a much larger perspective – the report is not on a nocturnal wiring-party between the trenches, but on the whole enterprise of war. This allusion is balanced in the opening lines, which are an ironic inversion of Psalm 37 verse 25: ‘I have been young and now am old: and yet saw I never the righteous forsaken, nor his seed begging their bread’. The resonance would be clearly audible to those of Blunden’s upbringing in the traditions of the Church of England, and the reversal of meaning shocking in consequence, yet this is moderated by the gentler, puzzled tone of the following line, ‘This is not what

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we were formerly told’. The second stanza develops Blunden’s earlier concern with the natural world, but adopts the more distant perspective apparent in many of his later poems, the war seen not as individual events but a larger actuality that is no less confusing. There is reference to a ‘green country’ with ‘its villages vanished’ – a literal truth in the fighting Blunden witnessed. The selection of ‘the last rat and the last kestrel’ as absent life forms adds both a specific quality and a larger inclusiveness, encompassing forms both beneath and above the earth. ‘Seraphina’ was a child who, paralyzed from an early age and horribly disfigured, bore her sufferings with joy as a reflection of the passion of Christ, and as a result was canonised (made a saint) by the church. The name suggests the beauty of a seraph or angel, a quality both physical and moral. That she has ‘turned to harlotry’ concentrates the poem’s despoliation: the civilization of the village, the world of nature, and beauty of spirit are all laid waste by war. It is the religious imagery and allusion that is most powerful in the poem, in both effect and structure. The ‘peculiar grace’ of the second stanza, in reference to the destruction of nature, can be read both as ironic rejection and puzzled continuation of faith, and the same is true of the poem’s final stanza, which sees the ‘disillusions’ as the ‘curious proving’ of God’s love. Behind this are echoes of the proof of God’s existence within the brutalities of human kind, since they are evidence of His ultimate gift of free will; but whether the poem ends with hope or in cruel parody of a belief is ultimately unclear. If ‘Over there’ refers to heaven, then there is a sense of redemption; but it could equally well refer to the landscape of the trenches, and convey a sense of irony, however much it might be seen to refer to the transformative power of suffering endured in the fighting. Blunden’s poetry is easy to dismiss as simplistic in its reliance on the nature images of a nearly exhausted Wordsworthian tradition. But the use it makes of this reveals something much subtler, in which the equation between the speaker and both the natural world and the tradition of seeing it is contorted to produce displacement and incompletion. This is seen not only in the poems discussed above but in many others: sometimes even the titles convey the mood, as with ‘Gouzeaucourt: The Deceitful Calm’ and ‘Two Voices.’ Poems written after the war continue the estrangement, most directly ‘1916 seen from 1921’ but also those not obviously connected with war, such as ‘The Midnight Skaters’ and ‘The Troubled Spirit’. The last of these contains lines that convey very well the combination of immediacy and distance, of both experience and language, that characterise Blunden’s verse at its finest: ‘summer sees a rumour in the past’.

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4.1.2 Robert Graves (1895–1985) ‘France is the only place for a gentleman now’, Graves declared shortly after the outbreak of war. The statement reflects the class-based sense of duty felt by many young men at the time, and reveals what would later be exposed as a profoundly distortive view of the nature of warfare. Graves’s first volume, Over the Brazier, contained poems written at Charterhouse, his public school, between 1910 and 1914, and those written before the battle of La Bassée in 1915 in which Graves first saw action. The movement is representative of that undergone by many young men, but also marks an important difference. Graves had already begun writing poetry before the war, marking his work as different from that of the large numbers who wrote only in response to its circumstances, and this explains the nature of his earliest work from France. The volume shows a movement from the simple, school-dominated pre-war verse, heavily influenced by the mock-medievalism of Swinburne and Pre-Raphaelite painting to the apparent realism of poems written in the trenches, the latter still informed with gentlemanly ideals and notions of quick, clean death in battle. Fox-hunting, the resurgence of young manhood, the nobility of sacrifice are frequent subjects; there are frequent references to flowers, scents and childhood scenes, couched in simple four-line stanzas and sonnet structures. The poem ‘Limbo’, however, marks something of a change, talking of ‘bursting shells, of blood and hideous cries’, and of rats ‘big as kittens’ that ‘scuffle with their horrid fare’. Instead of the large, general statements that dominate Graves’s earlier poems, as they do much early poetry of the war, the poem is located within a specific situation, a move into the trenches after the ‘Limbo’ of the title, ‘a week spent under raining skies,/ In horror, mud and sleeplessness’. It is an important poem in being one of the first to convey the sense of being locked in a state of liminality, along with terse, focused details of suffering borne as much by the conditions of the trenches as by conflict with the enemy, that are characteristic of many later poems, by Graves and other poets. Goliath and David (for text see http://www.bartleby.com/120/7.html) appeared later in the same year, originally printed privately in an edition of 200 copies by The Poetry Bookshop, revealing the poetry as a private, aristocratic activity rather than the public statement of outrage that it would become with Sassoon and Owen. The poem itself is a rewriting of the Biblical parable, beginning with the claim that ‘the historian of that fight/ had not the heart to tell it right’ and ending:   Quoted by Neville Barbour, a school friend of Graves, in a letter to Cyril Hartmann dated 25 October 1914. Richard Perceval Graves, Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic 1895-1926. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1986, p. 117.

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‘I’m hit! I’m killed!’ young David cries, Throws blindly forward, chokes…and dies. Steel helmeted and grey and grim Goliath straddles over him. ‘Babylon’, from the same collection, at last rejects the poeticised childhood of the earlier volume, with its ‘magic hosts’, and is followed by poems of bitterness and anger. ‘The Lady Visitor in the pauper Ward’ ends with the speaker urging ‘Leave us to quiet dreaming and slow pain,/ leave us alone’. Most forceful in this collection is Graves’s rejection of earlier glorification of war in ‘A Dead Boche’. Addressed ‘To you who’d read my songs of War/ And only hear of blood and fame’, it continues: I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before) ‘War’s hell!’ and if you doubt the same, To-day I found in Mametz Wood A certain cure for lust of blood The cure is the ‘Dead Boche’ or German soldier of the title, ‘dribbling blood from nose and beard’. The combination of physical detail with specific location in the scene of some of the fiercest fighting in the Somme Offensive (see http://www.iwm. org.uk/server/show/nav.00o001) is a significant rejection of the ideals and abstractions of the earlier, more popular, poetry. Recent historians have argued that the battle was a strategic success; but for those who were there, it could not be other than a terrible waste of life. Graves’s third and final war collection, Fairies and Fusiliers, appeared in 1917, and achieves a balance between the fanciful, tradition-conscious richness of the earliest work and the irony and detachment of that which followed. Its poems make use of legend, dream and the remembered landscapes of childhood, often placed within structures approaching doggerel in their regularity. It is clear that these are not only trench poems, but poems about the identity and the future of poetry itself, conscious of its conventions while at the same time presenting them with irony and bitterness. ‘Corporal Store’ is a vision of a dead soldier, presenting the poet as recorder of the strange and visionary and thus developing ironically the tradition of heroic balladry; ‘A Child’s Nightmare’ unites the nursery and the battlefield in the hideous vision it presents; ‘the Assault Heroic’ is a parody of a Pre-Raphaelite knight in ‘the dungeon

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of Despair’ who beats off his enemies and readies himself and his men for ‘a new/ Attack’. The simple vocabulary and forms, along with the strange alliance between conventional and deeply contemporary references, give the poems a very particular force. Graves discarded almost all of the poems from the war years when publishing the various versions of his Collected Poems. They are reprinted rarely, and figure in few anthologies; yet the combination of fairy-tale structure and darker suggestion with outbursts of often sarcastic irony is characteristic of much of his later verse. Important, too, is an awareness of tradition, often used to support the rejection of an earlier ideology of war. Nowhere is this more evident than in ‘Big Words’, published in The Muse in Arms. Twenty of its twenty-two lines, within quotation marks, are a rejection of the fear of death by a speaker ‘still a boy’, who speaks of having lived a full life and now knows the importance of genuine love and purpose. These are in almost direct imitation of the many poems written at the beginning of the war. The final couplet rejects both the sentiments and, by implication, the abstract diction and large claims of the earlier style: no better indication could be found of the difference between the assertive generalisations of the early war poems and the intensely localised uncertainties of the later poems. The contrast inscribes not only the sombre actuality of war but its bitterly corrosive effects on poetic utterance and the use of tradition: But on the firestep, waiting to attack, He cursed, prayed, sweated, wished the proud words back. 4.1.3 Ivor Gurney (1890–1937) Ivor Gurney attended Gloucester Cathedral Choir School and studied music at the Royal College of Music in London, where he quickly became a fine composer of solo song. In 1915 he joined the 2nd/5th Gloucesters and fought in Flanders and on the Somme, before being wounded and gassed. The eccentricity that he had shown before the war now became a much darker affliction and, although he returned to his studies, in 1922 he was admitted to an asylum where he remained until his death. During his service in France, as well as his subsequent illness, he continued to write poems, and composed some of the finest songs in one of the richest periods of English song writing. He set only one of his own poems, ‘Severn Meadows,’ and although he published two volumes of poetry, Severn and Somme (1917) and War’s Embers (1919), a large

