..... " , .'

AN ANALYTICAL STUDY

OF

FOUR TRENCH POETS

A THESIS SUBJ.VlITTED TO THE FACULTY

OF GRADUATE STUDIES AND RESEARCH

IN PARTI.AL FULFILLMENT OF THE

REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF ARTS

DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH

McGILL U~ITVERSITY

MONTREAL

ABSTRACT

JULY, 1969

This study of the trench poetr,y of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert

Graves, Isaac Rosenberg and 'Hilfred ChIen attempts to analyse and assess

their poetic response to the first World Har. It seeks to demonstrate

that trench poetry is quite distinctive in both its variet,y and its quality.

It also attempts to demonstrate that not only are some poems of exceptional

value, but that, ove ra 11 , trench poetry evolved into an adequate poe tic

statement of the experience of the front-line soldier.

Since the first vlorld War \vas, in rnany ways, a unique experience,

the poetic response to it could not fall into conventional or traditional

patterns without danger of distorting the reality. Also, since this "'Jar

••

introduced man to many of the distinctive trends and values of the twentieth

centur,y, so its poetry is, in many ways, introductory to modern aesthetic

values in literature.

-."1i~ , 'If.. , ,'l,

~{

:i, ,,,

•

AN ANALYTICAL STUDY

OF

FOUR TRENCH-POETS

BY

BARRY PAVITT

A Th"ESIS SUBHITTED TO THE FACULTY OF

GRADUATE STUDIF.3 Af\TJ) RESEARCH IN PARTIAL

FULFILLHENT OF THE REQUIREHENTS FOR THE

DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARI'S

DEPARTt1ENT OF ENGLISH NcGILL UNIVERSITY NONTREAL

@) Barry Pavi tt 1970

JULY 1969.

'.

• AN ANALYTICAL STUDY

OF

FOUR TRENCH-POETS

• CHAPTER

l

II

III

IV

V

• VI

VII

VIII

•

CONTENTS

TITLE

Introduction .

Siegfried Sassoon . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Robert Graves • . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Isaac Rosenberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . loTilfred Owen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Appendix: biographical sketches of

the four poets • • • • •

PAGE

l

9

25

LL

66

100

Bibliography • • • • • • • • • • • • • • • •• 10~

I. INTRODUCTION

This study of the trench poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert

Graves, Isaac Rosenberg and Wi1fred Owen is an attempt to analyse and

assess their poe tic response to the first Wor1d War. It will seek to

demonstrate that trench poetr,r is quite distinctive in both its variet,y

and quali ty. It will also seek to ShOl-T that not only are some poems of

exceptional value, but that, overall, trench poetry evolved into an . adequate poetic statement of the experience of the front-line soldier.

For the war destroyed many of the patterns (aesthetic, social, religious

and philosophical,) which had given shape to earlier literature. In the

heat of intense pQysical and emotional duress, new poetic forms and ideas

were evolved by the soldier-poets. Their poetr,r has significance and

relevance in the history of English literature and to the aesthetics of

the twentieth centur,r.

It is also demonstrable that trench poetry is evolutionary.

From undistinguished beginnings it slowly acquired considerable strength

and quality. Sassoon, Graves, Rosenberg .and ~Jen were aIl young and

compa ra tively inexperienced in 191L. English poetry, generally, had

drifted into the doldrums since the end of the nineteenth century, with

the aesthetes, decadents and Georgians providing an unstimulating poetic

context for youths with only potential originality. P~e-war social

conditions l'lere fairly placid -- at least, in comparison with subsequent

1

turbulent decades. Thus the trench poets were unprepared for the challenge

v.lhich a war like theirs would make upon their personali ties and their

apparently thin literar,r talents. Their response, unlike the war, was not

s ta tic. This s tudy will tr,r to shov! the emergence of a new Voray of looking

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at, and describing, war -- a modern way.

For there developed a war-aesthetic which was not heroic: not

epic. J.M. Johnston, in his study of first World War poetry,l ultimately

disavOtrlS the trench poets because their verse do es not rneasure up to the

standards he finds in epic poetry -- the traditional poetic expression of

'war. This provocative judgment invites dissent. The first World Ttlar was

unlike aIl former wars. It offered no opportunit,y -- at least, none to

the fighting soldiers to adopt an heroic stance. Their poetry, there-

fore, if it was to be true to their emotions and experience, could not be

epic. Is it, in consequence, of less value and of a lesser quality?

This thesis will atternpt to answer this question objectively •

We feel [about Sassoon1s trench poetry) not as we do with true poetry or true art that something lS, after aIl, right, but that something is intolerably and irrernediably wrong. 2

Thus in 1918, J. Middleton Murry condemned Sassoonls war poetry, as he

would, one imagines, have found fault with the trench poetry of Graves,

Rosenberg and Owen also. It is a judgment that rings quaintly in the

ears of modern readers who are not prone to demand affirmation and con-

solation as criteria for "true art." After the wide influence of such

modern works as The Waste Land, "The Second Coming" and 14aiting for Godot,

it is no longer generally accepted that art should make us feel "something

is right." In fact, unqualified statements of this nature are more likely

IJ .H. Johnston, English Poetry & ~ First Ttlor1d ~ (Princeton, 196L,), p. 9-16.

2J. Middleton Murry, "Hr. Sassoonls War Verses," ~ Nation, XXIII (July 13th, 1918), 398.

2

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to give offence.

Yet Murr,yls review illustrates a characteristic kind of

criticism of trench poetr,y. Eighteen years later, W.B. Yeats excluded

war poetr,y from The Oxford ~2iModern Verse (which he edited in 1936,)

on the grounds that "passive suffering is not a the me for poetry"3 --

one wonders why. Yeatls predilection for the "joy of battle"!' is weIl

enough known to explain, but not ta justif,y, this statement. In reply,

one need only remark that a cursor,y reading will reveal that trench poetry

is no more exclusively concerned wi th "passive suffering" than Yeats lB

3

poetry wi th old age, al though selected samples may give such an impress:i.on.

A third criticism vlhich emphasises and clarifies these attitudes

is found in Johnstonls book:

The standards invoked to judge trench poetry are those of epic and heroic literature -- the traditional literature of war. • • • The epic poem was equal to every aspect of primitive conflict; the modern war lyric, however, was probably the medium least capable of dealing là th the vastly multiplied moral and physical confusions of technological vrarfare.5

Hovi can one prove that a form equal to "primitive conflict" would also

be equal to "modern warfare"? The values inherent in the heroic attitude

broke down during the war and are no longer widely held in the twentieth

)vi.B. Yeats, "Introduction," The Oxford Book of Modern Verse (Oxford, 1936), p. xxxiv. - -

LSee an analysis of this issue in J.M. Cohen, "In Memory of W.B. Yeats: and Wilfred Owen," Journal of English ~ Germanie Philology, LVIII (1959), 637-6L9 •

5Johnston, "Introduction," pp. x-xi.

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centuryl

The factor common to the three judgments above is negativity.

They criticise trench poetry for what it is not. This study will try to

examine the work of four soldier poets without exaggeration, either negative

or positive. For, sorne enthusiasts show unrestrained approbation. In

praising Owen, for example, one reviewer states, "1ike Tolstoy and Shakespeare,

he celebrates with majestic understanding the enlargement of the human

spirit. 1I9 Whatever Owen's quality, it is no great service to his reputation

to puff him into comparison with Shakespearel

The poets chosen for this study aIl spent long periods on active

service in the trenches. They were conscientious in their devotion to

poetry as a means of expression. They worked hard to improve their crafts-

I~nship both as soldiers (since they accepted completely their responsibility

to their comrades), and as poets. They '\-Tere confronted with a sub,ject ready-

made for them, although certainly not of their choosing, and under the

pressure of war experience their poetry, like their attitudes, changed

considerably.

This evolution mirrors a literary development, for as the first

World War is an introduction to the history of the modern era, so its

poetry is introductory to much contemporary literature. This is not to say

that later poets were greatly influenced by war poetry directly (although

Owen lITaS adopted and lionized by many of the left-wing poets of the thirties

like Spender and C.D. Le1J1Îs), but the trench poets came to know and feel,

6John Bayley, "But for Beaumont-Hamel, Il ~ Spectat~ CCXI (October ~th, 1963), ~19.

and therefore to reflect, many attitudes and emotions relevant to modern

societ.y. Their protest against war and their desire to de-glamorize it

have echoes throughout the succeeding fift,r years.

Similarly, from the point of view of technique, one observes that

the trench poets were distinctly modern. Their imagery, their tones, their

use of conversational and colloquial language signif,y a break with the pasto

It would be foolish to compare their influence with, say, that of T.S. Eliot,

but influence is only one criterion in as assessment of achievement, and

one is often astonished by the contemporary note struck by many trench

poems.

The immediate poetic predecessors of the soldier-poets were the

Georgians, whose poetr,y is, for the most part, undistinguished. Their

reliance upon Romantic themes in pastoral settings, without either a meta­

physical frame of reference or the enthusiasm of innovation which charact­

erized the Romantics, make for obvious weaknesses. The poetry exhibits

a fey and delicate style; an attempt to portray exquisite and languid

sensibility. It is fragile and enormously derivative. The sense of grandeur,

of awe, which makes Romantic poetr~ so robust is entirely lacking. Any

strength in Georgian poetry lies mainly in the subjects and themes, not in

the poets nor in their techniques. But even here one is struck by an

ignorance, sometimes true and sometimes feigned, of twentieth century

realities. Any age preceding great climactic events seems, in retrospect,

to be somehow unreal and out of touch. Ne respond more readily to what

trench poets discovered than to the preciousness of Edwardian elegance.

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6

The trench poets came from this literar,y context into the war;

from an Arcadian England to an all-too-quickly devastated Flanders. Like

most young men at the time, they responded at first with enthusiasm to the

idea of war, to the image of war. As they had populated the English countr,r-

side with fauns, so they peopled the war-front with warriors and heroes.

If they did not welcome the war as a means of avoiding boredom and inertia,

they accepted the all-pervasive patriotic fervor, inescapable for aIl save

a few thoughtful men; the philosophers, pacifists or men with a European

rather than an English outlook. But once on active service their attitudes

changed, some more rapidly than others, especially as the senseless and

slaughterous nature of a war of attrition became clear. The Somme Offensive

of 1916 is generally regarded as the watershed. Certainly, after 1916

no sane man in the trenches could express the naive sentiments of 19lL-l,.

These trenches proved to be a poetr,r workshop, horribly equipped to test

the abilit,y of poets and the resiliency of poetr,r under intense pressure,

not to mention the stress on unprepared human character. There was little

temporal or spatial distance from their subject available to trench poets.

Even when on leave their minds were obsessed by the war and its effects.

Another aspect of this unique poetic situation, amply demonstrated

by trench poetr,r, is touched on by J.M. Cohen:

The war was autonomous. Ever,rthing else stood outside it. "lrlar provided its own way of life, its own shattered landscape, its own spectacles, which were sometimes beautiful. 7

7J .M. Cohen, "The Earth is Hungr,r," The Listener, LXXIV (Nov. Ilth, 1965), 753 •

• 7

Not on~ did the trench poeta experience the isolation attendant upon any

artist, but also that of front-line combatants. They knew they were

isolated from civilians and rear-echelon troops. It was yet another factor

contributing to the pressure from which their poetr,r came. While most

artists have to struggle long and hard either to break with their inheritance

and traditions or to evolve within them, these trench poets went through a

forced and accelerated growth. If anyone in the war could possibly be

called fortunate, they were, in that they found their individual voices so

quickly because of outside circumstances. By the same token, of course,

the war robbed Rosenberg and Owen of their young lives and future readers

of what promised to be much distinctive and distinguished poetr,r. For those

who admire these two poets, this irony is sometimes unbearable.

The selection of Sassoon, Graves, Rosenberg and Owen as represent­

ative of trench poetr,r is based not simp~ on the quality of their art nor

on their subsequent reputations. In attempting to analyse and evaluate

this war poetr,y, it is important to select those who served longest at the

front and who dis play cumulatively as many of the facets of trench poetry

as possible. While they are each very different frOID the others, the

totality of their work includes almost aIl of the themes and techniques

to be found in trench poetr,y. Echoes of Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley,

Julian Grenfell, Herbert Read, Edmund Blunden, Robert Nichols and many other"

soldier-poets or versifiers are found in these four. Nothing unique or of

extraordinary interest is to be round in other poets and not in these four.

Another consideration is, of course, that Sassoon, Graves,

Rosenberg and Owen do not merely repeat each other. Each is thoroughly

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distinctive. There is as much value in contras ting , their poetr,r as in

comparing it. While it is appropriate to seek valid generalizations about

trench poetry from an analysis of·, four imPortant representatives in order

to examine the poetic response to an important human experience, it is

vital to distinguish individual voices. This study undertakes not only to

demonstrate the symphony, but also to reveal its component parts. It is

not merely war poetr,r that is under consideration, but poe.try itself, and

poets. As two critics have said:

and

It is not simply that each gives us a different vision, but that each poet gives us a changing vision of youth grown suddenly old.8

Those books that show a man, any man caught up in a fate that is not of his asking, and striking out in action a personal response to it before he is destroyed or thrown up to survive, are to mr mind of universal value. 9

A persistent and increasing interest in the trench poets supports the view

that their work has much of value to offer any reader.

8F.W. Cutler, flSoldier Poets of England, Il Sewanee Review, XXVIII (1920), 86 •

9Cohen, "The Earth is Hungry,fI 755.

8

II. SIEGFRIED SASSO ON

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Siegfried Sassoon1 has thoroughly chronic1ed his war experiences.

Three volumes of poetr,r, The 01d Huntsman (pub1ished in May 1917), Counter­

Attack (1918) and Picture Show (1919), together with a fictiona1ised auto­

biograpby in three vo1umes,2 record in detai1 his 1ife and feelings as a

soldier. To this is added his retrospective commentary, Siegfriedfs

Journey 1916-1920 (1946). These books c1early revea1 Sassoonls deve10pment

as a poet.

