1 Poetry and the Cultural Memory of the First World War
âNot since the Siege of Troy has a conflict been so closely defined by the poetry that it inspiredâ, Tim Kendall writes in the introduction to his anthology of First World War poetry (2013b, xxvii). Indeed, the Great War of 1914â1918 produced a body of verse unsurpassed as to its bulk and the poetic quality of its outstanding examples by any previous or subsequent conflict. In Britain in particular, the poetry of the war has shaped its cultural memory. The war poems of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert GravesGraves, Rupert, Edmund Blunden, Wilfred Owen and Isaac RosenbergRosenberg, Isaac have entered the canon, and Owen and Rosenberg are among the most widely read English poets today (â11 Edmund Blunden, â15 Robert Graves, â23 Wilfred Owen, â25 Isaac Rosenberg, â26 Siegfried Sassoon). In the 1960s, their works became part of the A-level syllabus in England, and since then they have been widely taught in schools and universities throughout the UK. As historian David Sheffield has argued, âa strong case can be made that it is teachers of English, not history, who have had the greatest impact on the shaping of views on the First World War through the teaching of war poetrySinclair, May | war poetryBlunden, Edmund | war poetryâ (2002 [2001], 18). First World War poetry also greatly influenced poetic renderings of later wars, whose poets, according to Jane PotterPotter, Jane, âfound models in the work of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and others, yet also felt constrained and overshadowed by themâ (2012, 21).
The Great War poets have anchored in the British collective consciousness images which have become emblematic of the first âindustrializedâ war in human history: soldiers huddled in labyrinthine trenches, choking on poison gas or being blown to bits by high explosives, troops âgoing over the topâ to be mowed down by machine guns, in battles over yards of mud, and corpses rotting in no manâs land. These images have influenced writing about war far beyond the Great War and its aftermath:
The Second World War killed roughly five times as many people as did the first, brought untold destruction to civilian populations, and in its final throes unleashed a horror that could â and still can â wipe out life on earth. The facts, and logic, dictate that if any images dominate poetry they should be those of Hiroshima, Dachau, and Stalingrad. Certainly these images appear frequently in modern writing, but it is far easier to find the images of the Great War ... (Stephen 1993 [1988], 289)
Poems like Owenâs âDulce et Decorum Estâ, which refutes military glory through its drastic depiction of a poison-gas victim, have come to be regarded as exemplary renderings of the horrors of war and their traumatizing impact: âIn all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowningâ (WW 198).1 As the motif of haunting in this poem and others, like Charles HamiltonHamilton, Ian (General) SorleySorley, Charles Hamiltonâs âWhen you see millions of the mouthless dead / Across your dreams in pale battalions goâ (WW 68), indicates, they have also become emblematic of the persistence of the past, and the need to remember.
In the public imagination, the poetry of the Great War has been stereotyped as a poetry of protest after initial enthusiasm, and its diversity has been channelled into reductive patterns of âdevelopmentâ or âcontrastâ (from enthusiasm to disillusion, pro- vs. anti-war, traditional vs. modern). Rupert BrookeBrooke, Rupert | 1914 and Wilfred Owen have become iconic figures of early pro-war and later anti-war attitudes respectively. However, some front line poets wrote in the âhigh dictionâ of Brooke throughout the war, while the example of SorleySorley, Charles Hamilton, killed in the Battle of Loos in October 1915, shows that there were critical voices from the beginning. The popular image of a shift from early enthusiasm to disillusionment, with the Battle of the Somme in 1916 marking the turning-point, thus needs to be qualified, as needs that of a pro-war/anti-war polarity. There is no consistent pacifism even in Owen and Sassoon, whose poetry sometimes reveals a subliminal fascination with the violence, and is often expressive of a pride in their sacrifice and military achievements. (In one of his letters to his mother, Owen called himself âa conscientious objector with a very seared consciousnessâ, letter to Susan Owen, [? 16] May 1917; Owen 1967, 461). In fact, â[t]he poetry of the Great War was generated across a continuum in which protest and patriotism, modernists and Georgians, propaganda and remembrance, humour and pathos, coexisted, if uneasilyâ (PotterPotter, Jane 2012, 28).
While the poetry of the First World War has often been the subject of simplifying interpretations, it has itself greatly contributed to the rise of popular myths about the war, like that of an unbridgeable divide between combatants and civilians, and to prevailing views of the war as âfutileâ or âabsurdâ. The great loss of lives, and the âobscurity of any purposeâ, which many saw in the stalemate of the trenches, engendered post-war interpretations that emphasized the âfutilityâ of the war â a war which has since then âoffered the perfect paradigm for contemporary determinations to resist war in generalâ (Stevenson 2013, 195). Poetry has played a major role in constructing the cultural memory of the war, including its mythology. During and immediately after the war years, however, it served a range of emotional needs, foremost among them the necessity of making sense of loss and grief. First World War poetry thus crystallizes the distinction between âwhat the war was and what it meantâ (Hynes 1990, ix), rendering imaginative versions of the war which contributed to the transformation of historical complexity into the evident of uncontested narratives.
Before the war of 1914â1918, when Britainâs wars were fought by (small) professional armies, poetry about war had been the domain of civilians. With regard to the number of poems written, this still holds true for the First World War, yet the greater impact was now clearly made by the poetry written by combatants. Mass recruitment and conscription as introduced in 1916 had created a far bigger army than ever before, of greater social diversity and with an unprecedented number of better educated men among its ranks. Poetry was read at the front line (Paul Fussell emphasises the importance of the Oxford Book of English VerseQuiller-Couch, Arthur | Oxford Book of English Verse (1900) as a source of literary knowledge shared by many soldiers, 1977 [1975], 155â160), and many of those who would render poetic accounts of the trenches had written poetry before. The First World War thus re-defined the role of the poet in war in the sense that â[b]y 1914 [...] the participation of the poet in war [...] was as important as his writingâ (Featherstone 1995, 14). Due to the extraordinary amount of poetry that was now written by combatants, âwar poetrySinclair, May | war poetryBlunden, Edmund | war poetryâ âestablished itself as a genre, and the soldier poet became a speciesâ (Das 2013b, 5). According to Robert GravesGraves, Rupert, âwar poetâ and âwar poetryâ were âterms first used in World War I and perhaps peculiar to itâ (1949, 307). The term âsoldier poetâ appears, for instance, in Galloway KyleKyle, Gallowayâs anthology Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men, published in September 1916; Rupert BrookeBrooke, Rupert | 1914, whose sonnet âThe Soldierâ was probably the most famous war poem between 1914 and 1918, was referred to as a âpoet soldierâ by Dean Inge, who recited the poem from the pulpit of St. Paulâs cathedral on Easter Sunday 1915 (Das 2013, 7, 5). In any case, the poetry written by a comparatively small group of âsoldier poetsâ has come to dominate the common understanding of First World War poetry as one which is based on the actual experience of battle, whose attitude is invariably anti-war, and whose aim was to tell the truth about the war to ignorant civilians.
During the last three decades in particular, critics and anthologists have shown how the popular identification of âwar poetrySinclair, May | war poetryBlunden, Edmund | war poetryâ with âsoldier poetryâ falls short of the wide range and diversity of the poetry engendered by the war. Most importantly, the equation of âwar experienceâ with actual combat led to the long-time neglect of the poetry written by civilians (with the exception of Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling), and especially by women (â17 Thomas Hardy, â20 Rudyard Kipling, â6 Gendering the First World War). Women did not take part in the fighting, yet they had to cope with the loss of husbands, lovers, sons or brothers, and wi...