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number of poems was left unpublished at his death. It was only in 1982 that a more complete collection was published, and subsequent publications and recordings have done much to establish his reputation. The title of his first volume, and the final line ‘Do not forget me quite, O Severn meadows’ from the poem that he set to music perhaps suggest that Gurney’s concern is with mourning his exile from a landscape he loved and knew intimately. But his poetry is infinitely broader than the sentimental Georgianism of so much war poetry of regret for the homeland. Like several of Blunden’s poems, Gurney’s often convey dislocation through a sense of being simultaneously in France and England, and also reflect a dismay at the desolation of nature. ‘Trees’ and ‘The Fire Kindled’ are among the poems that state this explicitly, but there are many others that subsume such ideas into larger concerns. Gurney’s relationship with landscape is not the spiritual exchange of Wordsworth, but something more deeply physical, suggesting a definition of individual identity through physical location. The closest parallel in English poetry is probably John Clare (1793–1864), a likeness made stronger in that both poets suffered acute psychological disturbance through physical displacement and both spent many years incarcerated in asylums. Gurney’s acute sense of place is evident, for example, in a poem that was probably his best-known during the war years, ‘Strange service’, which appeared in The Muse in Arms as well as his first collection Severn and Somme. Gurney’s approach redirects the conventional sentiment into to something far more personal, the repayment of a duty felt not from social or political intrusions but from deep physical interaction with ‘Cotswold hills beside the water meadows’ and ‘hills not only hills, but friends of mine and kindly.’ The line just quoted demonstrates a more immediate characteristic of Gurney’s writing, his idiosyncratic use of syntax in which adverbs, nouns and adjectives often exchange roles. This quality is coupled with a use of rhythm that both loosens and extends traditional metrical forms. Some have seen this as native Gloucestershire dialect, but it is far more than a naivety of technique. Comparison with the versification of Gerard Manley Hopkins is not out of place: Gurney could not have read any of Hopkins’s poems, as they were not published until 1918, but the parallel may help to illuminate his poetry. These qualities may be seen in ‘Maisemore’. Its opening stanzas are almost a parody of Housman in their strict metrical structure, as well as their tone of future sadness divined within transient joy: ‘O when we swung through Maisemore,/ The Maisemore people cheered’. After suggesting itself as a poem of regret that parallels the French village with a sight of home, and therefore to be

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remembered in battle with similar longing, the poem then moves to something quite different from Houseman’s classical regularity: When the darkness downward hovers Making trees like German shadows, How our souls fly homing, homing Times and times to Maisemore meadows The shift of rhythm, moving to something almost but not quite that of a ballad, is doubly displacing, especially when combined with the near-rhymes of ‘shadows’ and ‘meadows’. The idea of Maisemore being a new home is subtly reinforced by the allusion to ‘Maisemore meadows’, both erasing and emphasising the distance from the ‘Severn meadows’ that are named in several poems from the war years, adding another level of ambivalence to the reader familiar with Gurney’s other poems. The displacement from his own landscape is matched elsewhere in the writing by an isolation from the absurd structures, social and military, into which he was thrust by the war, and reveal his poetry as concerned not only with feelings for nature and his comrades – especially, as will later become clear, those who have died – but as a statement of the individual astray within the psychological mechanisms of warfare. In ‘The silent one’ (online hyperlink) this is emphasised by the contrast between the ‘finicky accent’ and ridiculous diction of the officer who asks him to crawl through a hole in the barbed wire and the ‘Infinite lovely chatter of Bucks accent’ of the dead man of the title. That there is no conclusion to the episode, least of all a final, acidulous line of the kind often used by Owen and Sassoon, again reveals Gurney’s individuality – and perhaps also suggests the poem as representing a kind of Modernism in its narrative incompleteness. Gurney’s address to the loss of companions takes different forms in other poems, but always in a manner quite different from the anger of Sassoon or Owen. Some of the poems talk of the dead being reborn through the beauty of the landscape, a notion that became almost an everyday consolation for soldiers, especially when fields where men were buried burst into spring wildflowers – here it is worth remembering that the phrase ‘pushing up the daisies’ was a coinage for death made during the war, whereas before it the usual expression was ‘under the daisies’. ‘Eternal treasure’ and ‘Fire in the Dusk’ both explore this regeneration, the latter with particular, and individual, force: ‘all your wandering grace shall not be lost/ To earth’. Later, the poem asserts that the dust of the dead is ‘Such dust as makes/ Blue radiance of March in hidden brakes’.

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In some of the poems, an intense tone of mourning combines a sense of the physical beauty of the dead comrade with respect for his identity and a mood of acute desolation. This goes beyond the homoeroticism seen in some trench poems, or as an undertone in some of Owen’s imagery: the early twenty-first century has perhaps too easily categorised love between men as simple homosexuality, and the degree of friendship felt by Gurney is something much more complex, while not necessarily excluding an erotic level. This quality is shown most fully in ‘To his love’. Personal loss is located within a moment of remembered experience within a Gloucestershire landscape and a presentation of event in both psychological and physical terms. The lingering idea of nobility of death in battle is qualified by the occasional irregularity of rhythm and idiosyncracy of syntax, which adds an uncertainty and contributes to the poem’s gradual failure of control. The opening lines, ‘He’s gone, and all our plans/ Are useless indeed’, and the following references to the walks not taken in the Cotswolds, are shocking because they adopt a tone far more familiar in a woman talking about a dead lover; but little of this seems to come from a realisation of same-sex intimacy. The lines that follow describe the litheness of the lost man’s body, leading to the concluding reference to colours in a manner that achieves its force through resonance made greater by imprecision. The injunction ‘cover him over with violets of pride/ Purple from Severn side’ rises to barely controlled grief in the final ‘Hide that red wet/ Thing I must somehow forget’. The purple suggests the dignity of mourning, the flowers hint at rebirth through nature; but this collapses in the last outcry, in which the earlier ‘body that was so quick’ is now a terrible ‘red wet/Thing’. In its statement of the immediacy of bereavement, the attempts to find consolation in poetic structure and imagery, and the final collapse, this is a poem with very few equals. 4.2 Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967) Wound for red wound I burn to smite their wrongs; And there is absolution in my songs. These lines form the conclusion of ‘The Poet as Hero’, a poem that first appeared in the Cambridge Magazine of 2 December 1916, and give precise statement to one of the main propellants of Sassoon’s poetry. They reveal his desire to avenge the sufferings of the soldiers, and in this to find justification for his writing. Coming at the end of a poem that asserts that ‘now I’ve said good-bye to Galahad’, it does not so much

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mark a turning point in the poet’s career from writing Arthurian romances about the war to voicing anger at needless anguish as reveal the rejection of a genre of poetry familiar from early in the war, and still current when the lines were printed – a declaration of the writer’s position with regard both to the war and to poetic purpose. Sassoon’s poetry is often read in conjunction with his trilogy of fictionalised autobiography The Memoirs of George Sherston, comprising Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1929), Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherston’s Progress (1936). It is easy to see the titles of the volumes as representative of the change in his attitude to the war, although it should be remembered that all three were written after the events they describe and so make their own contribution to the movement from innocence and faith to disillusionment and anger that has come to dominate the mythic history of the war. In Sassoon’s case, however, the pattern has no little validity. He was born into a wealthy aristocratic family, brought up by his mother and attended Marlborough and Clare College, Cambridge, which he left without a degree before becoming a country gentleman, spending his time in hunting, sports and writing poems that were published at his own expense. These reveal a complete lack of awareness of any social conditions beyond his own immediate environment, and his first wartime volume, The Old Huntsman (1915) reveals a similar concern only for the modified pastoralism of the Georgians. ‘Absolution’, probably Sassoon’s first poem from the trenches, asserts ‘War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise’, following a spiritual path familiar from many popular writings from the war’s earliest months and common in Sassoon’s earlier war poetry. This is soon displaced by what for many readers is the most characteristic quality of his poetry, its tone of irony, bitterness and anger, directed at the military commanders, home patriots, and any others who promulgated or facilitated the continuation of the war. Often this is achieved through the simple structural device of recording an incident or describing a character and then viciously undermining it in a final couplet. Most direct in this form is ‘The General’, a poem of only seven lines which, after describing the bluff general’s discussions with soldiers on parade, ends ‘But he did for them both by his plan of attack’. ‘Glory of women’ attacks those who think of war in terms of chivalric heroism and love the soldiers when they are ‘wounded in a mentionable place’, ending with the stark juxtaposition of a ‘German mother’ at home and her son dead in battle, his face ‘trodden deeper in the mire’. The poem has been criticised as misogynist, since it attributes to all women a narrow and insensitive view of warfare held by only some, and also shared by many men. But it deserves better than such a dismissal: the poem is significant for two reasons.