As a youth with a gentee1 background and upbringing, his imagination

was stif1ed in derivative verse unti1 the war fina11y re1eased it.3 He

wrote typica1ly Georgian poetr,r:

There is no mistaking the gent1e 1andscapes, the rural themes and settings and the naive disp1ay of the "correct" poetic emotions .4

When the war broke out Sassoonfs reaction mirrored the romantic, heroic

response of so many of his contemporaries -- of whom Rupert Brooke is the

best known. Not so much patriotism as youthfu1 idea1ism, this reaction was

on1y gradua1ly tempered by his first tour of service in France from November

1915 to July 1916. His poems begin to revea1 the pbysica1 rea1ities, the

lSee Appendix, PP.100, for a biographica1 sketch.

2Memoirs 2!'George Sherston, a trio1ogy which consists of Memoirs of ~ ~ Hunting ~ (London 1928), Memoirs of ~ Infantry Officer (1930) and Sherstonls Progress (1936).

3Michae1 Thorpe, Siegfried Sassoon: A Critica1 Stugy, (Leiden 1966), p. 3.

4Howard Sergeant, "Siegfried Sassoon--Poet of War," Contemporary Review, CCII (1962), 38.

• 10

unp1easant details, of the trenches. But still his response was comparatively

controlled.

It was the Somme offensive which had the most decisive effect upon

Sassoon and thus upon his war poetr,y:

The ferocious destruction in 1916-17 of what had sustained at first -- the death and maiming of comrades and friends, the smothering of chiva1r,y and heroism beneath the mud and the bombardments -- aroused in Sassoon • • • a revu1sion against the ~var of an intensity far exceeding that with.:which he had he1d his original untarnished idea1s.5

From this time cornes the best and most famous of his trench poetr,y.

Sassoon became the poet of vehement protest; a bitter satirist with, as

Cohen says,6 a tone of prophetie righteousness which gave extreme forcefulness

to his poetry.

After the war, he followed a brief career in po1itica1 journa1ism,

writing for the 1eft-wing newspaper the Herald. He then l'lent into retire-

ment and on1y pub1ished his work in private editions. His post-war poetry,

a1though satirica1, never found the urgency and the incisiveness of his

trench poems and during the second ~lor1d War he actua11y responded to a

request for patriotic, exhortatory verse. As he has retained most of his

trench poetry in his collections of verse (more, one fee1s, as a record of

war experience than because of intrinsic poe tic worth -- Robert Graves did

the opposite and suppressed a11 of his war poetry), one finds the contrast

very ironie.

'Thorpe, p. 18.

6J.M. Cohen, "The Three Roles of Siegfried Sassoon," Tulane Studies in English, VII (1957), 171.

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The Old Huntsman shows the change in Sassoon1s attitudes quite

abrupt~, as the ear~ effusions are juxtaposed with the later trench poems.

Before his embitterment, his acceptance of the glamourous appeal which the

war made to youth is striking. In "Absolution" he writes:

yet war has made us wise, And fighting for our freedom we are free • • • We are the happy legion, for we know Timels but a golden wind that shakes the grasse

Since he was still under the influence of Rupert Brooke at this time, there

is no intentional irony in these lines. Even the death of his brother at

Gallipoli in August 1915 had little real effect upon his attitude: "For

we have made an end of aIl things base," and "through your victory l shaH

win the light" ("Brothers").

The war as a whole was symbolised as a dragon breathing fire --

one of the few attempts that Sassoon made to grasp the war as a whole, but

a completely inadequate, old heroic image. He thought that one could fight

for the radiance of the French countryside:

And they are fortunate who fight For gleaming lanscapes swept white and shafted And crowned by cloud pavilions white. ("France")

Here one recognizes immediately both the Georgian attitude and the hangover

of pre-Raphaelite language. He soon came to feel that "smiling nature" was

non-existent in war-time, save as an escape from ugly reality.7

In fact, at this time, he had nothing to fight for. His early

poetry, even the war poems, show a sensitive young man yearning to express

7H.N. Fairchild, Religious Trends in English Poetry: Gods of a Changing Poetry 1880-1920, V (London, 1962), ~82. -- -,.. -

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beauty in poetr,y, but with neither the concepts nor the technique which

would distinguish his verse from that of anyone else. "Freedom," "the end

of aIl things base," "gleaming landscapes" -- these do not offer sufficient

justification for going to 101ar. They are tag-phrases expressing the

emotionalism which swept men into the army in 191~: meaningless words that

Sassoon himself was ta condemn later; the language of the uninitiated.

Disillusionment is first evident in terms of personal deprivation.

He missed those pleasures of art and nature that had previously been his

greatest joy and solace:

Return to greet me colours that were my joy l am sad; on1y l long for lustre --Tired of these greys and browns and the leafless ash. ("To Victor,y")

He catalogues the de1ights that he can no longer enjoy, "garden

nights and elm trees nodding at the stare," pictures, books and solitude.

The first indication of Sassoon coming to grips with the rea1ities

of the trenches is to be found in poems 1ike "The Redeemer," "In the Pink"

and "Working Party." He creates vivid, impressionistic sketches of trench-

warfare as a background for descriptions of the ordinary soldier. These

sketches portray the miserable conditions of the troops as they awaited

death. Mud, rain, bullets and rockets characteriM the sceI.e and in the

midst of them is the soldier of whom Sassoon t-lrites, "I say that he was

Christ" -- a Christ suffering to redeem the world.

"The Redeemer" does not convey the intensity of feeling which he

later achieved, although it states an idea which so many of the trench poets

expressed. l1uch better is the colloquial tone adopted in "In the Pink,"

in which the poet tries to communicate the feelings and attitudes of an

inarticu1ate Tommy writing home. Here where Sassoon is not striving for

'artl the poem is not marred by a self-consciousness with words and forms

1ike many of his set-pieces of war. One observes also the tentative

striving towards what 1ater became a Sa:ssoon trademark: what he himse1f

ca11s " a knockout b10w in the last line,,:B

Tonight hets in the pink; but soon he tl1 die. And still the war goes on; he don1t know why.

13

liA Working Partyll is a narrative of trench conditions. As in the

two poems ~entioned above, Sassoon tries to put some distance between him-

self and his subject: to objectif,r his experience by introducing the

c011lTlon soldier, "he." This man is the essence of a non-hero: that is, a

simple man forced by the war to give up civilian life for an artificial

mi1itary career which ends abruptly in death. The lack of training or

preparedness and the absence of strong character which might have enabled

these non-heroes to comprehend their new circumstances seem t,rpical of

Sassoon' sm-ln case at this time. He ends the poem thus:

He pushed another bag a10ng the top, Craning his body outward, then a flare Gave one white glimpse of No Man's land and wire; And as he dropped his head the instant split His startled life with lead, and all went out.

The description vividly shows the blinded automaton-like work of the

soldier and his almost incidental death -- of no importance to anyone save

himself and perhaps his family. To describe these troops otherwise would

BSiegfried Sassoon, Siegfried's Journey 1916-1920 (London, 19L5), p. 29.

be to falsifY the realities of the many for the sake of the exceptional few.

At this time the best that Sassoon could do was to offer graphie descriptions

of the war,.as seen through the eyes of dazed men, as meaningless and

horrifie. Calling them "Christ" so simply suggests that the poet had not

found any solutions to the questions of war.

Although time and fUrther experience did not bring him any closer

to satisfYing conclusions, they did at least define the scope within which

his abilities could best be used. Worthless sacrifice had to be stopped.

Sassoon began to develop his st,yle as a vigorous satiriste At first his

efforts were not finely controlled, but they had great power as "indignant

eruptions in which raw emotions, more than any 'art' is the cornpelling

factor.,,9 He was becoming an enemy of ignorance. Cohen describes him as

a prophet against "complacency, sin and hypocrisy,1I a supporter of the poor

and oppressed who called people from "wickedness to truth and righteousness."lO

As such, of course, he soon became quite a controversial figure, revered by

his fellow soldiers like Owen, Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves (the latter

two have never lost their respect for Sassoon as a satirist and as a poet),

but loathed by the objects of his violent attacks.

'!'wo poems in ~ 212.. Huntsman, "Blighters" and "They," illustrate

this movement. Both are evidence of his attitude towards England and

civilians, but the treatment is very different in each.

"Blighters" begins describing in an hysterical tone a music­

hall variety show:

9Thorpe, p. 19. lOCohen, p. 171.

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The House is crammed: tier upon tier they grin And cackle at the ShOlv, while prancing ranks Of harlots shrill and chorus, drunk 'l'Ii th din; IHe 1 re sure the dear old Kaiser loves the tanks 11

15

The poet would like to see a tank wipe out all music-halls and their patrons

so that they could no longer "mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume."

The incident is, of course, a projection from a deeply disturbed mind --

the offence hardly vlarrants such drastic remedies. The poet 1 s savagery

is unreasoned and demonstrates how rage and hysteria vIere constant dangers

to Sassoonls art as well as being its major inspiration.

How much more worthy of his indignation is the thoughtless Bishop

in "They" and how much more effective is Sassoon 'Vlhen he is coldly satiric l

In reply to this Bishop' s vague and complacent remarks:

When the bqys come back They will not be the same; for they'll have fought In a just cause: they lead the last attack On Anti-Christ)

Sassoon offers the actual, physical changes l'Jrought by war:

For George lost both his legs; and Bill' s stone blind; PoorJim'S shot through the lungs and like to die; And Bert's gone syphilitic:

then adds a Parthian shot, "And the Bishop said: 'The ways of God are

strange lI" In this poem, the bitterness is channelled into irony. Speech

and facts are merely reported; they speak for themselves "rithout inter-

vention from the poet. This is the best kind of work frorn Sassoon's early

volume of trench poetry.

In both "Blighters" and "They" he reveals sorne of his distinctive

characteristic of. style. Not so much self-consciously concerned l·rith poetry as

an art form, he is able to utilize extreme, colloquial simplici ty. He chooses

16

specifie incidents which enable hirn to express his intense ernotional

sympathies or antipathies. At the sarne tirne, he is beginning to find ironie

touches to control, to a certain extent, his outbursts of feeling. He

ranges from flippancy to calculated cynicism, espec.ially on religion. From

earlier reactions whieh saw the ordinar,y soldier as Christ, he moves into

the blasphernous frame of rnind of the soldier himself. In "Stand-to: Good

Friday Horning," he describes the dawn, with, one feels, a bitter mocker,y

of his earlier poetic views:

Dawn was mist,y: the skies were still, Larks were singing, discordant, shrill; They seemed happy; but l felt ill • • • o Jesus send me a wound today And l'Il believe in Your bread and wine And get my blooqy old sins washed white'

This prayer for escape from the war, not its end, shows that Sassoon had

not quite gone the whole way as a propagandist devoted to putting ~ stop

to hostilities. But still the inherent irony of desiring to be maimed in

order to live is very strong. "The One-Legged Man",

Safe with this wound, a citizen of life •• Thought: 'Thank God they had to amputateL r

Such were the real attitudes of soldiers, not rdeath and gloryr.

Other realities are shown in such poems as "Died of Wounds" and

"The Hero." The first describes physical and mental agony before d.eath;

lingering, painful, seared by terrible memories. The second shows how

civilians are told "gallant lies" about their sons: a motherrs pride is

misplaced for her son was actually a "cold-footed, useless swine" who

panicked. Sassoon was determined to rtell it like it isr. Furthermore,

what did England have to offer those who had made such terrible sacrifices?

17

Sassoon IS answer is "Lung Tonie, Mustard, Liver Pills and Beer" ("Stretcher

Case"). It seemed as if men were resurrected from the trenches in order

to read this catalogue of advertisements. Sassoon did not explore the

condition of the wounded with the loving concern of Owen, so much as use

their plight as a whip to lash out at the enemy at home.

And yet he was concerned. One notes in this first volume a theme

which was ta become very important in the second book -- his sense of

responsibilit,y as an officer and as a man ta his fellow troops. In the

slight poem "Conscripts," he observes that he has come to respect and love

the cornmon men he had formerly despised snobbishly and that they will soon

sac~ifice all that they love:

They looked at me Reproachful; how l longed to set them freel

The change that came over Sassoon after the Somme (see p.2) and

his meeting with the pacifist group vThich was centered around Lady"Ottoline

Horrel and Bertrand Russell, is tvell illustrated by the poems in his second

volume of war verse, Counter-Attack. This book opened his offensive against

the real enemy, anyone 1-Tho supported the war either deliberately or tacitly.

Al though Blunden has testified to his admiration for this poetry, "a well-

varied and organized book, in which observation, wit, imaginatiqn marched

under the command of love of ordinary humanity,,,ll his remark nowhere

conveys the fury and violence in these poems. They were received gratefully

by soldiers but with a horrified recoil by most people vlho had not been

at the front. On1y a fevl contemporary civilians cou1d respond to Sassoonls

intentions. Virginia Woolf noted that the vivid scenes had "the power to

l1Edmund Blunden, "Har Poets 1914-1918," 'Hri ters and their Hork, no. 100 (London, 1958), p. 29.

•

18

move and not mereJ,y to shock. lIl2 And this is the essential point. A

modern reader is still moved by the force and power not only of Sassoonls

rage, but also by the intensity of the softer emotions and sympathies which

are inherent in his attitudes. One feels the nakedness of a deeply wounded

sensitivity as well as the strength of an assured satiriste No matter how

critical one may be about the qua lit y of Sassoonls art, one still is com-

pelled into an active emotional response to his poetry.

The first two poems describe trench-warfare as the soldier knows

it. "Prelude: The Troops" is a sombre painting based on Sassoonls care-

fully controlled emotions of despair and admiring love for his companions.

It is built up on precisely chosen adjectives which complement each other

like the pieces of a jig-saw picture: "shapeless," IIdrizzling, Il "d;.s-

consolate, Il II sodden," IIdulled," II sunken j " "haggard," "stale." Yet still

the poet lapses into self-conscious phrasing at times as his expression

cannot ahlays ma tch his feelings. Phrases like "bird-sung joy jOf grass-

green thickets" and II some mooned Valhalla" do Dot accord "lI1ell with the

simple sincerity of "0 my brave brown companions." His sorrow and despair

almost gain the stature of a modern elegy or lament:

Battalions and battalions scarred from Hell; The unreturning army that was youth; The legions "liTho have suffered and are dust.