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It attacks the euphemistic language of war reporting, especially the use of the word ‘retire’ to refer to a retreat of British soldiers ‘When hell’s last horror breaks them’. More strikingly, it brings together both British and German women as being simultaneously ignorant of the war and urging its continuation, an unusual parallel to the feeling common among many in the forces that the German soldiers were as much victims of the war as they were themselves. Sassoon himself claimed that his poetry came largely from his visual imagination, and certainly many of his poems convey powerful re-creations of the physical circumstances of war. Yet the visual is always filtered through a very strong sensory awareness. Often, as suggested earlier, this is then redefined by a purposeful irony. In the poems of satirical intensity so far discussed, what is most forceful, alongside their bitterness of tone, is the simplicity of the diction in the effort to channel a response to what is recorded. ‘Blind’, ‘terrible’, ‘horror’, ‘dirt’, ‘hell’, ‘blood’ – these are words common in Sassoon’s poetry that are not only shockingly new in poetry about war, but which have subsequently become part of the litany of popular history and cultural constructions of the war. In this, using a language that is neither traditionally poetic nor a parody of the colloquial diction of soldiers, Sassoon achieves some of his most incisive effects. In ‘Lamentations’, for example, such language combines with the swift ironic turn at the end of the poem. Rejecting the large claims of the earlier poems it moves directly into a single event in its first line ‘I found him in the guardroom at the Base’, establishing the setting both by its easy use of military language and by its compressed establishment of character and location. It also establishes a division between the speaking ‘I’ and the subject ‘him’ that will be the pivot of the poem’s later reversal. What follows is a harrowing account of the soldier’s despair: distraught at his brother’s death, he is seen only in terms of his suffering: it is not he, but ‘his rampant grief ‘ that ‘Moaned, sobbed, shouted’ while he is ‘kneeling/Halfnaked on the floor’. The division between speaker and subject is precisely identified, the former revealed as another version of ‘The General’, in language that slides back into the empty abstractions of the recruiting campaign: ‘In my belief/Such men have lost all patriotic feeling’. The effortless use of the language of the trenches within a simple rhyme-scheme that gives structure to a single stanza of predominantly run-on lines in a rhythm of simple observation, with the final satirical shift, makes the poem appear much simpler than it is, and obscures both its subtle craftsmanship and the distance that Sassoon’s poetry has travelled from ‘Absolution’. In 1917 Sassoon was invalided out of France. Recovering in England, with the aid of the philosopher Bertrand Russell he wrote a statement against the war and refused

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to return to the fighting. Avoiding court-martial, he was sent to Craiglockhart Hospital near Edinburgh, where Dr W. H. R. Rivers was undertaking pioneering work for neurasthenia or shell-shock. While there, he met Wilfred Owen, significantly influencing the younger man’s poetic style, and perhaps also his whole attitude to the war. Sassoon decided that he would go back to the war, not through patriotic sentiment but from a sense of duty to his troops. It is this sense of belonging to the men for whom both poets, as young officers, were responsible – with terrible paradox, both for their safety and for their deaths – that drove both to return to the war after being wounded, and produced much of their finest later poetry. In Sassoon’s case, this was apparent in his next collection, Counter-Attack (1918). Once again, the title prefigures much of the force of the volume. In appropriating a military term, it suggests that the poems themselves are a virulent rejection of the force of war itself, a counter-attack against its rhetoric and actualities. The poem from which the volume takes its title reflects this, and shows Sassoon as capable of far more than the abrupt, sarcastic reversals of tone and meaning of ‘The General’, ‘Lamentations’ and other poems. What is striking here, as in many of the poems about the war that he continued to write long after the Armistice, is the uncertainty of voice. Around half of the war poems contain passages within speech marks, giving a doubleness to the voices that makes their ultimate viewpoint uncertain. From a psychoanalytic standpoint, this may well be seen to reflect Sassoon’s agonised awareness of his own dual position with regard to the fighting men. Here, too, another element is important: the homosexuality which greatly intensified his awareness of the sufferings of the men in his command, the maiming and destruction of young men who, in other circumstances, might well have been his lovers. ‘Counter-attack’ begins with what seems a factual account of a battle, making use of military diction –‘objective’, ‘bombers’, ‘Lewis guns’ – that is then radically undermined by the diction of squalor and suffering in the second paragraph, developing at far greater length and intensity the antithesis seen earlier in ‘Glory of Women’ and other short poems. The second six lines of the poem are a catalogue of indignity and decay which, after the first reference to the trench as ‘rotten with dead’, refers only to body parts, not even complete corpses. From the military diction of the opening and the horrific chronicle of dismemberment the tone then swerves again, in a modified version of the abrupt changes of the shorter poems. Here, the change is to the gentler irony of the language of the troops, in its reference to ‘the jolly old rain’. Diction shifts again in the next section, to the thoughts of ‘A yawning soldier’, before this is itself dispelled by the actual words on the officer ordering ‘Fire-step … counter-attack.’

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The final section moves within several kinds of dissolution, in which confusion of event is matched by a gradual collapse of voice and syntax. It is uncertain whether the outcry ‘O Christ, they’re coming at us!’ comes from the ‘yawning soldier’ or is something overheard in the battle; the three ellipses within two lines reveal the inability of language to keep pace with event. Language itself then fails: the soldier can only ‘grunt and wriggle’ and is ‘Lost in a confusion of yells and groans’ before his death, drowning in the flooded trench, a long way from the aseptic, pure death of the hero in ‘Absolution.’ The poem ends with another ironic shift of diction: ‘The counter-attack had failed’. ‘Counter-attack’ manipulates uncertainty of speaker and location within a narrative that is at once highly naturalistic, unidentified in historical terms and symbolic of the larger futility of a war in which hundreds and eventually thousands of lives were expended in the rhythm of offensive and counter-attack presented in the poem. In this, it is again partly responsible for the perpetuation of one of the most insistent popular constructions of the war; and, in this way, it forms its own counter-attack against the grand strategies of military historians and propagandists. Because of their use of an immediate, forthright diction, and because of their irony of tone and structure that is directed to readers accustomed to the mythic constructions of the war and its rhetoric for which again Sassoon’s poetry is itself partly responsible, it is easy to consider these poems, and the many others that in technique and stance they represent, as far simpler than the more self-consciously poetic writings of some of his contemporaries. To see them in this way would be to simplify, and to overlook both their careful construction and their innovation in language and effect. 4.3 Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) Owen is one of a small number of English poets who attended neither a public school nor a university, and his Shropshire upbringing in a family that was clearly middle class is perhaps significant in that it allowed him to feel a greater sense of belonging with the men it was his duty to lead in battle. Sassoon, as has been made clear, felt it his duty to return to the fighting not to obey the orders of the high command but to avoid betraying his private soldiers; Owen’s sense of duty also makes itself apparent in the desire, stated in many of his letters, to write poetry that was genuinely accessible to a wider range of readers. Owen’s social exclusion is reflected in a duality present in his work, which from his early writings before the war he wanted to be

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seen as part of a tradition of English poetry, yet also, especially in the later poems, felt that he must employ as a political instrument against the war and, by implication, the social system that had ensured its continuation and with all the suffering that followed. These impulses were all strengthened by his meeting Siegfried Sassoon at Craiglockhart, but the relationship between them is not so much one of direct influence as one of facilitation, the more experienced poet helping to release and focus elements in the younger man’s writing that, by 1917, were already present. The ‘Preface’ to the collection of poems on which Owen was working shortly before his death, but was not published until 1920 (with an introduction by Sassoon), makes clear this contradiction between Owen’s anxiety to inform and his concern for poetry as an aesthetic object. Claiming that ‘Above all I am not concerned with Poetry’, it nevertheless mentions the word three times within fourteen lines, and the word ‘Poet’ twice. It begins by saying that English poetry is ‘not yet fit’ to talk of heroes, and concerns itself with the role of ‘true poets’ to ‘warn’ and ‘be truthful’. It is perhaps the most direct engagement with the paradox of war poetry, addressing without solving the question of whether the poetry or the war is paramount. Within Owen’s poems themselves, the attempt to reconcile these opposites is repeatedly apparent, in the adoption and adaptation of traditional forms that will both instil a new vigour to exhausted convention and provide a form of utterance that is worthy of the suffering that he saw all around him, most particularly in the young men over whom he was placed in authority. In Wilfred Owen’s Voices, Douglas Kerr addresses the issue of Owen’s displacement and achievement by finding in his poetry a conflict between a range of voices, among them those of the church, the daily rituals of the army, the inherited tradition of English poetry, especially that of Keats, and the daily round of middle-class family interaction. However it is expressed, this tension is a key element within the poetry, and a major determinant in its success in inscribing the compound contradictions of wartime experience. The technical feature by which Owen is best known is that of para-rhyme or consonantal rhyme. In this device, words at the end of successive lines are drawn together by sharing not the vowel, as in a conventional rhyme, but the consonants that frame them. The underlying effect of the technique is always to give a sense of incompletion, in which the expectation of rhyme is never quite fulfilled. As a formal statement of the psychological displacement of warfare this has few parallels in the poetry of the time: it is also a development that both continues and rejects formal qualities in earlier verse, offering itself both as an innovation and a meta-poetical foregrounding of the very idea of poetic form.

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This has special force when it is added to another formal structure which recurs in Owen’s writing, the sonnet. In the years before the war, when his concern to become a poet was insistent, he wrote large numbers of sonnets as exercises. The first chapter of this book argued that the sonnet became a coded form for love poems between men, and this is particularly important with regard to Owen who, as recent studies have emphasised, had strong homosexual inclinations but strove to suppress them. The desire to enrich and extend the poetic tradition, coupled with outrage at the suffering of the troops, the conflicting drives to release and suppress his sexuality, and above all the striving to write in a language both that the soldiers would understand and that would serve to ‘warn’ those at home, all unite in a fusion of emotion and utterance that gives Owen’s poetry its characteristic complexity. ‘Futility’ shows this clearly in an early form. Like almost all of Owen’s poems, and indeed like those of most later writers of war poetry, it moves from a single incident to a bitter statement of anger at the war and its causes, locating this within a larger frame that suggests a rejection of religion, demonstrating the influence of the church’s voice and its teaching that has been so drastically undermined by war. Adopting some elements of pre-war nature poetry in its opening reference to ‘fields unsown’, it moves quickly away from any simple Georgianism by the reference to ‘this snow’, a progression to winter that denies the traditional sense of seasonal growth . While it leads towards the expectation of a conclusion concerned with renewal through the land in a reference to ‘the kind old sun’, this is soon dispelled in the second stanza. The close appreciation of the torn body that is perhaps heightened by a sexual awareness – ‘limbs, so dear-achieved’ – is stated in lines whose structure almost collapses beneath the weight of grief, before the final bitter outburst against the purpose of life in the last two lines. The unfulfilment of the ‘clay’ is implicit within the poem’s rhyme scheme, the pararhymes ‘sun/unsown’, ‘once/France’ leading to the final incompleteness of ‘tall/toil/at all’. Whether or not the reader is consciously aware of this is immaterial: the structural incompleteness is there, and provides another level of deferral and unfulfilment. The sonnet ‘Anthem for doomed youth’ is probably the most direct inscription of these elements of dislocation. The language of the church dominates the poem’s scheme of imagery, every aspect of the deaths of the soldiers in battle being ironically compared with an element of the funeral service, most specifically the catholic mass for the dead. The ‘Anthem’ of the title refers to a short piece of choral music, not a part of the ‘ordinary’ or the set liturgy, often reflecting the specific nature of the individual service, in this case a mass for the dead soldiers. The antithesis of the title

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–‘ Anthem’ and ‘doomed youth’ – thus establishes the nature of the imagery and the irony that will be present throughout the poem. The word ‘Anthem’ may also have overtones of a national anthem, revealing the link between church and state seen in military rituals such as services of prayer or blessing before battle. As the poem progresses the disjunctions between church mourning and death in battle are listed with an anger and bitterness that is apparent from the tone and sound of the opening lines – ‘cattle’ and ‘battle’ anticipating the third line, that both presents the sounds of gunfire and continues the tone of violent protest, reaching a climax of anger when the gunfire is seen as the dying men’s ‘orisons’ or prayers. The second quatrain, or four-line unit, continues the same pattern of imagery by comparing the shells to the choirs of a funeral service, but moves slowly away from the violent outburst of the opening to the much gentler statement of loss in the eighth line, which also broadens the imagery by including mourning rituals from outside the church. That this refers to the counties of southern England, the ‘shires’ that are the setting of so much Georgian and earlier poetry, shows Owen’s careful redefinition of elements of this earlier tradition; that the ‘bugles’, or military trumpet-calls played at military funerals, are seen as calls that are unanswered, is emphasised by the break between the octave and sestet, the two parts of the sonnet. It is as if the bugle-calls hang in the silence of the space between the two parts of the poem. The sestet continues the parallels, but in a far calmer tone that suggests the bleakness of mourning in ‘the pallor of girls’ brows’; the ‘drawing down of blinds’, referring to the custom of closing the curtains in a house of mourning, is extended as a metaphor of the ending of each day as a generalised statement of suffering. The poem’s functioning through the parallel between a funeral at home and the slaughter of the soldiers in the trenches is located within a further formal device, the use of the sonnet form. Since this was the main form used from the mid sixteenthcentury onwards for a love poem, its use here is one that represents several levels of irony. It first reveals the complete rejection of the traditional concerns of poetry – what Rupert Brooke had earlier rejected as ‘All the little emptiness of love’. More powerfully, when Owen’s situation is recalled, it presents itself as a love poem addressed to the dead men in his command, in which homoeroticism is subsumed into a grief that begins as extreme, bitter anger and moves towards a desolate calm. In making such use of the sonnet, one of the oldest forms of English poetry, the poem both subverts and continues tradition; and in this Owen’s uneasy complicity with earlier ideas and structures of poetry, society and personal relationships is given powerful and disturbing form. The poem also engages with earlier writing in another

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way: in refusing to offer consolation through the idea of death for a cause, as proof of the nobility of youth, or as a move towards a rebirth through nature, it addresses and rejects the large number of earlier poems, some discussed in Chapter 1, that offer consolation of this kind. There is no consolation, and the only progress is that towards the numbness of the bereaved. ‘Dulce et decorum est’ is probably Owen’s best-known poem, if not the bestknown of all poems from the war. This is perhaps the result of its combination of a horrifyingly vivid scene of action from the fighting, made more awful by the narrator’s sense of guilt and the lack of resolution or sense of purpose, and a virulent attack on those who seek to glorify such events. Yet it is also extremely effective in the way that it modifies earlier poetic structures, and in this way contributes to the debate about the value and validity of poetry as a response to warfare that had been implicit in writing from the beginning of the war and is insistent in its critical assessment. From the outset, it is clear that the poem is concerned with the daily actualities of warfare as experienced by the soldiers rather than with its abstract aims or philosophical issues. The opening reveals its blend of convention and innovation, moving from the near-cliché of ‘coughing like hags’ and the self-consciously poetic inversion of the fourth line to the account of the troops who ‘limped on, blood-shod’, combining the concentration of an Imagist poem with a statement of appalling literal detail (for Imagism, go to www.poets.org). The second section continues the detail, showing the speaker watching a man drowning in the fumes of poison gas through the ‘misty panes and thick green light’ – the glass lenses of the gas-mask, and the cloud of phosgene. What is important here is not simply the event, horrific though it is, but the effect it has on the narrator’s memory and the sense of helplessness it evokes. The final section of the poem moves slowly away, through the undignified horror of the disposal of the body, and the detail of the ‘froth-corrupted lungs’, to a forceful rejection of the claim that it is ‘sweet and fitting to die for one’s country’, as the Latin final line claims. The poem progresses with a controlled argument, by the repetition of conditional clauses – ‘If … If’ – to reveal the falsity of this view, at the same time revealing the immense distance between those who experience such waste of life and those who preach about nobility of conflict. The rejection of the final lines is more than a refusal to accept a view of war popular among some commentators: it is also a rejection of a classical ideal, the line coming from the Roman poet Horace (Odes, III.ii.13), of the public school classical education, and of the military system, since the line was inscribed over the chapel of the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. That Horace’s line may have been ironic in its original setting is in a sense immaterial: it

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was certainly not read as such in this new context. Owen’s passionate rejection of this military ideology is given explicit focus, and the ‘friend’ more precisely identified, by the presence in one of the draft versions in the British Museum of a line just after the title: ‘To Jessie Pope etc.’ When the poem is examined in more detail, its structure has much to reveal. The use of the word ‘we’ in the third line reveals that the speaker is one of the troops on the march, removing the element of distance often present in war poems between the officer-class speaker and the ordinary soldiers. The distance is present in many of Owen’s poems, in particular ‘S.I.W’ and ‘Spring Offensive’, but here it is annulled, showing the writer’s sense of shared suffering. Later in the poem, however, the distance takes an insistent physical form, when the speaker cannot help the soldier dying from the effects of gas. The sense of helplessness that he suffers also suggests the responsibility of the officer felt by both Owen and Sassoon, always mingled with guilt that it was they who were in one sense responsible for the suffering of the men. The duty towards the men, and the guilt that it engenders, is evident as strongly here as in any of Sassoon’s poems. Psychoanalytic readings of the poem would also suggest a more personal root for the guilt implied in the poem’s central lines, in that they may symbolise a homosexual encounter hinted at in Owen’s early writing. Such readings point to the ‘ecstasy of fumbling’ as containing an erotic charge. The whole thus brings together the officer’s guilt at the sufferings of his men and at the intensity of his own sexual drives. This may or may not be a valid reading of the poem, and the sexuality of the writer would in many circumstances be irrelevant, were it not for the fact that here it adds a very specific kind of tenderness and compassion for the suffering of the young men, and the decay of their bodies, seen here as in ‘Anthem for doomed youth’. It is also striking that ‘Dulce et decorum est’ can be read as one extended sonnet, formed of two shorter sonnet units. Seen thus, the poem follows a pattern common in renaissance sonnets, beginning with a detailed event, changing in a ‘volta’ or turn here represented by the couplet on the dying soldier and then moving to a larger moral reflection before ending with what appears to the reader as a final rhyming couplet in which ‘glory’ is ironically rhymed with ‘mori’. It is in this structural innovation that Owen’s poetry most completely questions the validity of traditional structures in the face of war, using them with a fierce irony and at the same time adopting the coded significance of the sonnet as a same-sex love lyric, transforming homosexual desire into a deep compassion for the men whom the writer, as officer, has life-and-death responsibility.