But ul tima teJ,y the poem is insufficiently na tural. It has too many clichéd

tones; too J1lUch striving for effect. Any force in these lines comes from

the fact tha t "lI1e kno\-T they are true, not from the power of the poet 1 s

language.

l2From a revie1-1 quoted in Thorpe, p. 22n.

• 19

The second poem, IICounter-Attack," contains this terrJble

passage:

The place was rotten with dead; green clumsy legs High-booted, sprawled and grovelled àlong the saps; And trunks, face dOlo1nward, in the sucking mUd, l-lallowed like trodden sand-bags loosely filled; And naked sodden buttocks, mats of hair, Bulged, clotted heads slept in the plastering slime. And then the rain began -- the jolly old rainl

As Johnston points out,13 here Sassoon concentra tes on the obscene details

which degraded the human body and which were unknOt-m to non-combatants.

The passage could be cancelled without affecting either form or content

of the poem as a whole. Sassoonls disgust and horror weIl up with an

urgency not to be softened by a typically flippant coda. These lines are

an automatic reaction heedless of artistic control and the last phrase

is a wan smile after violent nausea.

The rest of the poem reflects this unsteady equilibrium, but

mainly Sassoon does '\o1hat he is best qualified to do. Vividly descriptive,

in simple colloquial language, it traces the events of an early morning

attack. Changing from the poetls point of view to that of a soldier

("Weld gained our first objective" to "He wondered when they would get

busy"), it emis with the unnoticed, irrelevant, meaningless death of that

soldier. He Has no Achilles nor Hector and neither were the thousands of

others t-Iho died at the sams tirne. It would be ludicrous to hurl defiance

at ancl pit onels strength against machine-guns and bombs. Sassoon wanted

to t",ri te graphically of actualities and not comfort civilians \vith symbols.

13Johnston, p. 96.

•

•

•

20

Such incidents not only moved Sassoon personally but they also

served his avowed purpose of involving the uninitiated and making them

come to know the war as he knevl i t. "The Rear Gua rd, " "Wirers" and"Attack"

follow a sjmilar pattern. Descriptive or narrative, they are revelationary

poems designed to strip away callousness or indifference.

Sometimes his voice becomes quite shrill as bitterness over-

l-Jhelms him. In "The Effect" Sassoon uses as a refrain the comment of a

journalist that "He'd never seen so many dead before."

How many dead? As many as ever you wish. Don't count lem; theY're too many. vIho 'Il buy my nice fresh corpses, two a penny?

The carnage was unbelievable and unimaginable for those not in the trenches,

hence Sassoon's frustration and despair. If no one appears to be listening,

one has to raise one's voice. From silly individual deaths to scenes of

wholesale human carrion, the details had to be broadcast. Sassoon's poetry

vras compulsive.

In these poems death itself is the protagoniste The poetry may

be incidental if one considers "(-Jar in its totality, but it is absolutely

l'eal and true. Sassoon is not guil ty of distorting his experience, al though

his poems lTIay suffer at times from too great an ernphasis on the horror and

obscenity of vJar. But the fact remains that rnost soldiers could not forget,

nor couIc! they see through or past the bodies to larger visions, since

these bodies constituted their irnrnediate environment; an unusual, un-

believable and inescapable landscape. Furthermore, one can realize

Sassoon' s sté! te of minc1 as a resul t of what he had undergone from "Re-

pression of trlar Experience":

Harki Thud, thud, thud -- quite soft ••• they never cease Those 1-1hispering guns -- 0 Christ, l want to go out And screech at them to stop -- l'm going crazy; l'm going stark, staring mad because of the guns.

This was ,,1ri tten in the safety of his O"Tn home while on sick-1eave 1 The

poems for Counter-Attack were assembled and revised in Craig10ckhart

Hospital, Edinburgh, where the poet was being treated for shel1-shock.

21

Sassoon was an active man, not a contemplative, ano the pressures

of his war experience did not allow him much respite ta become phi10sophica1

or to cultivate the gent1er emotions within himse1f. As he won the M.C.

for conspicuous ga11antry on the batt1efie1ds of France 50 he sought honour

in batt1ing against proponents of the war. But the strain was almost

unbearab1e.

The dawn figures in six of the first seven poems in this volume,

but not as the brightness of a ne~-r day. It was the revea1er of terrors

~vhich the night had made to disappear for a while; a fresh rea1ization of

s tale dea th. The troops who survived Nere ones "T:Jho' ct refrained from

dying" -- if death is the protagonist, this is a positive action -- for

non-Promethean man is here described in non-heroic terms.

Another reason l'Ihy Sassoon cou1d not stand back and objectif'y the

tota1ity of war was simply a profound distrust and dislike of those who

did. The po1iticians and journalists who attempted to put the war into

perspective did 50 at the expense of the suffering of the soldiers and

in ignorance of coarse detai1s (and such b1indness was often quite

deliberate -- the war effort must not be hampered 1) In "Editorial

Impressions" a reporter speaks with a wounded soldier about a book he is

•

1

22

writing ca11ed "Europe on the Rack." Despite what he sees, the reporter

can still say, "And through i t a11 l fel t a splendour shine/Which makes

us win." It is significant that he had been watching an airman, his he ad

turned to the sky and not kept down to see the trenches. Sassoon emphasizes

the gulf between the two. He could not admit the validity of any viewpoint

save the combatants l because they experienced war at its source, even

though their position did not allow for any larger perspective. He felt

that he had to fulfill the reporterls function, or, better perhaps, the

photographerls, in order to get to the truth.

This gulf between the front-line soldiers and the rest led to

two themes in his poetr,y: his sense of camaraderie and responsibility

towards his men, and the need to wage war at home against complacency

and indifference. He despised and mistrusted themall: ageing fathers,

women, staff-troops, politicians and newsmen. The kind of righteous wrath

to which Thorpe and Cohen refer (see p. 7), is ver,y evident in the poem

lIFight to a Finish" in which he would like to lead his troops against the

journalists and then go "To clear those Junkers out of Parliament." On

the other hand, he was a master of incisive mockery. In "Lamentations,"

a poor soldier is crazed with grief at the news of his brotherls death:

He raved at the bleeding war; his rampant grief Hoaned, shouted, sobbed, and choked, while he was kneeling Half-naked on the floor. In my belief Such men have lost aIl patriotic feeling.

Did Sassoon remember his own patrician stoicism at his brotherls death in

191.5 and mock Lis mm youthful acceptance?

Sassoonls sense of responsibility and his sympathy for his

comrades in suffering are everywhere apparent. He loathed his occupation

23

of leading men to their deaths. He felt guil ty in the trenches, "I lm

wide awake; and sorne chap 1 s dead"; and he fe1 t guil ty a t base camp in

"The Dream"; and he fel t guil ty when in England on sick-1eave, "In bitter

safety l awake unfriended" ("Sick-Leave"). He had to return for "love

drives me back to grope wi th them through He11. Il

His burden of sympathy and responsibi1ity was not confined to

those only on active service. He used the shock value inherent in wounded

men for propaganda, but this does not a1leviate his own vicarious suffering:

Their drearns that drip with murder, Men who went out to batt1e grirn and glad; Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and made ("Survivors")

This does not examine the physical and psychologica1 effects of maiming as

Owen 10ving1y does, but a1so it is not rnerely an attempt to castigate the

uninvolved. Sassoonls persona1 torture lies at the bottom of his

sophisticated propaganda.

The lack of a1-1areness on the part of civilians is matched by the

complete detachment of God, "And God says something kind because youlre

dead." Tflhen a happy dream cornes to alleviate the horror of the trenches,

Sassoon specula tes, was i t perhaps because of "God 1 s blank heart grown

kind?" Never a firm1y re1igious believer, Sassoon could not find any

consolation either in church doctrine or adapted re1igious tenets. It was

not until he was seventy-one that Sassoon accepted the church completely

and became a Catholic. There was no faith to sustain him in the trenches,

on1y comradeship and anger. That his pit Y was genuine no one can doubt,

but he was too active a man to seek profundities when there l-J'as a fight

to be fought.

• 24

There are obvious weaknesses in Sassoonfs poetry as an art forme

Although he invigorated verse with a new and colloquial diction, the

basically Georgian forms and metres of his poems are not original. lL The

inclination towards self-dramatization and self-pit y often inhibit the

full power of certain descriptive scenes. Too often his expression is not

equal to the force of his emotion and one finds a lapse into clichés or

elaborate phrasing. And finally, as an emphatic satirist, there is a

tendenqy for his prototypes to be either black or white; the resultant

exaggeration lacking in subtlety.15

However, Sassoon had one great quality which is still extremely

effective; he recognized the power of strong emotion. Whether it is

controlled by the Swiftian art of satire or left to run wild in lyrics of

sensation, this power seldom fails to comr~nicate itself to the reader.

Sassoon became a spokesman for the soldiers. He tried to show their

environment and demonstrate their helplessness in order to put an end to

the war. He did not escape the realities of war, nor could he penetrate

them. Fear, harror, despair; love, pit Y and bitter irony: these are his

raw materials for graphie and detailed descriptions. Simplicity of style

and a laconic tone serve to order but not conceal his passion. As he wrote

in Siegfried's Journey, he provided "an antidote to the glorification of

the 'supreme sacrifice' and such-like prevalent phrases.,,16

lLVivian de Sola Pinto, Crisis in English Poetrr 1880-19Lo (London, 1951), p. ILL.

15Thorpe, p. 30.

16Siegfried ' s Journey, p. 19.

III. ROBERT GRAVES

25

Robert Gravesl was just nineteen when he enlisted in the army,

a few days after Englandts declaration of war. He was commissioned in the

Royal Welch Fusiliers -- the regiment in which his friend Sassoon later

served, and of which they were both intensely proud. Graves was in the

trenches for over a year before he was wounded in the Somme offensive. He

returned ta France for a short time in 1917 but was finally hospitalized

in Februar,r and subsequently remained in England as an instructor.

Graves was a close friend of Sassoon after the latterts arrivaI

in France. Sassoon introduced him to Owen in Craiglockhart Hospital and

Owen used to send Graves manuscript poems from France.

While stationed at Oxford, Graves came into contact with the

pacifist group centered at Garsington -- the Morrels, Bertrand Russell,

Lyttorl Strachey and Clive Bell -- which so much influenced Sassoon. But

although loathing the war and detesting its proponents, Graves never became

a conscientious objector or propagandist for peace. He did not believe

in the war, but he accepted the burden of loyalty to his militar,r comrades.

Indeed, when trying to dissuade Sassoon from becoming tao involved in

pacifist agitation, he used regimental pride and loyalty as part of his

argument. The whole of his war experience is vividly and entertainingly

recounted in his excellent autobiography, Goodbye 1QAll ~.2

ISee appenc1ix 2, pp. 101 , for a biographical sketch.

2Robert Graves, Goodbye To AlI That (London, 1929). Subsequent references will be to the paperbac~Penguin edition (1965).

•

•

26

Graves published two volumes of poetr,r during the war: Over the --Brazier (London 1916) and Fairies and Fusiliers (1917). The first book is

divided into two parts. Part l, headed "Charterhouse," contains eleven

poems from his schooldays, and Part II, headed "La Bassé," contains fourteen

poems written in the trenches. The second volume has forty-six poems, of

which five are reprinted from Over ~ Brazier.

There has not been much critical attention paid to these war

poems and perhaps it is only in an appraisal of war poetr,r as such that

they will ever be considered seriously. (Graves himself, fo11owing his

policy of "suppressing ail poems that no longer pass muster, Il"3 omitted

them entirely from the collections he made in 1947 and 1959. In his volume

Poems 191L-1926 he retained -thirteen trench poems on1y.) With regard to this

policy, J.M. Cohen says:

l be1ieve that Graves has often discarded poems that may, for persona1 reasons, have faded from his page, but_that remain clear and bright in the memory of his readers •••• For sorne poems seem to me to have been undeservedly sacrificed or a1tered, whi1e others, though inferior to his best, provide usefu1 evidence of his poetic progress,1. or record journeys up roads that he never fuily exp1ored.~

The majority of Graves' trench poems fa11 into the 1ast two of these

categories; few, if any, being of intrinsic poe tic North, but most of them

interesting in a study of war poetry.

Cohen hirnse1f dwells veFj" briefly on the early poetry of Graves

and concerns himse1f with the poems not inspired by the war. Seymour-Smith

3Robert Graves, "Foreward,1I Collected Poems 1959 (London, 1960) .

llJ .M. Cohen, Robert Graves (London, 1960), p. 2.

• 27

makes a short s ta tement: "he wrote 1 realis tic 1 poems of trench wa rfare,

more or less like his friend Siegfried Sassoonls, but did not draH a

. pacifist moral from his experience.,,5 J.H. Johnston limits himself to a

short analysis of "A Dead Boche" from Fairies and Fusiliers, which, he says,

is not "characteristic of Graves 1 general response to the war," and which

he dismisses because it "related neither to the general significance of the

struggle nor to the aims and ideals of the men engaged in it.,,6 The best

cri.tical work on Graves 1 trench poetry is on Bergonzi 1 s book, 7 'l-There it is

considered along vJith the poems of Blunden and Herbert Read.

In Goonbye ~ li ~ (p. 235), Graves recounts significant1y

that after his demobilization he had no civilian clothes except those he

had worn at school. In fact, his poetry clear1y reveals a schoolboy at war.

His preparation -- those poems written at Charterhouse in Over The Brazier

shows a young poet very conscious of the mechanics of his art, essaying aIl

kinds of rhymes and metres (from the trochaic tetrameter of Longfel1ow ' s

"Hiawatha" in "Dying Knight and the Fauns" to an experiment in Skeltonics

in "Free Verse"). His themes are derived from folklore, myth and romance

he usually contrived an e1e'-'lent of rnystery except in his simplest nature

poems -- and full of de;.~i"éttive poetic diction, "kine," "mead"and

"wondrous . Il

5I\1artin Seymour-Smith, Robert Graves (London, 1956), p. 7.

,-°Johnston, p. 78.

7Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes! 'I\·Ji1ight (London, 1965).