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Other poems of Owen make similar explorations of tradition. ‘Hospital barge at Cérisy’ alludes to Tennyson’s ‘Passing of Arthur’, through its reference equating the departure of wounded soldiers with the death of the ancient British hero, yet bringing with it the doubt and foreboding of the earlier poet’s version of the legend. ‘Strange Meeting’, modelled on Keats’s unfinished epic poem ‘Hyperion’, again echoes Tennyson, the line ‘lifting distressful hands as if to bless’ recalling the ‘lame hands’ mentioned in one of the bleakest lyrics of In Memoriam A. H. H., a poem concerned with the death of a dear friend that, when offered in this new setting, intensifies the companionship between soldiers of opposing armies made clear in the line ‘I am the enemy you killed, my friend’, once more to reveal the appalling waste of the loss of war on both sides. In many of the poems, too, aspects of conventional nature-poetry are transformed. In ‘Spring offensive’ the simple grace of the landscape before battle is contrasted with the ‘hot blast and fury of hell’s upsurge’, although the religious consolation with which it is coupled in earlier poems, such as Grenfell’s ‘Into Battle’ is undermined by the strangely disowned assertion ‘Some say God caught them even before they fell’. Religion itself is addressed elsewhere, in ‘The parable of the Old Man and the Young’ where the story of Abraham sacrificing the ram instead of his son Isaac is brutally reversed, in a rejection perhaps foreshadowed in Graves’s Goliath and David. Owen’s poetry is remarkable for its innovation within the frame of earlier forms, facilitating as it does statements of anger alongside assertions of tenderness and the precious nature of the sensuous individual, voicing compassion within its most virulent outbursts. The desire to make accessible his warnings about war, in language that offers the reader a troubled perplexity in relating it to earlier poetry, and the nature of poetry itself, shows at its most complete the paradox of ‘war poetry’, as well as revealing Owen’s as one of the most mature, individual voices of his generation. 4.4 Edward Thomas (1878–1917) Since Edward Thomas began writing poetry in the final months of 1914, he is uniquely a ‘war poet’; but since few of his poems explicitly address the war, he is least deserving of the name. Before enlisting he earned his living as a writer, producing books himself at the rate of several a year, including historical biographies, short stories and studies of the English countryside. He was also a prolific reviewer, especially of poetry, so that his knowledge of English poetry in the century’s first years was probably unequalled. A meeting with the American poet Robert Frost led to the suggestion

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that he should write poetry himself, with the publication of Poems under the pseudonym of ‘Edward Eastaway’ in 1917 and Last Poems appearing posthumously, under his own name, the next year. Although Thomas knew many of the Georgian poets and was concerned in much of his prose writing with the nature of English identity, it is reductive to see his writing as yet another version of rural nostalgia. Instead, it is concerned with extending the exchange between landscape and feeling that has been fundamental to English poetry at least since Wordsworth. Most particularly, his poetry addresses two related impossibilities: achieving unity with the natural world, and stating this in words. This gives his finest poems an intellectual complexity of a very specific kind, as well as a questioning about the use of language that, contrary to what might be expected, accords effortlessly with his use of imagery of the natural world. These qualities are matched by a metrical sense that adapts conversational immediacy to a rhythm of thought and idea already finely honed in Thomas’s prose writing, in poems of a great variety of forms almost all of which are quite original yet reflect the movements and patterns of a language that to the writer is deeply familiar yet has always the freshness and distance of something never quite fully understood. In consequence it is a subject of respect, as the poem ‘Words’ makes clear. Some of the few poems more directly concerned with the war respond to it in a manner superficially resembling other writing that relates it to the English landscape. ‘This is no case of petty right and wrong’ is a simple statement of war aims, rejecting ‘something that historians/ Can rake out of the ashes’ and also contrasting ‘my hate for one fat patriot’ with a love of England stated through references to landscape and a traditional way of life that are assumed rather than fully stated. ‘The Owl’ presents a comparison between the speaker in England and ‘Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice’ denied the comfort of his rest, that are brought to mind by the cry of an owl that is ‘Shaken out long and clear upon the hill’. Here it is as if the elision of French and English landscapes seen in the poetry of Edmund Blunden and others is both reversed and intensified. Instead of seeing a vision of England in a French setting, the poem moves in the opposite direction; and instead of using this to state homesickness or patriotic devotion, it makes a direct statement of sympathy for suffering made more powerful by the lack of explication. Whereas Owen and Sassoon work through the use of very specific circumstances, Thomas creates involvement through understatement and suggestion, given added weight by the measured movement of his poetry. These qualities are seen in several short poems that address the war obliquely, through the filter of experiences of the natural world in England. ‘In Memoriam

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[Easter 1915]’ is a four-line meditation on woodland flowers and the men who should gather them but never will, without either glorifying or voicing anger at their deaths. This juxtaposition of natural and human cycles continues in ‘Fifty faggots’. This compares the duration of the war with bundles of firewood and the birds that will nest in them, but it reaches further than most nature poems in stressing that the speaker can ‘no more foresee or more control’ the war’s extent than the nesting birds. There is also a more complex exploration of time, in the assertion that the birds assume that their nests will remain ‘Whatever is for ever to a bird’. These elements take the poem from what appears to be a simple elegy to something much deeper, a metaphysical contemplation on the relation between human and natural time, with the war located at some distance within this perspective. Ideas of dissolution are apparent in other poems. ‘Tall Nettles’ talks of the dust on nettles which is ‘never lost/ Except to prove the sweetness of a shower’. What is apparently an immediate response to the changing sensations in experience of the natural world assumes the significance of a willingness to accept loss and death when seen within the larger movement of Thomas’s poetry, giving the poem a far greater contemplative breadth. This sense of wilful loss is developed in a small number of poems written in the last months of the poet’s life that mark his most complete and most characteristic achievement. Earlier, in ‘The Glory’, Thomas gives an intensely detailed account not of the experience of a fine morning, and then in the final line collapses this with ‘I cannot bite the day to the core.’ This concern with the complex and inexplicable relation between language, objects and ideas recurs increasingly in the poetry, first being evident in ‘Old Man’. A poem ostensibly about the names given to flowers and vegetation by countrymen soon reveals its metaphysical edge in the lines ‘the names/ Half decorate, half perplex, the thing it is’. The motif is given fullest and most complex expression in the latest poems, where the desire for annulment of self within experience becomes a simple yearning for loss of self, located within language that inscribes its own, parallel inadequacy and incompleteness. ‘As the team’s head brass’ takes the form of a fractured dialogue between an observer – a figure frequent in Thomas’s poetry, again reflecting the speaker’s isolation from landscape and event – and a man ploughing a field. The conversation is fractured by the man’s movement up and down the field, and framed by the disappearance and return of a pair of lovers in a nearby wood. These give the poem a rhythm suggestive of an order produced by the unity of humanity and nature, but that this has been destroyed by the war is made clear by the fact that the man ploughs alone, his companion killed in France ‘ the very night of the blizzard’ which brought down the

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elm tree on which the speaker sits. The war has broken the unity of rhythm, and the poem can offer no resolution for this. In part, the poem is a development of Thomas Hardy’s ‘In time of “The Breaking of Nations”’, which records another pair of lovers retreating into a wood. Hardy sees this as an assertion of the unbreakable continuity of natural rhythms in human drives: ‘this will go onward the same/ Though dynasties pass’. There is no such optimism in the Thomas poem, and instead the reader is left with a compound sense of separation between the speaker, the lovers and the ploughman, the last incised into the poem’s structure because of the broken nature of the conversation, with no purpose or consolation offered even within the ploughman’s claim ‘If we could see all all might seem good’. Though the poem is often seen as a statement of regret at the passing of old ways of rural life, it is far more subtle, far more troubling, asserting the impossibility of understanding the patterns of contemporary life and relating them to the rhythms of the natural world. ‘Blenheim Oranges’ refers in its title to a variety of apple, which now ‘Fall grubby from the trees’ – grubby in the sense of being infested with grubs – while the speaker looks on and meditates on the passage of time as embodied in this and in the decaying fabric of ‘the old house’. The only parallel that is offered is in the claim ‘I am something like that;/ Only I am not dead’, and the poem, for all its subtle balancing between natural, built and human decay, has nothing to offer in explicit commentary or explanation. The culmination of the failure of poetic metaphor implied here comes in ‘Lights out’, where the speaker, having ‘come to the borders of sleep’, willingly assents to the loss of self. There is no mention of the war: if this is a war poem at all, it is in the psychological and spiritual response to an apparent loss of all purpose, although its significance goes beyond any sense of immediate circumstance to provoke this. In these poems Thomas presents meditations on nature, humankind and language that extend ideas traditional in English poetry into an arena of metaphysical and linguistic contemplation that, in its failure to provide any explicit answers, is in itself consolatory. Many of the earliest poems of the war speak of a willing loss of self in a glorious sacrifice that is itself a final proof of manhood: the last poems of Edward Thomas present a willing self-annihilation that rejects any nationalistic fervour, replacing it with a deep love of country, beyond words and beyond the poet’s own understanding. The distance between the two forms is immense, and reveals Thomas as a poet of great intellectual sophistication.