The youthful attitudes and practices are carried over into the

second part of the volume, "La Bassé. Il The first poems here represent

youth and innocence as femininity which is being crushed by the cruel

necessities of the armw and war:

TheY've steeled a tender, girlish heart, Tempered i t vlith a man' s pride, Leaming to play the butcher's part Though the woman screams inside. (liA Renascence").

(In this same poem one finds:

But of their ~ravailings and groans Poetr,y is bom again

which is an idea that Owen explored, tuming on it the full force of his

28

imagination and craftsmanship, but which here means no more than a limited

and romantic view reminiscent of Brooke and the early Sassoon.) We also

leam the credo of 50 many schoolboy-soldiers:

To fight and ki11 is wrong To s tay a t home 't-lronge r ( Il Thel Shadow of Dea th" )

in which the crudity of expression matches the simplicity of the thought.

After arriving in France, Graves' poetr,y becomes changed in tone,

though not much more distinguished. Almost immediately his poems begin to

show the ugly, horrifie details of the trenches and his own shocked feelings

of nausea. In the sonnet "The Moming Before the Battle, Il he senses his

own imminent death while waiting alone in a garden and sees a vision of

himself as a ghost with a battered head:

The fruit between my teeth to clotted blood Vias . transubstantiate and the pale rose Smelt sickly.

In "Limbo" the reader is shocked by a realistic description of rain, mud,

shells, blood and hideous cries, "where the reek of death offends the

• living." After a whispered order commands that the corpses be piled into

a protective parapet, Graves can no longer control the horror and so the

poem ends with a relieving vision of corn-fields and ploughhorses. The

IlDead Fox Hunterll also depends upon shocking detail for i ts effect:

He saw that qying and in hopeless case For otherts sake that day Hetd smothered aIl rebellious groans: in death His fingers were tight clenched between his teeth.

The schoolboy in Graves cannot help but demand justice for this self-

sacrifice, so, if there is no fox-hunting in Heaven,·the sport must be

invented for this officer's sake.

The best illustration of the change in tone in Graves' early

poetry is found in "The Trenches. 1I While describing a soldierls sense of

29

helplessness before the great forces of war (he is like a louse trapped and

killed in the seams of a shirt), the poet refers to one of his own

descriptive phrases:

No, that sounds much too nice Oh, far too nice.

The major fault lvith these poems is that they are mere reporting.

Graves dralvS no conclusions from what he describes so vividly. There are

no implicit ironies; no thoughtful enquiries, and only the simplest emotions

inform these pieces. Heis shocked and disgusted and so his poems are

shocking and disgusting, but that is aIl.

Graves' predilection for children and their stories or views of

life is everytvhere apparent in both of his volumes of war-time verse. Not

only did he write many poems for children, but he a1so re1ated many of his

• 30 .

experiences in terms of his emotional experiences as a child. Three poems,

called collectively "Nursery Memories," describe sensations of horror,

bravado and fear as he had known them in childhood, and each is related to

his present situation. They suggest that, as a poet, he was forced to use

his memory of young feelings in order to capture vividly his present

emotional condition. "The First Funeral" pictures a soldierls corpse that

cannot be buried; Graves 1 feelings are conveyed in terms of the horror and

disgust he had felt wh en he and his sister as children had had to bury a

putrescent dead doge In IIThe Adventure," when he mocks the exaggerated

claims of a machine-gun team, he do es so by comparing them with his

childhood boast of having killed atiger. Finally, his experiences on a

moon-light patrol in no-manls land recall to him how he had hated the moon

as a child because it frightened him, "And l know sorne day itlll do me

sorne dreadful thing."

These poems indicate that Graves suffered a kind of retardation

as a result of the war. His psychological and poetic development were

arrested. Too young to be able to see around or through the war, he

was forced back into the images and emotions of childhood in order to

register what was happening to him. He only gained sorne psychological

freedom years later in writing the cathartic Goodbye To AlI That.

"Big Words" is a poem which begins by expressing a sense of

preparedness for death. Graves had had a religious upbringing and he

retained his faith through the early months in the army, so here he places

his confidence in the "Wisdom of Godls way." But as he awaits an attack,

IIHe cursed, prayed, sweated, wished the proud words back." This otherwise

31

slight poem captures the breakdown of faith or philosophy in the face

of fear. It conveys a simple truth about the soldier's condition. Later

Graves was to find, lïke Sassoon, that religious faith was no comfort at

a11 and he turned ironically and blasphemously against his earlier belief.

The simplicity of "Big Words" is quite disarming in its pure

sincerity. Graves, more than ar~ other trench poet, was capable of

communicating the uncomplex feelings, the basic emotions of a front-line

soldier.

Two other poignant poems end the volume Over The Brazier.

"It's A Queer Time" has an hallucinatory theme developed from realistic

and colloquial description and is the forerunner of better poems ("Corporal

Stare," for example). The poet recognizes the sense of unreality which a

civilian must have, confronted by war. Bergonzi says of it:

The wilfull understatement of the refrain, "It's a queer time," indicates the habituaI stance that Graves adopted, or tried to adopt, to the realities of war: basically an attitude of 'stiff upper-lip' reserve, lightened with gaietB and backed by the always-possible retreat mythe

into

The other poem, "Over the Brazier," tells of the yearning of the poet and

his two companions for their projects lafter the war'. It is an escapist

poem, quite frankly -- the men long for the peace of Canada, a coral island

and a cottage in Wales -- but day dreams are temporary:

• • • but this silly Mad war has now wrecked both and what Better hopes has my little cottage got?

This note, which Graves could strike quite often, is very moving,

8Bergonzi, p. 67.

perhaps because of the poetls youth.

Although the first volume has few noteworthy poems, it does

contain most of the themes, moods and techniques which Graves refined in

Fairies and Fusiliers. There is little real development from one book to

the next save for an increasing confidence in poetic craftsmanship. The

occasional awkwardness, metrical lapses, forced rhymes and precious

32

language were to be corrected to a large extent as Graves, through practice,

gained a surer control over his verse forms. Still, the subjective~

emotional point of view and the dreamr, ~sterious quality that he delighted

in were to continue in the later work. Apart from the occasional poem

where he deliberate~ forces the readerls attention on the ugly and the

brutal by graphie description, he was unable or unwilling to paint the war

in the trenches in its own dress. Imager,y and symbolism derived from the

Bible and classical literature, from folk-Iore and romance, are cornmon.

Unlike Owen, who could vitalize and transmute the details of trench-warfare,

Graves either escaped them or merely described them. Unlike Sassoon, who

could throw his ernotional distress and energy into a regulated and

passionate irony for protest, Grave found outlet in his softer, childrenls

poems.

Of the fort y-one new poems j.n Fairies and Fusiliers , on~ sixteen

have any direct relationship with the war. The first three reflect Graves 1

intense regimental pride and his great friendship with Sassoon. In Goodbye

~ lli That (p. 226), he mentions that his comrade Sassoon was "two men"

during the war: happy "Tarrior in France and bitter pacifist in England.

He himself never suffered from this kind of schizophrenia. The Royal

•

33

Welch Fusiliers was a fine regiment even though its ranks had been decimated

and refilled. "The Legion" draws a parallel from Roman history to show the

effect of regimental standards on raw recruits. A "sullen pack of ragged,

ugly" swine" are moulded into the Legion and thus the New Army of Kitchener

manages to maintain the military efficiency of the old Regular Army because

the rigid regimental structure was retained.

IvIore specifically, "To Lucasta on going to the wars - for the

fourth time" states Graves t raison de guerre -- pride:

Donlt plume yourself he fights for you; It is no courage, love or hate That lets us do the things we do; Itts pride that makes the heart so great; It is not anger, no, nor fear Lucasta, hets -a Fusilier, And his pride keeps him here.

(Like Owen and Sassoon, but unlike Rosenberg, Graves had little time,

liking or respect for women before and during the war. His sexual develop-

ment was hampered by his schooling and the interruption of 19lL.) The

sentiments expressed here are very typical of Graves and, one imagines, of

a great number of the young officer cadre. Immature and unphilosophical,

they reflect the schoolboy codes of honour. After the war Graves developed

an individuality that bordered on the eccentric, but at this time his

genteel upbringing was sufficient to keep him at his duty. Disillusionment

with the nationts leaders and his countryts cause was not enough to bring

about even an intellectual revoIt despite the fact that he was a self-

assured and opinionated youth •

Finally, "'l'wo Fusiliers" illustrates an interesting difference

between Graves and Sassoon: one l-Thich reveals the greater youthfulness of

•

•

•

the former. Whereas Sassoon became ver,y concerned with a sense of

responsibility, Graves 1 poetr,y reflects the more personal, subjective

sense of friendship:

Show me the two so closely bound As we, by the wet bond of blood, By friendship, blossoming from mud, By Death.

In this poem the horrors or war, duly catalogued, have the effect of

cementing friendship. Graves 1 strong sense of loyalty is manifest in his

relationship with Sassoon and their mutual friend David Thomas.

Two other poems are addressed to Sassoon: "Letter to S.S." and

"Bough of Nonsense." The first is full of youthful excitement at the

prospects of life after the war. They will share a cottage in Wales,

absorbing the myths and fables of the countr,yside, and then travel to

seek adventure in the East:

And doing wild, tremendous things In free adventure, quest and fight, And God1 what poetry weIll write.

3L

Graves was unusual in being capable of such exuberance during the war. His

young vitality was never completely exhausted by his terrible experience.

No matter how despondent or disillusioned, no matter how badly he suffered

from neurasthenia and shell-shock, there was always a resiliency which

enabled him to overcome his environment. At the very least he and Sassoon

could escape into nonsense, "Before this quaint mood fails/We 111 si t and

weave a nonsense hymn." Were i t not for other poems in this collection

that describe the war graphically, one might wonder if Graves could not

see what was before him •

\

But liA Dead Bochelt is a reminder that Graves too could paint

realistically '\o1hen he wanted. This poem is a IIcertain cure for lust of

blood. 1I In a dispassionate description of a German corpse, Graves

administers a shock to his readers aIl the more telling for the nature of

the poems around it:

Where, propped against a shattered trunk, In a great mess of things unclean, Sat a dead Boche; he sCOlvled and stunk With clothes and face a sodden green, Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired, Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

35

The photographie quality of this is reminiscent of both Owen and Sassoon

(" sodden" is one of the latterls favourite wOrds). Exact, if ugly details

are expressed in a toneless st,vle since the subject itself is the poem.

There is no need for an attitude to be struck or an opinion expressed.

Hmvever, this poem is very much an exception in Fairies ~

Fusiliers. Many of Graves 1 responses to the war were expressed in terms

of myths, fables or allegories. "Dead Cow Farrn" is based on an old saga

. 'to1hich explained the Creation in terms of a cow licking life into clay.

But now, says Graves, the cow is deadj an appropriate symbol when one

considers the devastated farmlands and dead animaIs of Flanders. "Escape"

uses Greek myth for its structural basis. Graves had been reported killed

in action and explains, with grim humour, how he escaped from the monstrous

Cerberus into life. In this poem he tries to convey a sense of his

delirium with broken phrases, but although his emotions -- his determination,

joy and relief -- are very apparent, the poem is unsuccessful. Its mixture

of humour and emotion is awkward and poorly controlled as if he had not

revised i t:

Then swiftly Cerberus" wide mouth 1 cram Ù'lith arnw biscuit smeared with jamj

Ieads to:

A crash; the beast blocks up the corridor With monstrous hair,y carcase, red and dun Too Iatel for l've sped through.

Oh Lifel Oh Sunl

One often has an impression of hastiness in Graves' 1.-1ar poetr,y.

36

His colloquialisms seem unnatural compared with Sassoon's and their effect

is thereby lessened. As his later poetr,y shows, Graves is usually more

comfortable with more formaI English. Where Sassoon could ernploy rough

soldierly language to achieve polished effects, Graves often sounds stilted.

l'1uch better is "Corporal Stare." This short narrative describes

an hallucination -- the kind of phenomenon which would naturally appeal to

the dreamer in Graves. At a dinner celebration one night, Graves sees

through the window a man who had been killed a month earlier. The same

story is re-told in Goodbye 1:2. AlI That (p. 102), but the cornpFesscion

achieved in the poem makes it more telling;

He paused, saluted smartly, grinned, Then passed away like a puff of wind, Leaving us blank astonishment. The song broke, up we started, leant Out the windo1.-1 -- nothing there, Not the least shadow of Corporal Stare, Only a quiver of smoke that showed A fag-end dropped on the silent road.

Here the use of Ilfag-end" does not jar on the reader's ear not seem out

of place. On the contr8'r'Y) its abruptness helps to create a shock which

enhances the eerie effect Graves is seeking.

•

•

IIThe Assault Heroic ll is a rather heavy allegory in the Bunyan

tradition:

Dream snatched, and set me where The dungeon of Despair Looms over Desolate Sea.

37

Despite the turgidity of the allegory this is one of the better poems from

the point of view of technique. The language is spare and pointed. His

IIfoes ll cry:

Today 1o1e Ive killed your pride: Today your ardour ends. Welve murdered all your friends; Welve undermined by stealth Your happiness and your health. Welve taken away your hope.

It would be difficult to find a more fitting epigraph for the war. These

short lines are full of menace and have a ring of finality in them. But

the resolution is not so satisfactory as Graves overcomes these foes through

IIfaithll -- he does not say in what --lI l aughter" and a "bitter tongue. 1I

He is vague in his overcoming of despair, although the reasons for that

despair are vivid and real. Nhen deliberately creating nwstery Graves

is often successful, but many times the mystery of his own psychological

response escaped him and he becomes facile or vague as a resul t. What kind

of "faithll ? Why the IIlaughterll? Where the IIbitter word"? Graves leaves

these unanswered.

Finally, Graves uses a biblical story and the Greek idea of

Metamorphosis to express the death of his close friend, David Thomas. In

"Golia th and David," as the ti tle implies, he reverses the tale and has

David struck down by the giant Goliath. This is the best example of

controlled bitterness in Graves' war poems. The irony that David's valour

and faith ("but David calm and b:;"ave/Holds his ground for Gad will save")

are ineffective is neat~ established. Although Goliath is described in

a German uniform, one senses that the killer is war itself (none of the

trench poets exhibit much animosity for the Germans):

(God' 5 eyes are dim, His ears are shut). One cruel backhand sabre-cut --''l'm hits l'm killedl young David cries, Throws blind~ forward, chokes ••• and dies. And look, spike-helmeted, grey, grim, Goliath straddles over him.