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4.5 Other cultures, other nations 4.5.1 Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) Rosenberg represents a tradition quite different from that which might seem the predominant one in English poetry of the war years. Born in Bristol into a Jewish family of refugees from Russian anti-Semitism, and moving at the age of seven to the East End of London, he drew on a cultural tradition that was Hebraic rather than Christian, and urban rather than rural. The longest piece of writing, published at his own expense in 1916, was Moses, a reworking of the Judaeo-Christian myth of the leader in exile in Egypt, which reflects his own sense of exclusion and his struggle to find a place for himself in terms as much social as religious. The particular inflection this gives to the sense of displacement felt by all of the poets, and indeed most of the soldiers, is apparent within all his poetry. Rosenberg was also a painter, studying at the Slade School where his contemporaries included Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler and C. R. W. Nevinson, and he thought of himself more as a visual artist. His progress through the war is recorded in a series of self-portraits, the last of which is executed in chalk on a fragment of wrapping paper taken from a parcel to the trenches. The search for identity is apparent in the range of visual styles these represent, as well as in the introspection the recurrence of the subject suggests: a related movement may perhaps be discerned in his poems. ‘On receiving News of the War’, written while he was visiting his sister in South Africa, locates the idea of war as a renewal and reinvigoration felt also by Brooke and Grenfell within a sense of a return from exile for the Jewish people, culminating in the sense of a purification through suffering in the final stanza: O! ancient crimson curse! Corrode, consume. Give back this universe Its pristine bloom. In ‘August 1914’, this has moved towards the mature tone of his later verse, modifying the ruralism of English tradition into something tougher in imagery and thought: Iron are our lives Molten right through our youth. A burnt space through ripe fields A fair mouth’s broken tooth

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In its references to large, elemental qualities – the reference to ‘pristine bloom’, the description of life as ‘iron’, the burning of fields – and the focus on individual suffering – the ‘broken tooth’ – these poems echo the language and movement of Hebrew testament and myth. These elements are more fully developed in the poetic dramas The Unicorn, The Amulet and The Tower of Skulls, which again combine ideas of exile with the circumstance of war and are remarkable in their fusion of styles and subject. More immediately accessible, and perhaps more fully achieved, are a small number of poems written in the trenches that, while retaining elements of the scriptural, are concerned with the daily experiences of the soldier. ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ offers an account of trench events that combines a close focus on visual detail with a controlled distance and a sense of the universal and mythic. The alternation between immediacy, detachment and the timeless is shown in its opening lines: The darkness crumbles away – It is the same old druid time as ever. The references to a ‘queer sardonic rat’ with ‘cosmopolitan sympathies’, the ‘fine limbs, haughty athletes’ and the ‘shrieking iron and flame’ continue to suggest this complex fusion. The poem’s ending, which returns to the image of a poppy taken from the trench parapet at the poem’s opening, states the idea of physical continuity through the processes of nature before moving to an ending of throwaway nonchalance: Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins Drop, and are ever dropping; But mine in my ear is safe, Just a little white with the dust ‘Man’s veins’, not ‘men’s veins’: the difference is important, making the process universal, not something restricted to this war. It is this kind of breadth, coupled with this insouciance, that is characteristic of Rosenberg at his most effective. These poppies work metaphorically in a way markedly different from those of John MacCrae. ‘Returning, we hear the larks’ records a journey back to camp when the sound of the birds is experienced as ‘Music showering on our upturned list’ning faces’. The final stanza, with its observation that ‘Death could drop from the dark/ As easily as song’, moves towards an awareness of the strange combination of joy and death,

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locating it once more in images that draw the reader towards both the benevolent and the destructive forces of a far older frame of religion and myth. The same conjunction of specific and mythic-universal occurs in ‘Dead Man’s Dump’. The task of collecting the dead for burial is urgent and insistent, but made timeless through reference to ‘rusty stakes like sceptres old’, and to the corpses as ‘Man born of man, and born of woman’ for whom ‘earth has waited’, and it is placed in Judaeo-Christian language by the parallel between the limbers and ‘many crowns of thorns’. The poem’s core, concerned with what seems a hunger for the dead within the combat of ‘Dark Earth! Dark Heavens!’ gives way to more immediate references, to the awful detail of the ‘brains spattered on /A stretcher-bearer’s face’, completed by the narrative return to the limber and the ‘weak scream’ of a dying soldier. Throughout, there is a relation between what the poem refers to as ‘this dead with the older dead’, but in no way is this redemptive, nor is there any hint of regeneration through nature. Yet to conclude that this is simply a process without resolution would be to misread the poem: in its stress on the timelessness, and the mythic echoes that it contains, it offers, like all of Rosenberg’s poetry, a hope of continuity through its structures and allusions that its explicit sense apparently denies. 4.5.2 David Jones (1895–1974) In Parenthesis was first published in 1937, a book-length work that is part prose and part poetry. It describes the experiences of David Jones while a private soldier with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers, but in a manner that combines the events of the fighting in and around Mametz Wood with Arthurian legend, as presented in Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, and the sixth century Welsh epic poem Y Gododdin. The parallels with Rosenberg’s work are intriguing. As Rosenberg was in exile from Russia, so was Jones from Wales, being born in Brockley, Kent; he was a staunch Catholic, his faith infusing his writing as Rosenberg’s did his; Jones was a visual artist, and had studied at Camberwell Art School before the war, his later career involving watercolour and calligraphy. Most significantly, the writing of both moves towards the mythic in relating the war to other, older struggles. But there are also major differences, the main one being the nature of Jones’s language. Much of In Parenthesis resembles the tone and diction of the King James Bible, most particularly the Psalms, combined with elements taken from soldiers’ diction, and abrupt shifts of tone that are perhaps influenced by the fractured voices of Modernist poetry, especially that of T. S. Eliot. The sheer extent of the work precludes detailed commentary here, yet many of

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its central features are apparent in the most anthologised passages. There is a concern with the timeless suffering of the soldier, regeneration through the processes of nature, and the narrative progression of the two epic poems on which the work rests. In addition, it presents an account of the fighting for Mametz Wood that is remarkable in its accuracy, as Colin Hughes has pointed out in David Jones, the man who was on the field. In this way it is a further extension of the immediate within the timeless, the near with the distant, that is found in Rosenberg. In addition, the concern that it shows for individual suffering, most particularly in its stress on the closeness between individual soldiers and the natural world, both continues and transforms one of the most frequent, if various, concerns of First World War poetry, while placing it within a ritualistic frame that again offers contextualisation and consolation in response to suffering and loss. 4.5.3 Irish poetry Given the extremes of activity of Irish nationalists immediately before the war and the violence of the 1916 Easter Rising the number of Irishmen who had no ideological difficulty in fighting in the British army is initially surprising. In part, this may be explained, like the Suffragette movement’s support of the cause, by a belief that England was fighting for right and freedom, and perhaps by a more calculating awareness that duty in war would reap its reward in peace. What is striking, however, is the degree to which Irish poetry follows the conventions in theme and form of most popular writing in England. The poems of Willoughby Weaving appeared first in The Muse in Arms, and are indistinguishable from the adjacent English writings. John MacCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’ gives no hint of its national origin. The three volumes published by Frances Ledwidge adopt a Georgianism and delight in landscape that approaches that of Laurence Binyon, although in ‘The Dead Kings’ the appearance of the spirits of Pearse and MacDonagh, killed in the 1916 Dublin uprising, and the use of the old Irish poetic device of internal rhyme reconcile the conflict by seeing the war with Germany and the fight with the English colonialists as parallel aspects of a fight for liberty. The MP and economics professor Tom Kettle produced ballads and satires: ‘Paddy’, his attack on English attitudes to the Irish, is undermined by its use of the stylised Cockney ballad form made popular by Rudyard Kipling, a poet then as now associated with English imperialism, in particular the poem ‘Tommy’ that attacks attitudes to the professional soldier. The same structural fault-line is evident in the Soldier Songs (1917) of Patrick MacGill.

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The poetry of W. B. Yeats is rarely considered as war poetry, but a small number of his poems may fall under this category. ‘Easter 1916’ may be read as a war poem against the English, its litany of names of dead heroes producing a roll of honour that challenges those appearing week by week in English newspapers, and its assertion ‘A terrible beauty is born’ in some of its many, and troublesome, significances, referring perhaps to the beauty and liberation of death for a just cause and as a final assumption of manhood of a degree equivalent to that celebrated by Julian Grenfell. ‘An Irish Airman foresees his Death’ is most striking as a war poem. Its power lies in its explicit rejection not only of the cause of Irish independence but of the very concept of war aims. It is not ‘Kiltartan’s poor’ for whom the speaker fights, nor for any cause; rather, ‘A lonely impulse of delight/Drove to this tumult in the clouds’. The exultation of flight is a theme common in novels and paintings of the period, though rarely stated in poetry: in it, Yeats presents a wholly original vision of the exultant purity of death in battle, at the same time offering an alarming pre-vision of the spiritual intensity of an élite air corps that would be a major strand of fascist thinking in the 1930s. 4.5.4. Scottish poetry The poem by J. M. Denwood was cited in Chapter 2 as an example of poetry strident in its opposition to war, and one unstated aspect of this may be a Scots poet’s rejection of a war seen as essentially English. However, although Scotland was probably the scene of more dissent from the war than most of England, especially in the labour disputes in the shipyards of Glasgow, the great majority of poetry written there during the war followed the English model and broadly supported the fighting. Charles Hamilton Sorley’s poem ‘The Army of Death’ (The Muse in Arms) presents some anger at the disparity between the heroic dead and the civilians for whom they died, but not in a specifically Scottish manner, nor does it refer to the Scots fighting for English objectives. The poetry of Charles Murray and Donald Sutherland MacGill can be seen as similar to much representative English poetry in its regretful support of the war, much of it adopting what Macdonald Daly calls ‘Housmaniac, nostalgic rusticity’ (p. 84) in reference to the rather feverish regret for the loss of rural life seen in the poems of A. E. Housman. Perhaps the most extreme statement of this is seen in the poetry of John Buchan. Best known for his patriotic popular novels beginning with The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), Buchan was successively Director of Propaganda and Minister of Information. His collection Poems Scots and English (1917) perhaps

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reflects his own dual nationality in its title, and poems such as ‘The South Countrie’, ‘Home thoughts from Abroad’ directly borrow titles from earlier English writing. Written in lowland Scots dialect, the collection has poems in memory of friends dead in battle, an imitation of a soldier’s letter home, and adaptations of classical literary works, including an ode of Theocritus. That it was reprinted twice in 1917 and twice more in 1919 reveals its popularity: the Scots dialect is easily comprehensible to English readers, and the overall effect is more of a statement of regional loyalty to Westminster and its causes than of an assertion of independent nationhood. In this the collection is representative: it was not until much later that Scottish nationalism would find a major voice in the poetry of Somhairle MacGill-Eain (Sorley Maclean). Reading Irish and Scottish poetry of the war years, it is hard to see in it any specific statement of national identity or individual aims. There are, of course, significant exceptions, but they stand out more through their rarity than their ability to reflect or influence specifically national ideologies or structures. Like much poetry by women, it seems, poetry from these two nations used forms that were part of the dominant cultural ideology of the time, to express what may most conveniently, if reductively, be described as a thinly spiritualised pastoral patriotism. There is a powerful irony in this: the three groups, each colonised by the English male, adopted in a moment crucial to the definition of its own future identity, the cultural forms imposed on them by their ruling force. As Antonio Gramsci and others were later to make clear, hegemony can only be perpetuated by the complicity of the exploited, through their aesthetic structures as well as their ideologies (see http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-gram.htm#hege).