38

AlI of Davidls struggles are shown as puny and weak. On~ defiance remains

and that is struck down. Graves has succes$fully conveyed the feelings of

frustration and hopelessness which assailed the soldiers in the trenches.

The biblical comforts -- stories which show goodness, justice and truth

prevailing -- are demonstrab~ wrong in the face of trench 8xperience:

But • • • the historian of that fight Had not the heart to tell it right.

This kind of realism, channelled into a traditional mould, is Graves' reply.

For once, the blend of myth and present experience is achieved without

strain, and the pit Y of it aIl comes through as strongly as ~n some of the

better of Owen's poems.

"Not Dead," on the other hand, escapes the reality. Davidls

presence is fel t in the oak, the brook and the flowers, "Over the whole

HOE:ld in a lit tle t"hile/Breaks his slovl smUe." Doubtless Graves is being

true to his emotional experience. His memor,y has recaptured David and

returned him metamorphosed in nature "to cool my heat and pain." HOvlever,

one is bothered once more by th8 shallowness of the concept. Dylan

Thomas, among others, explores the philosophical idea in "The force that

through the green fuse, Il but Graves' poem is totally unintellectual. He

39

avoids rather than considers the fact of death.

There are three other poems directly related to the war in

Fairies and Fusiliers. 1~',Then l 'm killed" is an attempt at fatalisrn which

suffers in comparison vlith Graves' prosaic accounts' of arguing the odds on

death and maiming in Goodbye To An That, v-Thich are frighteningly cold-

blooded. Also there are unhappy modulations of tone, from the forthright

And there' sone thing that l knmv weIl l'm damned if l'Il bedamned to Hell,

to the romantic yearning of:

On your lips mw life is hung: a friends and lovers, you can sa.ve' Ycur playfellow from the grave.

The concept of a poet being immç:>rtal through the medium of his .poetry is

very familiar (one thinks of Sha1œspeare' s sonnets and Auden' s "In memory

of 'ft! .B. Yeats" as examples), but Graves' poem has no Shakespearian grandeur

and none of Aucen's ironie complexity. His sincerity is not served by

his immature thinkine and faulty techtüque (in the last line above, the

ugly lengthening of sound in "playfellOt"" has no structural nor metrical

purpose. )

"The Next Tt/ar" too is a frustrating poem to read because one

imagines hOvl much further th~ concepts could ha.ve been developed. There

. is an uneasy mixturfl of bitterness and resignation v-Thich tend to cancel

each other out and lessen the ultimate effect:

Another Har soon gets begun, A dirtier, a morfl glorious one; Then, boys, you'll have ta play a11 in; It's the cruellest team Hill Hin,

leaos to:

And children here will thrust and poke, Shoot and die, and laugh at the joke, vlith bows and arrows and wooden spears, Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers.

Bitterness and resignation were both genuine and valid responses to this

war, and ta the violent characteristics inherent in human nature, but in

this poem the moods remain simp~ moods. They are unresolved and un-

considered. Yoked together here they do not give strength but structural

,,,eakness to the poem.

This is not the case wi th Il A Child' s Nightmare. ~' Like "Nursery

Nemories" in the earlier volume, this poem is based upon his childish

fear and is related to his present condition. Now lying wounded, Graves

hears aga in the voice of his nightmare, Il a voic e cruel and fla t," which

repeats over and over again, "Cat • • • Cat • • • Cat • • ." The voice

ho

becomes the cat (when he was a child it had no form), as Graves describes:

Horphia drowned, again l lay In a crater by High Hood: He Has there wi th s traddling legs, Staring eyes as big as eggs, Purring as he lapped my blood, His black bulk darkening the day, Hith a voice cruel and fIat, "Catt ••• Catt • Cati • •• " he said, "Catt ••• Cati •• • "

This is the sinister, ghoulish stuff to frighten children, but also

successful in demonstrating Graves' horror. The vague, eerie quality of

the opening becomes solidified in the morphia-induced delirium, but the ten-

sion is not lessened. In fact, the threat has crystallized (Graves uses

"straddling" here as he used "straddle" in "Goliath and David" earlier,

to connote helplessness and hopelessness in the victim), and he has

achieved the difficul t feat of making the picture as frightening as the

•

readerls expectation.

Of the sixt y-six poems in the two war-time volumes only thirty, .~

less than half, are about trench-experience and many of these do not

describe the war in its own terms. Graves often draws back from the actual

imagery of loathsome trenches, violent death and numerous bodies. The

dreamer-like sensibilities of the young poet were too delicate most of the

time to root dOloln in the mud and blood for poetry. This ra ther belies

Graves' statement in Goodbye To AlI ~ (p. 146), about hO't<l he had ·shown

sorne manuscripts to Sassoon who "frovmed and said that the war should not

be written about in such a realistic way • l told him, in my old-

soldier manner, that he would soon change his style." Of course Sassoon

did change his style, but Graves Has unable to maintain his Irealism l

beyond a few shocking poems and details. B~rgonzi observes that: "on

the occasions when Graves confronts the horror • • • he is unable to do

anything with the experience itself: it does not provoke the anger of

Sassoon nor the pit y of Owen.,,9

The problem can be resolved by considering Graves as a sensitive

man-child. The man could be an lold soldier' and affect a callousness to

brutalities in order to render them in his poetry, but the youth shied

away, hurt, into a softer, emotional subjectivity.

It is of interest that there are t.wo more trench poems that were

not published during the war. "The Leveller" appears in Poems 1914-1926.

9Bergonzi, p. 67.

•

e,

In this poem two soldiers (one, eighteen and innocent, and the other an

old adventurer who had seen much death before), are struck down by the

same she11. The old 'sweat' dies groaning "mother" while the youngster

dies "cursing God with brutal oaths'." The sergeant wrote the same letter

to their next-of-kin:

He died a hero's death: and lJe His comrades of 'A' Company Deeply regret his death; we shall AlI deeply miss so true a pal.

The poem is very much in Sassoon's st.Yle. The basic irony is one which

Sassoon would appreciate and the fluent, colloquial, uneducated style of

the letter (the repetition of "deeply" and the use of "pal"), is gained

as effortlessly as Sassoon's "In the Pink."

In Collected Poems 1959 there appears "Sergean"t-Hajor Money, fi

which tells the stor,y of a regular N.C.O. who tried to run his share of

the New Army by the old standards. He is therefore shot by two of his own

men. Graves insists that no one is to blame for this murder but the

unnatural situation of war itself. AlI three were courageous men in the

face of the enemy, but could not adjust to one another. The realism and

naturalness of this poem stand in contrast with "The Legion" and the

reason is that, written in retrospect, Graves no longer needed the "pride"

which sustained him during the l'lar. Now he could be dispassionate and

objective.

Graves' control over technique in these two poems is quite

masterly. It is not sa much that his trench poer.Js are badly constructed

as that they are often strained. With exceptions, they seem forced; the

patterns unnatural. Their value lies mainly in their themes and the

•

•

•

tones which illumina te those themes. However, as a collection of poetry

written under such conditions and at such an age, they are not negligible

by any means, and Graves provides us with an interesting and different

facet of trench poetry •

L3

IV. ISAAC ROSENBERG

1fuen the war broke out, Isaac Rosenberg1 TrIaS in South Africa

trying to repair his poor heal th. He returned to England in Ylay 1915 and

enlisted in the ranks. From June 1916 until he was killed on the lst

April 1918, he was on active service at the front for the better part of

twenty months; a tour of dut,y far exceeding that of the other poets in

this study. Furthermore, as an enlisted man he did not have the benefit

of those amenities enjoyed by Sassoon, Graves and Owen as officers and,

if nothing else, his trench poetry is a triumph of fortitude and deter-

mination.

During his life Rosenberg issued three privately printed

collections of poetry: Night and Day (1912), Youth (1915) and Moses

(1916). Apart from these publications he had only three poems published

during his lifetime: "The Dead Heroes" in South African Women in Council

(December, 1914), "Break of Day in the Trenches" and "Marching" in

Poetry (Chicago, December 1916). In 1922, Gordon Bottomley selected and

edited most of his fini shed poetry and included a memoir by Laurence

Binyon. 2 In 1937, Rosenbergts poetry, prose and letters together with

some of his drawings, were collected and edited by Bottomley and Denys

Harding, with a foreword by Siegfried Sassoon. 3

ISee appendix 3 ,PP.I02, for a biographical sketch.

2Isaac Rosenberg, Poems, ed. Gordon Bottomley (London, 1922).

3The Collected Ttlorks of Isaac Rosenberg, ed. Gordon Bottomley and Denys Harding (London, 1937)7 AlI subsequent references will be to this texte

The edition of 1937 is divided into three main sections; IIPoems, Il

"Prose ll and "Letters." In the sub-section "Trench Poems 1916-1918" are to

be found twenty poems, but there are five other war poems in other sub-

sections. Although not many in number, Rosenberg1s trench poems are often

conceived on a grand scale and sorne are of great length, 50 that his work

more than matches in importance and bulk the output of other trench poets.

There are a number of factors that separate Rosenberg from

Sassoon, Graves and Owen as trench poets. His formaI school education was

less than theirs, although he made up for this deficiency by reading widely

and attending night classes. He came from a working-class, urban, Jewish

family, and derived much strength in his art from Judaic history and

religion. He was a painter as weIl as a poet -- he had studied in the art

school of Birbeck College and in the Slade School of Art before the war

and in his painting he often strove for huge, symbolic effects. He was also

a ranker and, therefore, not prone to suffer from the narrow sense of

responsibility and dut Y often typical of an officerls outlook. (In fact,

Rosenberg saw responsibility and dut Y in general human terms from his lowly

position and began ,.,ith a vie .. r which Owen and Sassoon had to develop

gradually.) But, most important, he l"ras a dedicated artist at the time he

l-lent into the trenches. He had already consecrated hÜi life to imaginative

creation, not in the young, amateurish way of the other three poets, but in

terrns of a total and all-encompassing commitment to art. This is not to say

that his development Has complete. Harding remarks on the exploratory

nature of Rosenberg's verse at this time,L while Bergonzi considers that

Ln.H. Harding, IIAspects of the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg,1I Experience into Words (London, 1963), p. 97.

Rosenberg' s early work "is marred by a quali ty that could be called groping

as rnuch as exploration," with a resultant incoherency or obscurity.5

Despite conditions that would have destrqyed aIl but the

dedicated artist and denied the small but important comforts and privileges

of rank, he managed to keep his creative imagination functioning. H01r,ever,

as he makes clear in several letters, he considered that most of his poetry

stood in need of revis ion, which only time and peace could have allowed.

Probably, too, he Hould have eliminated some of the slighter poems Hhose

sentiments and construction Hould have offended his reflective examination.

The letters, although incomplete, clearly reveal Rosenberg's

sufferings and trials as a soldier and an artiste Since he was killed

during the Har there is no retrospective autobiography to organize and

concentrate his experience, but these letters form a contemporary record

111hich is useful. Two the7les emerge from them: the Hretchedness of his

life a~ a soldier (he does not dwell on the horrors of Har so much as on

its unhappy squalor, its discor.lforts, its time and energy-consuming

pettiness and its effects upon his poor health) and his unceasing interest

in art. Hany of his letters to Edward Harsh, for example, begin with the

dreariness and discomfort of his situation and then continue in a gossipy,

but nonetheless serious tone, Hith questions and comments about poets and

poetry. One re8 lizes how very difficul t i t .. las for Rosenberg to carry on

Horking a t his poetry and yet beneath the misery, one can see the powerful,

elastic egoism of a real artist.

)Bergon?i, p. 111.

•

•

•

47

There also emerges, piecemeal, sorne elements of a theor,y of

poetr,y, or at least, a statement of his own attitudes and methods. "Ideas"

and "tone" are the keynotes of this aesthetic:

l seldom remember the tiords of any poem l readj but the tone of the poem, the leading idea, nearly always fix their impressionj (p. 326)

and:

and:

Simple poetry -- that is where an interesting complexity of thought is kept in tone and right'valueto the dominating ide a so that it is understandable and still ungraspable; (p. 371)

l also feel a kind of injustice if mw idea is not grasped and is ignored, and only pettr,y cavilling at form, which l had knovm aIl along was so ,is continually knocked into me. l feel quite sure that form is only a matter of time. (p. 372)

Besides ideas and tone, he was concerned to achieve a qualit,y of suggestion:

a presence in the poem of something undefined that enhances the overall

effect:

l think with you that poetry should be definite thought and clear expression, however subtle; l donlt think there should be any vagueness at aIl; but a sense of something hidden and felt to be there. (p. 319)

It is evident that his friends constantly urged him to clarify his ideas.

It is equally evident that, while genuinely grateful for their admiration

and advice, he would go his Dl'ln way despite them. Rosenberg IS sensibility

was to~gh and many aspects of his style fairly weIl formed by the time he

went to France, and although there is change in his verse -- and it would

have continued to improve had he lived -- he could not be led. He had to

discover and develop in his own w?y .

•

•

•

He held independent views on rhythm and did not care for con-

ventional metres. He preferred to work in larger units than mere "words"

and argued that "phrases'.' (which includes images and symbols) are more

important than idiom or syntaxe

In reference to the emotional content of poetr,y, he wrote:

l do not like Rupert Brooke's begloried sonnets for the same reason [their sentiments are commonplac~. What l mean is second hand phrases lambent fires etc takes from its reality and strength [sicJ. It should be approached in a colder way, more abstract, with less of the million feelings ever,ybody feels; or these should be concentrated in one distinguished emotion. (p. 348)

(Rosenberg's prose is ungrammatical, its punctuation erratic and its

clarity marred by obliquity. This kind of incoherence was seen as re-

flected in his poetr,y by Marsh, but Rosenberg usually teased him by ad-

mitting "vagueness" and claiming that he could do nothing about it.)

L8

Finally, his letters complain continually that his life is starved

of artistic nourishment. His "muse" deserts him frequently; his vocabulary

is threatened by lack of conversation; he has few books to read or time to

read them. He misses pre-war London terribly, especially its artistic

coteries. He longed for civilian life and even Hent so far as to state

that Marsh 1 s occupation as a civil servant Has more important than his own

as soldier -- i..Jhich thought would have struck the other lV'ar poets as

blackest heresy.

AU of this inclicates that Rosenberg was capable of great de-

tachment tm'Jards the hTar -- not as a man, but as an artiste It g,ave him

his greatest strength, for it enabled hirn to put the war into different

L9

kinds of perspective. To Laurence Binyon he \vrote, "1 am determined that

this war, 'l'li th all its powers for devastation, shall not master my poeting ll

(p. 373), and continued by saying that he would "refine" it all into poetry

afterwards. Indeed, for much of his last year he was working on a play

the title was changed twice, but he finally settled on "The Unicorn" --, ,

of which he t-Trote:

If l am lucky and come off undamaged, l mean to put all my innermost experiences into the "Unicorn." l want it to symbolize the war and all the devastating forces let loose by an ambitious and unscrupulous will. (p. 379)

Only a small part of this project had been sketched out when he

was killecl., but the design shows Rosenberg's determination to impose the

order and form of art upon the chaotic shapelessness of war. Not being

a member of any war fraternity and drawing his main sustenance from pre-

'!rJar London, he tended to impose his poetry on his subject rather than

merely describe 'lrJhat he saH. This is the central fact of Rosenberg 1 s

individuality as a trench-poet. He had a freedom of choice which younger

or less-formed poets coulcl. not recognize for themselves.

1:Jhen he enlisted i t '!rIas not out of patriotism: "1 never joined

the army from patriotic reason. Nothing can justify Har. l suppose l'le

must all fight to get the trouble over." (p. 30,). Thus there are few

patriotic poerns in his collection. "The Dead Heroes" is a paean to the

sacrifice for mother country, which concludes:

Flame out, flame out, 0 Songl Star ring to star, Strong as our hurt is strong Our children are.

•

Their blood is England's heart~ By their dead hands It is their noble part That England stands.

England -- Time gave them thee; They gave back this To win Eterni ty And claim Godls kiss.

It is not a particular~ good poern, but it has several qualities that are

50

typical of Rosenberg's style. He tries to aehieve grandeur and size through

great concepts ("Time," "Eternity~" "God") and timeless symbols ("flame~"

"song" and "star"). Typically the sense of the sécond stanza quoted may

be felt by the reader, but a pros aie paraphrase would be diffieult to find.

The metre crea tes more résonance than rhythm. There is a Keatsian or

pre-Raphaelite richness of texture whieh Rosenberg often eultivated in his

verse.6 AlI of these figure in his style, from the best to the slight.est

poems.

TWo other poems of a pa trio tic nature are found in the sub-

section headed "Fragments." The first, "To itlilhe1m II, Il harps on his

cruelty and ambition l .. hich are doomed to punishrnent and defeat at the hands

of England. The second, addressed to "British ~-!omen" and extolling their

sons, was Hritten for a Christmas card which the poet rlesigned for his

Division in 1917:

Not for mere love-delights God meant the profound hour When an Englishman l-;ras planned. Responsib1e hourI wherein God Hrote anel., His guarantee of the Norld 1 s suret y •

6J.M. Cohen, in an interesting article ("Isaac Rosenberg: From Romantic to Classic," Tulane Studies .!!!. Eng1ish, X (1960), l29-lLI2), argues that one can trace a definite deve10pment in Rosenberg's poetrJ away from the Romantic: "he vras a poor romantic '\-1horJ circumst.ance .-las trans­forming into a remarkab1y. good classically inclined poet." p. Ih2.

• (Rosenberg suffered from no inhibitions regarding sex in his poetry.)

This is b1ood-quickening rhetoric, but the poet did not deceive himself.

In a letter to John Rodker, he says: IIturn over for a patriotic gush, a

jingo spasm ll (p. 350). Whether he was ever moved by such sentiments one

cannot tell -- he certainly loved his native country -- but he was always

able to judge thelr1 coldly.

More typical of Rosenberg is a poem t..rritten in South Africa,

liOn receiving news of the war." Here the poet is a seer, a visionary, l-lho

regards events as part of a vast cyclical pattern. ~linter destroys the

vitality and beauty of summer and is thus a convenient symbo1, but

Rosenberg goes further. "Some spirit old" has brought the t"inter into

men' s lives to des troy them. The poem end s :

Red fangs have torn His face. God's blood i5 shed. He mourns from His lone place His children dead.

01 ancient crimson cursel Corrode, consume. Give back this universe Its pristine bloom.

The funereal tone of the first stanza quoted transforms into the supp-

lication .in the second, but in both, the war is viev18d as part of a fund-

amental pattern of human history. In this last stanza, hosenberg adopts

the mode of the poet-priest. His appeal is at one with man's prayers

(for the renewal of life, for water, for relief from plagues) to the

universal forces since the most ancient times. It is much more intense

than the plea.ding of bored, idealistic youth tIThich one can hear in the

early war poetry of men like Brooke and Sassoon.

51

• 52

Biblical sonorities often echo through Rosenberg's poetry.

Indeed, twice he invokes biblical stories to gain an impressive weight

behind his ideas and not be tied down to the details of this war:

and:

Sweet laughter charred in the flame That clutched the cloud and earth ~lhile Solomon r s towers crashed betvJeen The gird of Babylonrs mirth. ("The Destruction of Jerusalem").

o hath the sun plunged down? ~lhat is the molten gold -­These thundering fires blown Through heaven -- '\olhere the smoke rolled? (The Burning of the Temple").

I-lhen Rosenberg writes "God," when he draws upon Judaic history

and the Old Testament for vigour and texture in his verse, the effect is

always powerful. The feelings behind the invocation etch themselves into

a reader's awareness in a way that neither Graves nor Sassoon could ever

do with their "Oh Godl" and "Christi" Only Owen cornes near ta Rosenberg's

pOrler in religious intonation. There is no sense in Rosenberg of Sunday-

School religion, but of a centuries-old close relationship with the mysteries

of the universe and man's place therein.

Often this pOvler is allied to a deliberate avoidance of prosaic

logic or development. "August 19111" asks what has been burnt from the lives

of soldiers by the fires of war. "Gold" and "Honey" are destroyed and only

"iron" is left:

Iron are our lives Holten right through our youth. A burnt space through ripe fields, A fair mouth r s broken tooth.

The last image has not grown out of the rest of the poem. It does not

fit into a logical structure or development except throllgh an association

53

of ideas (waste, ugliness and destruction.) Yet the effect is greater

than if a similar association "lere spelled out in a narrative, which tends

to dissipate force in favour of reason. Su ch compression, Johnston

suggests,7 reflects the influence of the IPlagist poets, since Rosenberg

knew Ezra Pound and admired F.S. Flint.

In "The Je"l-]fI and in sOrne letters, Rosenberg hints at anti-semitic

discrimination against him in the army, but very few could "sneerlf at the

pm~er which Rosenberg's heritage conferred upon his art by way of language,

symbolism and attitudes.

But Rosenberg did not clraH solely on the Scriptures for depth

and scope. 'Th,0 poems, flSoldier: 'IWentieth Centurylf and "Girl to a Soldier

on Leave," see the soldier not as a poor miserable creature, but as a new

"Titan." (In fact, they appear to be two drafts of a single poem since

certain phrases and ideas recur, but as they stand in the text they are

distinct and separa te.) In both of these the poet is trying to convey

the new stature of his comrarles and, at the sarne time, to exhort thern to

recognize i t thernselves, for they have Iflooked through death."

Sirnilarly, liA Horm fed on the Heart of Corinth" associates the

present wi th a rnythological and/or historical pasto England is now being

wooed by the destructive worm t-rhich brought down Corinth, Rabylon, Troy and

Rome. The Har is placed in a perspective which simultaneously heightens

and controls it.

There are other elements in Rosenbere;' s style which may be

7Johnston, p. 223.

• 54

isolated and examined through the medium of his slighter poems. Certainly

the fact that he was a painter enabled him to achieve sorne success with

impressionistic sketches. "Marching" and "The Troop Ship" are good examples

of these. The first, subtitled "as seen from the left file," begins:

AlI a red brick moving glint. Like flaming pendulums,hands Swing across the khaki Mustard-coloured khaki To the automatic feet.

This first stanza 1s built up on colours and movement and suggests rather

than describes the totality of what he sees, although the details are

sharp and clear. Similarly, the second poem 1s evocative more than

realistic:

Grotesque andqueerly huddled Contortionists to twist The sleepy soul to a sleep, Irle lie aIl sorts of ways And cannot sleep. The wet wind is so cold, And the lurching men so careless, That, should you drop to a doze, Windls fumble or menls feet Are on your face.

The economy of these poems is remarkable, as whole scenes are captured in

a few deft touches. These sketches are almost pure visualizations and have

little to do with the "ideas" which Rosenberg considered 50 important, but

the ability to create visualizations is a necessar,r part of a poetls craft,

which stands him in good stead when composing on a larger scale.

There are two other sketches worth notice. The first, "From

France," traces the desolation of that countr,r by means of contrasted images.

From "café lights," "hot life" and "women gay Il the focus blends into

"broken men," "heaped stones" and "charred signboard." It is a slight but

•

•

•

55

effective evocation of disastrous change. The second poem, "Home Thoughts

from France," pictures the ghostlike qua lit y of joy when the poet is

trapped in desolation. "Wan fragile faces of joy" cannot dispel a "pitiless

trance," because the power of their attraction is insufficient to break the

hold that the war has on his mind. This poem captures the poignant yearning

of a front-line soldier more effective~ than the usual catalogues of home

pleasures (books, paintings, music and the countr,yside.) There is an

excellent control over tone here ~Thich deliberately prevents sadness from

becoming maudlin or slipping into despair:

Dear faces startled and shaken, Out of wild dust and sounds You yearn to me, lure and sadden My heart with futile bounds •

This control and Rosenberg's sense of aesthetic distance from

the horrors of the war are weil illustrated in tl-l0 poems which strike a

note of genuine, if grim, humour. The ironically titled "The Immortals"

begins with 'Vlhat seems to be desperate, hysterical blood-lust:

Then in my agony l turned And made my hands red in their gore. In vain -- for faster than l slew They rose more cruel than before. l killed and killed with slaughter mad; l killed till a11 my strength '\olas gone.

But one discovers in the last line that his enemies are lice. The effect

is satisfactor,y only on the first reading. It is a joke which cannot be

enjayed again after the 'punch-line' is knawn.

This is nat the case with "Louse Hunting." Here the poet creates

a lurid picture of a new Inferno through his impressionistic technique •

In the candIe-lit dug-o'lt, soldiers tr,y to de-lause their clathes:

•

•

•

Soon like a demon's pantomime The place was raging. See the silhouettes agape, See the gibbering shadows Mixed with the battled arms on the wall. See gargantuan hooked fingers Pluck in supreme flesh To smutch supreme littleness. See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling.

This visualized humour (note the repetition of "see") is grim beeause the

56

setting is made demonic and at the baek of the reader'S mind in a comparison

with the soldiers' "supreme littleness" ready to be erushed. Yet, humour

it certainly is. Rosenberg has taken the misery of vermin-infestation

and not treated it ruefully, but on mock-epic scale. One knows (from his

letters) how mueh he and his companions suffered from lice, a squalid

discomfort when compared with the omnipresent threat of death, but none-

theless real for all that. In.this poem, he finds the right forro and tone

for his subject; elevated to heroic proportions, but moeking, in order to

regain perspective.

Three poems on a grand seale illustrate the method that Rosenberg

eonsidered the best way to describe the war. He wanted to weave an inspired

concept into the texture of his Har-time experience in order to get the

essence of the war in symbolie terms. Of his "Daughters of War" he l-Trote

to Marsh that it had been worked on for over a year and that he felt it to

be his best poem to date: "1 am sure once you get hold of it you vlill

find it my best poem, most complete, most epic," (p. 320). He said that

he had striven to capture "that sense of inexorableness the human (or

inhuman) side this war hasll (p. 319). Rosenberg often demonstrates a kind

of fatalism regarding the war vlhieh separates him one more remove· from the

• other poets of the trenches.

"Daughters of War" is based on a great symbol of passionate

Amazonian women who lure men to their death in order to enjoy them as

lovers. Rosenberg tries to dig deeply into the nature of war in his rôle

of visionary-. The desire of these maidens in "love-heat" can only be

assuaged by the spirits of men, so the Amazons create a war. The sexual

symbolism and a sense of freeing men ~rom physical bondage, both convey

a reconciliation t-lith death. There is pit Y for lian's condition, but his

fate is shawn as ineluctable:

l saw in prophet gleams These mighty daughters in their dances Beckon each soul aghast from its crimson corpse To mix in their glittering dances. l heard the mighty dancers' giant sighs In sleepless passion for the sons of valour, And envy of the days of flesh Barring their love with mortal boughs across The mortal boughs, the mortal tree of life, The old bark burnt to1i th iron wars They blow to a live flame To char the young green days And reach the occult soul; they have no softer lure -­No softer lure than the savage ways of death.

vlar, then, is a repeated process beyond the control of man and to which he

must respond by sacrifice of his body:

Wi th the Amazonian t-JÏnd of them Over our corroding faces That must be broken -- broken for evermore So the soul can leap out Into their huge embraces.

The long poem of five irregular stanzas ends with a speech by one of the

maidens, who suggests that although her sisters' appetites may have been

satisfied by this war, she has yet to receive her lovers:

57

• My sisters have their males Clean of the dust of old days That clings about these white hanos And yearns in those voices sad They are my sisters l lovers in other days and years.

Thus Rosenberg encompasses his experience by means of an imposed order.

58

There is a fine incantatory ring to these Iines, enhanced by the repetitions.