Chapter 5 Placing War Poetry 5.1 War poetry and Modernism Conventional literary history has placed war poetry rather to one side of the stylistic and conceptual changes in poetry during early the twentieth century. Perhaps because its most widely read examples reject the lapidary concentration, absence of exposition and avoidance of narrative that are the self-declared features of the Imagist poets of the years immediately before the war, the writing discussed in these pages is conventionally seen as quite different from the works most often regarded as constitutive of high Modernist poetics (a longer account of Modernist approaches can be found at http://elab.eserver.org/hfl0255.html). Certainly, the majority of the poems written during and about the war make use of traditional forms, many to voice reassurance and continuity, and this seems more to answer a need for both writers and readers in a time of immense dislocation and distress than to assert the need for poetic change. Can any poems of the war years be seen as more directly Modernist in design and stance, using the term in its more generally accepted meaning with reference to the new poetry of the 1920s? The bitterness and satire of Sassoon’s poetry certainly reflects an attitude that is modern, but in its structures it is largely traditional. Wilfred Owen’s poetry moves towards Modernism in its innovative use of pararhyme, and the precision of some of its imagery (‘blood-shod’), but ultimately moves back towards a revision of traditional forms, perhaps through a desire to be accessible to its readers. The fractured syntax of Ivor Gurney might also be seen as a kind of Modernism; and the philosophical detachment, and rejection of self and language, of the final poems of Edward Thomas might also be characterised in this way. The combined continuation and rejection of tradition that is seen at many levels in the work of these writers and occasionally of others may well be considered Modernist, or at least a reflection of a modern outlook (see Sillars, 1999). The work of David Jones perhaps comes closest to what is often regarded as canonical Modernism, with its discontinuities of voice and narrative, and a structure achieved through a patterning almost visual in form rather than inherited metrical forms or rhyme schemes, but we should remember that In Parenthesis dates from the

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late 1930s when Eliot had already established many of these diagnostic signs. T. E. Hulme, who wrote a small number of poems before the war but whose main significance was as a philosopher, produced in ‘Trenches: St Eloi’ an image that concretises the mental processes of warfare and those who direct it, recalling Eliot’s ‘streets that wind like a tedious argument’ in ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’: ‘My mind is a corridor. The minds about me are corridors.’ It is to the work of two far less well known poets that we must turn to find a sense of continuation of the work of the prewar Imagists that can be called a genuine contribution to the growth of Modernism as it is most often defined: Ford Madox Ford and Herbert Read. 5.1.1 Ford Madox Ford (1873–1939) Before the war Ford was an established novelist and literary editor, who had established the literary periodical English Review in 1908. Significantly, he had also collaborated with Joseph Conrad, later a central figure in the design of the Modernist novel, with its fractured and often imprecise narrative, on the novel Romance (1903). Ford began the war by writing books and pamphlets explaining the cause for the Government, like many other writers, but from 1915 served with the Welch Regiment, and was badly gassed. His novel The Good Soldier appeared in 1915 and, with the four novels of his ‘Tietjens Saga’ known collectively as Parade’s End (1924–8), is considered by many to be a major work of Modernism in its fragmented narrative and rejection of chronology. Ford’s poem ‘Antwerp’ (full text at http://www.bartleby.com/265/165.html) is a response to the German invasion of Belgium with which the war began. It is rare in serious poetry from the war in directly praising the gallantry of a civilian population and in recording some of the events in free verse that makes no allusions to canonical poetry; it employs neither the appeals to personified abstractions of early poetry of the war nor the bitter record of uncontextualised individual events of some of the better-known writers. In its structure, a series of separate sections followed by a short ‘Envoi’ or tailpiece, the poem recalls the form used by T. S. Eliot and other Modernists in their longer verse, and the irregular line lengths and rhythms suggest a following of thought-processes rather than an external order, in itself a rejection of the consolation offered by many poems in their use of familiar forms. That Eliot himself called it the most satisfying poem to emerge from the war supports this, although it has to be said the text is uneven in its achievement.

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The most successful part is probably section VI, an account of the crowd, ‘all black that hardly whispers aloud’, that circulates around Charing Cross railway station at midnight. The poetry is given form by the recurrence of the opening line, ‘This is Charing Cross’, and the words ‘dead’ and ‘black’, used in conjunction with the mothers and children who are ‘waiting in all the waiting-places’. Poetically, this is a reflection of the concern with the visual that has been important since the writing of the Imagists, a kind of abstraction that owes something to visual art: emotionally, it gives great power to the desolate, aimless wandering of the crowd in the great London terminus at which boat-trains arrived. In this coming together of new poetic technique and the desolation of war it is remarkably effective, not least because of the complete lack of movement that it presents in the change from ‘midnight’ to ‘past one’. This makes it not only one of the few successful Modernist poems of the war, but an important piece of writing from whatever standpoint it is approached, despite its limitation by being part of a longer poem that does not maintain its level of invention to the same standard. 5.1.2 Herbert Read (1893–1968) Read joined the Green Howards at the age of seventeen when war broke out, and published a small number of poems, and a longer text called The End of a War which includes prose and poetry from a number of separate speakers, and which was highly praised when it appeared in 1933. After the war he became an academic and critic, whose work covered both literature and visual art, and this combination is perhaps apparent in the detailed observation and vivid imaginative qualities of his writing. Some of Read’s poetry recalls that of Owen and Sassoon in its deeply ironic rejection of the attitudes of earlier poetry and a concentration on the details of suffering, but avoids their intense anger and, instead of their more traditional forms, uses free verse to convey incompleteness of experience and thought. ‘The Happy Warrior’ begins with an account of an unnamed soldier and then, in a moment of observation that also recalls the tone of Isaac Rosenberg, dispassionately relates that ‘Bloody saliva/ dribbles down his shapeless jacket’ and records without comment that he repeatedly stabs ‘a well-killed Boche’. The poem ends by quoting the first line of the poem by Wordsworth that provides the title: ‘This is the happy warrior,/ this is he...’. Technically, what gives the poem its effect is the coldness of its tone, the absence of anger or moral statement – a principle also espoused by the Imagist poets – in the presentation of an incident that in human terms is quite shocking. The quotation from

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Wordsworth’s poem is one of the earliest examples of a genuinely Modernist intertextuality, a concept developed by the critic Julia Kristeva, where the original meaning is directly rejected through the irony of its contextual framing. That the poem offers no larger comment or justification furthers its Modernist identity: it is a fragment observed without comment except for the purely formal power of its fragmented lines and the irony of its quotation. The End of a War begins with a short prose account of the final day of the fighting, which includes the discovery of a seriously wounded German soldier and the body of a girl bayoneted to death. The sections that follow are titled ‘Meditation of a Dying German Officer’, ‘Dialogue between the Body and the Soul of the Murdered Girl’ and ‘Meditation of the Waking English Officer’. In the presentation of sections seen from different viewpoints through different voices it clearly shows the influence of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922). Like it, Read’s poem avoids narrative and replaces it with a process as much emotional as logical, leading towards a conclusion that the war cannot be understood except as a work of God that is beyond human comprehension. The final paragraph concludes in lines that anticipate the mingling of terror and sacrament found in Eliot’s later ‘Little Gidding’ (1944): God is love: in his will the meek heart rejoices doubting till the final grace a dove from Heaven descends and wakes the mind in light above the light of human kind in light celestial infinite and still eternal bright In its larger form, the poem is perhaps an equivalent to the structure of myth that Eliot produces in ‘The Waste Land’, and its verse has something of the authority of mental experience composed of thought, reflection and feeling that defines much of the finest Modernist poetry. Perhaps this is a vision of apocalypse that brings with it a kind of redemption, as in the poetry of William Blake: perhaps, instead, it demonstrates the violence seen in other kinds of Modernism, for example that of W. B. Yeats and the Italian Gabriele d’Annunzio, the aesthetic attendant of Benito Mussolini. It is for the reader to decide.