The images are sharp and ages-old. He does achieve his sense of "inex-

orableness." Yet i t is not an unmarred poem. Cohen comments upon one

of its weaknessesj an uncertainty of touch that moves betl.,een a "dry hard

quality and the visual object malt ing aHay into romantic abstraction. ,,8

Furthermore, although the pOvler of this poem is readily apparent, it is

as Johnston remarks, "far removed •.• from the circumstances of its 0:dgin."9

A mythological representation of fatalism has its grandeur here at the

expense of details from the actual war around the poet. It has anonymity

rather than universality. It couIn have been written by a non-combatant

at any time.

In the poem IIIn ~{ar," Rosenberg tries to obtain a similar effect

of timelessness vlithout going so far from the realities of the trenches.

It is constructed with much greater attention to form than the other. The

bTelve stanzas are quite regular and qegin with a measured, philosophical

consideration of life and death. The poet then foc uses upon himself as

a Inember of a burial party, digging graves for the newly killed. Their

weariness in the heat of noon and the sombre nature of their conversation

8Cohen, "From Romantic to Classic, Il p. 137.

9Johnston, p. 230.

are evoked as they rest:

In the old days when death Stalked the warld For the flower of men, And the rose of beaut,r faded And pined in the great gloom,

One day we dug a grave: \..J'e were vexed With the sun's heat. We scanned the hooded dead: At noon we sat and talked.

How death had kissed their eyes Three dread noons since, How human art won The dark soul to flicker Till it was lost again:

And we whom chance kept '\o1hole But haggard, Spent -- were charged To make a place for them who knew No pain in any place.

These stanzas move with a deliberation wholly in tune.l-Tith the subject: a

tired reverence, in which fatigue and heat play their part in keeping the

emotion Iml-key. It is unfortunate that the climax of the poem should be

59

treated hysterically. As the priest. prays,thie poet recognizes "rny brother's

name":

The good priest read: 'I heard ••• ' Di!1l1y rny brain Held words and lost • Sudden rny blood ran cold • GOd1 GOdl it could not be.

In striving for effect (a realization of the brotherhood of living and dead),

Rosenberg's grip loosens. This 1055 of control is seen clearly in contrast

with the restraint of the other stanzas, for the poem ends as sonorously

as it opened:

• Hhat are the grea t sceptred dooms To us caught In the wild wave? We break ourselves on them, My brother, our hearts and years.

In the superb creation of measured rhythm and striking phrases, this poem

is memorable. The metre sustains a gravit y and depth, while the phrases

60

("sceptred dooms," for example) echo in the reader's mind. Above aIl, one

admires the general restraint of the deep-fel t emotion, l<1hich is only

marred by one lapse of tone.

However, despite the ver,y fine achievement of this poem, it is

still tied only loosely to the details of the trenches. Both of these

poems are full of provocative ideas and exciting language TioThich, together

provide a dense, rich texture, but both faii to evoke the war explicitly.

Their effect could have been enhanced had Rosenberg blended the particular

into the general.

"Dead Manls Dump" cornes closest to this pattern. Like IIIn War"

it is based upon specifie experience which is related in a more general

philosophical context, but here the experience is d.escribed more graphically

and fully. Unfortunately, Rosenberg was not quite able to achieve a tight

control of structure and point-of-view, and the expert modulation from

tone te tone that such a design needs for success. Given time, he would

undoubtedly have found these, but as it stands the poem is a flawed

masterpiece, too fragrnentar,y and disjointed.

It is divided into twelve rough sections of var,ying length and

theme. The opening is unernotionally descriptive. A limber carrying

•

•

barbed-wire crashes over a pile of corpses:

The whee1s lurched over sprawled dead But pained them not, though their bones· crunched, Their shut mouths made no moan.

This, together with the title, establishes a seemingly detached view of

the horror and pit y of the scene, but then the tone changes, becomes

rhetorical, as the poet asks metaphysical questions:

Earthl have the,y gone into you? Somewhere they must have gone, And flung on your hard back Is their SOUIIS sack Emptied of God-ancestralled essences. Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

He wonders that:

None saw their spirits! shadow shake the grass, Or stood aside for the half used 1ife to pass Out of the doomed nostri1s and the doomed mouth, When the swift iron burning bee . Drained the wild honey of their youth.

(One may measure the unevenness of the poem in the changing quality of the

language, from such excellent phrases as "half used life" and "soulls

sack," with its Hopkinsian ring, to the forced image of the "iron bee.")

These speculations show that Rosenberg has moved from detachment into an

involvement with the dead. His questioning of their condition 1eads

naturally to a questioning of that imr~ortality which the living feel, and

whieh those dead had felt too until "the shrapnel called 'An end 1" No

answer is offered, but this section ends t.ri th the rea lization tha t man

himself is responsible for these savage deaths:

Dark Earthl dark Heavensl swinging in chemie smoke, What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul With lightening and thunder from your mined heart, Which man's self dug, and his blind fingers bored?

The poem then reverts to descriptive narrative as an incident is isolated:

61

• A man's brains splattered on A stretcher bearer's face.

But this soldier is in too grievous a s'tate for "human tenderness." The

poem ends with three sections of graphie description of the moment of

death of another wounded man just as the poet's limber cornes into sight:

We heard his weak scream, Iole heard his very last sound, And our wheels grazed his dead face.

It is a moment that the poet rightly leaves unembellished; the a~le and

pit Y are evident in the simplicity.

Despite parts of great power and effect, the poem suffers from

an ove ra Il lack of unity. It is shapeless. Yet the quality of the

language, the shocking and touching descriptions and the nature of the

questions he poses, aIl make it a startling achievment; full of suggestion

and implication. There is no resolution, yet Rosenberg has clarified the

inability of human emotion and intellect to grasp and absorb the nature of

wartime death. It is an awful and rrvsterious phenomenon; pit y cannot

avail the dying, nothing can. Man is guil ty, but of what exactly, and to

what extent? There are connections of a kind between the living and the

dead, but '"lhat are they? i-Jithout answers, the poem concludes in wonder

and fear; compassionate helplessness and guilt. Perhaps after the war

5.osenberg could have found satisfying resolutions, but face to face lvith

the dead and dying in such numbers, he could only ask.

62

It is only just to conclude '"lith t'"lO poems in which his conception

and execution are hetter matched; these two are not 50 grand in design, but

more perfect in achievement. "Returning, We hear the Larks" is a beautiful ,

lyric, contrasting joy with death. Both can fall unexpectedly from the

sky, ùut on this occasion i t is joy only: the song of birds. As weary

men return to camp, they fear the threat which lurks in the dark sky:

But harkI joy -- joy -- strange joy. LoL heights of night ringing with unseen larks. Music showering on our unturned list'ning faces.

Death could drop,from the dark As easily as song --But song only dropped, Like a blind man'I s dreams on the sand By dangerous tides, . Like a girl's dark hairfor she dreams no ruin lies there, Or her kisses where a serpent hides.

The great beauty lies in the poetls ability to grasp joy and to delight

63

in it without ever forgetting the curse under which this temporary pleasure

is offered. The closing images are a superb blend of the beautiful and

the sinister; of ecstasy and danger.

IIBreak of Day in the Trenches" is a slightly more complex

evocation of subtler moods. Standing guard at dawn, Rosenberg has just

placed a poppy behind his ear. The poppy has grov1n from "man 1 s veins, "

as nature and humanity meet and overlap. When he notices a rat he specula tes

ironically, that it can travel back and forth between the enemy trenches,

as man and man do not meet. "The rat, universal1y acknovlledged as one of

the most àespicable creatures on the face of the earth, has a lesson to

teach exalted t-1an."lO The rat can, if it desires; grin at:

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes Less chanced than you for life, Bonds to the whims of murder.

10,Jack Lindeman, "The Trench poems of Isaac Rosenberg," Literary Review, XI, No. L (Summer 1959), 582.

It, unlike soldiers generally-, can have "cosmopolitan sy-mpathies." The

poem ends:

What do y-ou see in our ey-es • • • What quaver -- what heart aghast? Poppies 117hose roots are in men' s veins Drop, and are ever dropping; But mine in my ear is safe, Just a little white with the dust.

The sadness in this poem is very touching. The poppy- may- have safety-, the

rat may- have freedom, but the poet is denied both. Here is not envy-, 50

much as y-earning, y-et aIl i8 focused by- the resigned irony- of the opening

lines, and a sense of the need for a brotherhood of man. The poem

6L

combines a rich mixture of rnoods: irony, poignancy, wonder and resignation.

The blend of visually-focused incident and reflective tones is masterful.

As an evocation of trench experience in a minor key it is one of the best

poems written during the \olar.

There js no doubt that Rosenberg is one of the two best poets

who wrote in the trenches. His poetry shows his great command of language,

tone and ideas. At his best there is immense power, but, as he knew him-

self, it had not y-et been fully controlled by- technique. His imagination

(which he called "inspiration,") was elastic and independent enough to try

.to eneompass his experience, understaLd it and then order it into art. He

was never satisfied with mere narrative or description of details. Irony

and bitterness were the least of his ernotional responses. For Rosenberg,

the poet was a prophet with a golden voiee, who tried to penetrate

~~steries and then illumina te them. It is possible, on the strength of his

war poetry alone, to speculate that, had he lived, he would have become a

major poet. He was not limi ted by- the war, although it helped to sharpen

his talent, and one is convinced that his greatest achievements were aIl

before him when he was killed.

6~

v • vlILFRED OHEN

At the age of twenty-two, Wilfred ~len2 enlisted in the Artists'

Rifles. He was subsequently commissioned in the Manchester Regiment and

sent to France in December 1916. Apart from a brief spell in hospital,

66

he served in the trenches until June 1917, when he was returned to England

suffering from neurasthenia. At Craiglockhart Hospital, he met Siegfried

Sassoon, who encouraged him in his desire to be a poet. In September 1918,

Owen went back to France where he won the M.C. He was killed in action on

the wth November, one weekbefore the Armistice.

Owen had met the French poet and pacifist, Laurence Teilhade, in

Françe before the war, but until his friendship with Sassoon, his only

literar,r acquaintance was his cousin, Leslie Gunston. (These two encouraged

each other and cor~eted in writing poetr,r, but Gun~ton achieved ver,r little

except slight recognition among Georgian poets.) Through Sassoon, Owen

met Graves and a host of literar,r men in London, but it was from Sassoon

hirnself, "Vlho already had a reputation and some stature in literary society,

that Owen gained the rnost confidence. Ahrays ver;! shy anà "Vrithout selî­

confidence, Ovlen had suffered from a lack of a University education and

intellectual companionship. Thus Sassoon's encouragement and respect,

their long conv'ersations about the war and poetr,r, helped Owen to develop

more assurance:

lSee Appendix 4-, PP.I02 , for a biographical sketch.

Know that since mid-September, when you still regarded me as a tiresome 1itt1e knocker on your door, l he1d you as Keats + Christ + E1ijah + my colonel + my father confessor + Amenophis IV in profile. • • • And you have fixed my 1ife -- hC)V1ever short. You did not 1ight me. l spun round you a satellite for a month, but l sha11 ~ling out soon, a dark star in the orbit where you will b1aze. 2 .

In acknow1edgement of Sassoonls introductions, ~ien writes:

"Ohl the wor1d you are making for me, Sassoonl" (p. 511).

Despite this fulsome praise, the effect of Sassoon upon Owen

61

should not be over-rated. Perhaps in the increasing use of colloquia1isms,

the restraining of 1uxurious language and the deve10pment of poetic forms

for propaganda purposes, <À-Ten \olas inf1uenced by his friend, but these trends

are in evidence before their meeting. 3 Sassoon himself discounts in large

measure his influence on OvTen 1 s style and themes. L

On1y four of <À-Ten IS poems viere pub1ished during his 1ifetime.

"Song of Songs" appeared in The Hydra (September lst, 1917). "l'liners,"

"Futi1ity" and "Hospital Barge at Cérisy" appeared in The Nation, the

first on January 16th and the others on June lSth, 1918. Several poems

'.J'ere published posthumously in different !J1.agazines in 1919 and 1920.

It was Sassoon vrho first published a collection of Owenls war

poetry, with a 1audatory introduction.5 In 1931, Edmund Blunden brought

2wilfred Owen, Collected Letters, ed. Harold Ü!-~en and John Bell (London, 1967), p. SoS. An subsequent references Hill be by page number to this texte

3It is not ahlays easy, hOVlever, to date his poer:Js accurately since he constantly worked them through many drafts.

4Siegfried Sassoon, Siegfriedls Journey 1916-1920 (London,19L5), p. 89.

5Tflilfred Owen, Poems, ed. Siegfried Sassoon (London,1920).

•

out a much fu11er collection, not confined to the trench poems, with an

interesting and perceptive memoir. 6 This edition was reprinted severa1

times unti1 1963. Readers of Owen owe a great dea1 to Sassoon for making

his friendls poetr,y known (in which task he was he1ped enthusiastica11y

by Edith Sitwel1), and to B1unden for his carefu1 collection and editing

of Owenls manuscripts.

C.D. Lewis edited the third collection in 1963.7 This book

reprints Blunden's memoir and contains a usefu1 introduction by Lewis.

There are few major textual differences between the two editions, but

Lewis included variant readings to be found in extant manuscripts. This

is helpful in showing the progress of poems through several successive

drafts as Owen perfected them. The edition is divided into three parts:

"War Poems" (containing thirty-two poems), "Other poems and fragments"

(twenty-two poems) and "Minor poems and juvenilia" (twenty-five poems.)

It is the most comprehensive edition to date.

Also of value to the critic is the recently published Collected

Letters, l-.rhich contains aU of the extant letters of the poet from his

childhood, and a biography of Wilfred by his brother, Harold ~~en.8 This

provides general background information about the poet and his family.

Finally, ane must acknowledge the critical study of Owen written by

1963).

6r,Tilfred Owen, Paem,!, ed. Edmund Blunden (London, 1931).

7The Collected Paems of Wilfred Owen, ed. C.D. Lewis (London, AH refe renc es to Owen 1 s poems ,üll be made ta this ed i tian.

8Harold Owen, Jaurney ~ Obscurity: ~-Jilfred Owen, 1893-1918, 3 vols. (London, 1965).

68

69

D.S.R. 'Vlelland,9 t-lhich is sympa the tic to the poetry and also shrewd and

profound in its insights. It is particularly useful in its close analysis

of the variant texts (both in attempting to establish the last drafts of

the poems and in studying the implications of the poetls emendations).