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5.2 Last thoughts The simplest way to characterise the poetry of the First World War is to see it as a movement between two phases. The first contains assertions of patriotic purpose, involving the rediscovery of manhood and purpose, often in statements of unity with nature. Poems from this phase are generally stated in terms of large, abstract metaphors. The second phase consists of poems presenting narratives of individual episodes of suffering, often involving bitter anger or confusion at the scale of loss. This movement might be seen as paralleled by and reflected in a similar one from the use of traditional forms and archaic diction towards more modern structures and colloquial language. This view has some truth, but it overlooks the far greater variety of the writing, and the complex individual stances and techniques adopted by individual writers. As this chapter has suggested, some of the individual figures reflect approaches that might be seen as part of the larger movement of Modernism; as earlier chapters have made clear, many of the writers use traditional forms in a manner that reveals them as important contributors to the larger pattern of English poetry, deserving consideration as poets, not merely as war poets, however that term may be used. This book began by posing the duality implicit within the very term ‘war poetry’, implying as it does the question of whether war poetry should be approached as an aesthetic entity or as a human statement, of whatever kind, about warfare, that fulfils a diversity of psychological needs for writer and reader, combatant or bereaved. The question is of course unanswerable, but it is also insistent. Not only does it constantly remind the reader of the deep needs that war poetry addressed and continues to address: it offers itself as an extreme embodiment of the purpose of all poetry, whatever its ostensible concern. The ritualising of feeling, and its placement within a communal frame of experiences apparently individual but now revealed as universal, are at the heart of this: it is not a matter of glorification, but of understanding, and perhaps, at last, of hope.

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Ploegsteert Wood, to the south of Ypres, photographed in the later 1930s. From The Western Front Then and Now. London: Newnes, 1938

And still, O glad passer-by Of the fields of agony Lower laughter’s voice, and bare Thy head in the valley where Poppies bright and rustling wheat Are a desert to love’s feet —Elizabeth Daryush: ‘Flanders Fields’

Bibliography 1.1 Contemporary Anthologies Knight, Professor (William Angus), ed. Pro Patria et Rege: Poems on War and its Characteristic Results. London: Bennett, 1915 —— ed. Pro Patria et Rege (Second Series). London: Bennett, 1916 Osborn, E. B.,ed. The Muse in Arms. London: John Murray, 1917 1.2 Later anthologies Brophy, John and Eric Partridge, eds. The Long Trail: Soldiers’ Songs and Slang 1914–18. 1931. London: Sphere, 1969. Featherstone, Simon. War Poetry: An Introductory Reader. London: Routledge, 1995. Parsons, I. M., ed. Men who March Away: Poems of the First World War. London: Chatto and Windus 1965, repr. Hogarth Press, 1987 Reilly, Catherine, ed. Scars Upon my Heart: Women’s Poetry of the First World War. London: Virago, 1981 Silkin, Jon, ed. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979 Stallworthy, John, ed. The Oxford Book of War Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984. Taylor, Martin, ed. Lads: Love Poetry of the Trenches. London: Constable, 1989. 1.3 Critical Studies (including work on Scottish and Irish poetry) Bergonzi, Bernard. Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War. 3rd edn. Manchester: Carcanet, 1996

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Brearton, Fran. The Great War in Irish Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Caesar, Adrian. Taking it Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets: Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, Graves. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993 Daly, Macdonald. ‘Scottish Poetry and the Great War’. Scottish Literary Journal, 21.2 (1994) 79–96) Field, Frank. British and French Writers of the First World War: Comparative Studies in Cultural History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991 Haughey, Jim. The First World War in Irish Poetry. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2002. Hibberd, Dominic, ed. Poetry of the First World War: A Casebook. London: Macmillan, 1980 Lehmann, John. The English Poets of the First World War. London: Thames and Hudson, 1982 Marsland, Elizabeth A. The Nation’s Cause: Franch, English and German Poetry of the First World War. London: Routledge, 1991 Murdoch, Brian. Fighting Songs and Warring Words: Popular Lyrics of Two World Wars. London: Routledge, 1990 Silkin, Jon. Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1972. Sillars, Stuart. Structure and Dissolution in English Writing 1910–1920. London: Macmillan, 1999 1.4 Historical and contextual studies Ekstein, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. London: Bantam, 1989 Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. London: Oxford University Press, 1975 Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined. London: The Bodley Head, 1990. Sillars, Stuart. Art and Survival in First World War Britain. London: Macmillan, 1987.

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Smith, van Wyk. Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War, 1899–1902. Oxford: Clarendon, 1978. 1.5 Women’s Studies Goldman, Dorothy, Jane Gledhill and Judith Hattaway. Women Writers and the Great War. London: Twayne, 1995. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar No man’s land : the place of the woman writer in the twentieth century. 3 vols. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1988–94. Khan, Nosheen. Women’s Poetry of the First World War. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988. Montefiore, Janet. ‘“Shining Pins and Wailing Shells”: Women Poets and the Great War’. In Goldman, Dorothy, ed, Women and World War I: The Written Response, London: Macmillan, 1993. Ouditt, Sharon. Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War. London: Routledge, 1994. Tylee, Claire M. The Great War and Women’s Consciousness. London: Macmillan, 1990. 1.6 Individual Writers 1.6.1 Edmund Blunden Blunden, Edmund. The Poems of Edmund Blunden. London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1930. —— ed. Martin Taylor. Overtones of War: Poems of the First World War. London: Duckworth, 1996. Webb, Barry. Edmund Blunden: A Biography. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990 1.6.2 Ford Madox Ford Ford, Ford Madox. Selected Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, 1997

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1.6.3 Robert Graves Carter, D. N. B. Robert Graves: The Lasting Poetic Achievement. London: Macmillan, 1989 Graves, Robert, ed. Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward. Complete Poems, Volume I. Manchester: Carcanet, 1995. —— ed. Paul O’Prey. In Broken Images: Selected Letters of Robert Graves 1914– 1946. London: Hutchinson, 1982. —— ed. R. K. R. Thornton. Collected Letters. Manchester: Carcanet, 1991. 1.6.4 Ivor Gurney Gurney, Ivor, ed. P. J. Kavanagh. Collected Poems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984 —— ed. R. K. R. Thornton. Collected Letters. Manchester: Carcanet, 1991 Hurd, Michael. The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 1.6.5 David Jones Blamires, David. David Jones: Artist and Writer. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971 Hughes, Colin. David Jones, the man who was on the field: ‘In Parenthesis’ as straight reporting. Manchester: David Jones Society, 1979. 1.6.6 Wilfred Owen Bäckman, Sven. Tradition Transformed: Studies in the Poetry of Wilfred Owen. Lund Studies in English, 54. Lund: Gleerup, 1979 Hibberd, Dominic. Owen the Poet. London: Macmillan, 1986 —— Wilfred Owen: The Last Year 1917–18. London: Constable, 1992 —— Wilfred Owen: A New Biography. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 2002 Kerr, Douglas. Wilfred Owen’s Voices: Language and Community. Oxford: Clarendon, 1993 Owen, Harold. Journey from Obscurity. London: Oxford University Press, 1963–5.

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Owen, Wilfred, ed. Jon Stallworthy. Wilfred Owen: The Collected Poems and Fragments. 2 vols. London: Chatto and Windus, Hogarth Press and Oxford University Press, 1983 Owen, Wilfred, ed. Harold Owen and John Bell. Wilfred Owen: Collected Letters. London: Oxford University Press, 1967 Purkis, John. A Preface to Wilfred Owen. London: Longman, 1999 Stallworthy, Jon. Wilfred Owen: A Biography. London: Chatto and Windus and Oxford University Press, 1974 1.6.7 Herbert Read Read, Herbert. Collected Poems. London: Faber, 1946 1.6.8 Isaac Rosenberg Rosenberg, Isaac, ed. Ian Parsons. The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg, London: Chatto and Windus, 1979. Liddiard, Jean. Isaac Rosenberg: The Half-Used Life. London: Victor Gollancz, 1975. 1.6.9 Siegfried Sassoon Sassoon, Siegfried. The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, 1931. London: Faber, 1967 —— ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon. London: Faber, 1983 Egremont, Max. Siegfried Sassoon: A Life. New York: Farrar, Straus, 2005. Moeyes, Paul. Siegfried Sassoon: Scorched Glory, A Critical Study. London: Macmillan, 1997 Thorpe, Michael. Siegfried Sassoon: A Critical Study. Leiden: Universitaire Pers Leiden and London: Oxford University Press, 1966

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1.6.10 Edward Thomas Farjeon, Eleanor. Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979 Motion, Andrew. The Poetry of Edward Thomas. London: Routledge, 1980 Thomas, Edward, ed. R. George Thomas. The Collected Poems of Edward Thomas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. —— ed. Edna Longley. Poems and Last Poems. London: Collins, 1973 Thomas, George R. Edward Thomas: A Portrait. Oxford: Clarendon, 1985 Thomas, Helen. Under Storm’s Wing. London: Carcanet, 1988

Humanities Insights The following Insights are available or forthcoming at: http://www.humanities-ebooks.co.uk/catalogue History The British Empire: Pomp, Power and Postcolonialism The Holocaust: Events, Motives, Legacy Methodism and Society Southern Africa

Literature Insights (by author) Chatwin: In Patagonia Conrad: The Secret Agent Eliot, George: Silas Marner Eliot, T S: ‘The Love Song of J Alfred Prufrock’ and The Waste Land Faulkner: The Sound and the Fury Gaskell, Mary Barton Hardy: Tess of the Durbervilles Heaney: Selected Poems Hopkins: Selected Poems Hughes: Selected Poems Lawrence: The Rainbow Lawrence: Sons and Lovers Lawrence: Women in Love Morrison: Beloved Shakespeare: Hamlet Shakespeare: Henry IV Shakespeare: Richard II Shakespeare: Richard III Shakespeare: The Tempest Shelley: Frankenstein Wordsworth: Lyrical Ballads

Literature Insights (general) English Renaissance Drama: Theatre and Theatres in Shakespeare’s Time Fields of Agony: English Poetry and the First World War An Introduction to Critical Theory An Introduction to Rhetorical Terms