~lenls early poetry shows 1ittle indication of his later devel­

opment. He was greatly influenced by Keats, whom he admired extravagantly.

Both the Romantic themes of loneliness and unrequited love and the rich,

sensual texture of Keatls verse had appeal for Owen. IPoetry,I for him,

meant beauty; as it did for many Romantics and pre-Raphaelites. His own

verse is a rather shallovl investigation, in highly decorated language,

of those emotions common to sensitive adolescents. Owen was a gentle,

diffident man of aesthetic and ascetic inclinations, whose great desire was

to be a poet. But, before the vlar, his experience was insufficient to

allow him to deve1op, since his imagination had little philosophical or

intellectual depth. A strictly orthodox Christian upbringing, allied with

a love of nature and art, were not in themselves capable of realizing his

latent talent into great poetry.

It was the shock of his trench experience 111hich brought Owen to

artistic maturi ty: a rapid deve10pment Hhich forced his diffidence into

aesthetic detachment and brought his religious sentiments to a high pitch

of compassion. The tension betTrleen detachment and compassion produced his

finest poe ms • These two made of Owen the greatest p1eader for the trench

9D.S.R. Helland, "Hilfred CÀoren: A Critical Study (London, 1960).

70

• soldiers. He shared most of Sassoonls attitudes, but where the latter

channelled his poe tic talents into denunciation, satire and propaganda,

Owen moved through and past these. He too wanted to denounce and involve

the uninitiated, but over and above that lay the need to explore and reveal

the innate truths of the war. His gospel had to describe the sacrifice and

analyze its moral and psychological implications, both for the individual

and for society. To do so in anger would be ultimately too limiting.

(There is, too, a purely aesthetic consideration. Bitter satire requires

spare language and technique for its maximum effect. Owenls love of

colourful language and his delight in experimental poetic forms, combined

with his diffidence, were not conducive.to satire or propaganàa in the

• long run.)

Furthermore, Owenls innate humilit,r, which at its most abject

manifested itself in hero-worship, muted his personal sufferings. This

enabled him to strike deeper chords in himself and in his reader than did

the harsh tones of proteste He could, like Sassoon, register his anger

with trumpet-like stridency and clarity, but at. its best his verse has

the range and tones of a cello.

Le,,,is 15 statement that "the subject made the poet, ,,10 is not

an exaggeration. His trench experience suddenly focused aIl of the poten-

tiali ty of Owen both as a man and as a poet. In August 191~ he was in

provincial France and so 'VIaS not swept away in Englandls patriotic fervor.

In view of his later lvork one is surprised to find, in a letter to his

1 10C .D. LevlÎs, "Introduction," The Collected Poems of Hilfred Ov!en (London, 1963), p. 12. -

•

•

mother, this response to the outbreak of war:

l regret the mortality of the English regulars less than the French, Belgian or even the Russian or German armies: because the former are aIl Tommy Atkins, poor fellows, while the continental armies are inclusive of the finest brains and temperaments of the land. (p. 282) •

. This priggish condescension and insensi tive distinction allow one to

measure the great change which tOOk place in Owen's attitude after his

service in the trenches. It took him a long time to decide to enlist,

not believing in the v.rar cause from the onset. He felt that he had the

potential for a career of benefit to his country, either as a poet or as

a teacher.

On the other hand, his letters reveal several sharp precursors

71

of methods and attitudes in his mature poetry. In a letter to his brother,

he graphically described, with the aid of pencil sketches, sorne operations

on wounded soldiers which he rTÏ tnessed in September 1914. He gave aIl of

the details in order IIto educate you to the actualities of war ll (p. 285).

To this dispassionate remark may be added the sardonic reproof of his

cousin, Gunston, after Owen had finally decided to enlist:

You say you 'hear of wars and rumours of wars.' Vous en êtes là seulement? You hear rumours? The rumours here make the ears of gunners bleed. • • • Hell, l have pursued a year of fine contemptuous nonchalance. (p. 349).

There is, therefore, no patriotic prelude to Owen's trench poetry

and, indeed, it is difficult to trace his development after his first tour

of service. Since he published so little during his lifetime and since

he Has constantly revising his poems, there is no clear indication of

evolution. Moreover·, as all of his important war poetry was vlritten

• 72

du ring 1917-1918, the chronologica1 or deve1opmenta1 critical approach i8

necessarily speculative.

If there is any preface to the trench poems, it is one of sadness

and regret. "Bugles Sang" is an unfinished poem governed by a tone of

sadness as young men are threatened by a morrow of violent death. "19IL"

is a sonnet expressing the v1ar in terrns of seasonal imagery. Owen, like

Rosenberg, sees \-1ar as the onset of winter darkness blotting out centuries

of civi1ization. Progress and achievement are arrested. The poem ends

resignedly rather than optimistica1ly:

But now, for us, vdld winter, and the need Of sowing for new Spring, and b100d for seed.

The sombre and horrifie environment of the trenches evoked both

graphie and impressionistic descriptions. "Exposure" crea tes an atmosphere

of senseless activity on1y re1ieved by occasional violence. The time is

'l'linter and the scene is set in the trenches:

Our brains ache, in the merci1ess iced east winds that knive us • • • Hearied, we keep awake because the night is silent ••• Low, drooping f1ares confuse our memory of the sa1ient vJorried by silence, sentries whisper, curious nervous,

But nothing happens.

i'Jatching, we hear the mad gusts tugging on the Hire, Like twitching agonies of men among its bramb1es. Northward, incessantly, the flickering gunnery rumb1es, Far off, 1ike a du11 rumour of some other war.

VJhat are we doing here?

In trench poetry fevl references are made to the fact that much time is

spent in monotonous, nightmarish vigil. General1y, the emphasis is placed

on the Active, sudden violent aspects of the war. In "Exposure," Owen sho'VJS

the never-never land of soldiers out of battle, but not out of war. As an

73

evocation of terrif.ying purposelessness it is comparable to T.S. Eliot's

"The Hollow Men" and The Waste Land. It has several lines which are

reminiscent of Eliot. "But nothing happens," ''What are 1-1e doing here?"

"Is i t that we are dying?" and "For love of God seems dying."

However, it differs from Eliotls poems in one essential feature.

Whereas Eliot uses masks or personae to condemn a man-made limbo, Owen

includes himself as a participant in this hell, not of the soldiers' making.

He seldom indulges in personal despair and is careful to generalize his

statements to encompass the hopelessness of aIl soldiers. Having intro-

duced contrast in the shape of a dream of home:

Slowly our ghosts drag home: glimpsing the sunk fires, glozed With crusted dark-red jewels; crickets jingle there; For hours the innocent mice rejoice;

Owen reveals that the vision cannot be sustained for God seems alien, even

hàstile. Thus the poem ends with soldiers, both living and dead, frozen

into the unbelievable reality of their icy environment.

In the trenches, generally speaking, winter and night-time \<Tere

periods of suspension or sporadic activity, while spring and dawn were

heralds of fresh violence. "Spring Offensive" is a poem of seven irregular

stanzas, based upon a curious rapport between nature and war. The troops

are resting in a field before an attack:

Marvelling they stoocl, and 'tolatched the long grass swirled By the Hay breeze, murmurous with Vlasp and midge. For though the summer oozed into their veins Like an injected drug for their bodies' pains, Sharp on their souls hung the iminent line of grass, Fearfully flashed the sky's mysterious glass.

(One remarks the span of Owen 1 s imagery, from the Tennysonian ring of line

74

two to the modern image in line four -- similar to that of Eliot at the

beginning of IIThe Love-Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," for example.) The

soldiers are shot dOv!n as they advance and Nature seems to be eminently

fitted as a stage scene for their slaughter -- the buttercups are re-

ceptacles for spilled blood and the hill slope steepens into that "infinite

space" which is death. There is no comfort offered despite the life-dèath

cycle in Nature, because here death is unnaturally induced and in contrast

to Naturels springtime vitality.

"Exposure" and "Spring Offensive" are the best of Ovlen 1 s

descriptive verse, both because of the masterful technique shown in them

(for example, the subtlp. para-rhy1nes and dulled echoes of the former and

the complex play of pathetic faUacy and modern imagery in the latter),

and for the thoughtful concepts which evolve. Yet Owen could also convey

specifie incidents vrith detailed, horrifying clarity. "The Sentry" exactly

describes the blinding and maiming of a soldier during a bombardment. The

scene is precisely rendered:

Rain, guttering dov!n in vlaterfalls of slime, Kept slush waist-high and rising hour by hour, And choked the steps too thick wi th clay to climb.

In seeking exactitude of description any poet concerned with

the realit,r of the trenches would naturally be attracted to the colourful,

colloquial speech of the soldiers. The best of ~~enls poems which make

use of this is "The Letter." lt is structured on both the wording of the

letter itself and the spoken asides of the correspondent:

~ve're out of harm'S TtTay, not bad fed. l'm longing for a taste of your old buns. (Say Jimmie, spare's a bite of bread.)

There don't seern much to say just now. (Yer lrlhat? Then don't yer ruddy C01rrl And give us back me cigarettel) l'Il soon be'ome. You mustn't fret. My feet' s improvin', as l told you of.

Interrupted by a sudden attack and fatally wounded, the writer asks his

friend to finish the letter for him. Owen captures Cockney idiom and

cadence effortlessly and, in so doing, conveys the pathos of inarticulate

75

men unable to make their own appeals. In other poems he is less successful.

"Inspection ll is weakened by a lapse into formaI English as the theme (Of

blood sacrifice for God' s approval) oven-rhelms the style. IIThe Chances 11

has a simplicity which is inappropriate for the gravit y of its subject --

a soldier driven insane by his sufferings -- as is obvious if one compares

i t wi th Owen' s fine exploration of the sarne theme in "I1ental Cases. 11

These poems combine outright propaganda, in the Sassoon manner,

with Owen's idea of meeting his responsibility in speaking out for his

comrades and thus gaining sympathy for them. But his best propaganda

efforts are conceived on a more oblique line, with the poet's apparent

detachment more effective than direct appeal.

IIThe Send-Off ll is a description of troops entraining for the

front in a sullen atmosphere of general indifference; IIS0 secretly, li.1<:e

1-Irongs hushed-up, they went. 1I They march off like men already dead. Few

Hill return. Ot-ren asks, rhetorically, if the survivors Hill receive a

joyous lrIelcome home, and replies tha t i t l'Jill be as furtive as their leaving.

Smug, contented civilians woul\1 be moved, no doubt, by this indj.rect

assertion that their 'heroes' were not heraically treated. Owen °appeals

ta the reader'S sense of shame.

• 76

"Anthem for Doomed Youth" is also designed to cultivate shame,

but in an even less obvious way. He lets the pit Y inherent in the situ~tion

reveal itself through a complex structure of imagery. The framework of

the octave is the religious ritual of funeral, but interwoven is the actual

ritual of warfare. The images are auraI:

What passing balls for those who die as cattle? Only the rnonstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles 'rapid rattle Can patter out their hast y orisons.

The sestet achieves a grave dignit,v. New funeral obsequies are fitting

for this kind of mass death:

The pallor of girls 1 brows shall be their paU; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each SlOlV' dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

vJhen the killed are numbered in their thousands, only personal memories

can do justice to the individual deaths. Underlying this poem is an

appeal to the reader not to forget, for that would be breaking faith.

Both of the foregoing poems generate their pOHer in restraint.

The propaganda effect is obtained tangentially rather than by direct attack

or accusation. Owen is reminding one that these are people who die, even

if the circumstances resemble those of an abbatoir. In each poem there

are dark notes, both in the tonalities of their language and in the emotions

they inspire. The reader reacts with shame rather than shock or surprise.

The effect is low-keyed.

"Dulce et Decorum Est" presents an entirely different meth.od.

Owen selects a terrible incident from his experience; one which will haunt

his own dreams and give nightmares to his readers. A soldier, unable to

•

•

adjust his gas-mask is horribly overcome:

If in sqme smothering drearns you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cad Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues }w friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for sorne desperate glory, The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est Pro patria mori.

77

This is direct appeal and accusation, with details deliberately chosen for

their shock value to jolt civilians out of apathy and ignorance. It is

comparable to Graves' "Dead Boche" and Sassoonls "Counter-Attack."

Owen 1 5 intention is to "educate" his readers to the "actuali ties of war."

For the sarne purpose he carrieà photographs of wounded soldiers in his

pocket. His object is to stimulate disgust rather than pi ty, for disgust

too, could be a pOTr1erful ~veapon in his struggle.

Owen fights against civilian beliefs and comforts by showing

mili tary reali ties • "s .I .1rJ." traces the career of a soldier brought up

in "the old Lie." But his youth 1 5 experience is too much for that fragile

anq false doctrine:

Courage leaked, as sand From the best sandbags after years of raine

H8 goes through "the reasoned crisis of his soul" and commits suicide. His

companions write the ironic truth to his mother, "Tim died smiling." This

separation of solnier and civilian is also the basis for "Srnile, Smile,

Smile." The t1rl0 are incompatible, 50 non-cornbatants comfort thernselves

Hi th falsehood and the troops sroile ironically to themselves. In these

•

•

78

poems Owenls irony is bitter and focused upon Eng1and, in the manner of

Sassoon. But his rea1ization of the soldiers l isolation carried him

further.

He investigates, thoughtfu1ly and ana1ytically, the effects of

war upon individua1s. This exploration is shocking, but it transcends

shock; it is on1y incidenta11y propaganda. One may measure this distinction

by comparing "Dulce et Decorum Est" with poems such as "Mental Cases,"

"Disab1ed" and "A Terre."

"Mental Cases" describes men made insane by their terrible

experiences :

Wading troughs of f1esh these he1p1ess wander, Ireading blood from 1ungs that had loved 1aughter. A1ways they must see these things and hear them, Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles.

In a11 of his descriptions, Ovlen is very aware of the human body and its

horrible desecration by war. We11end observes how prevalent are images

of b1ooo' and violence in Owen IS trench poetry.11 But this ruination of

the body is more than matched by ruination of the mind:

Sunlight seems a b1ood-smear.; night comes b1ood-b1ack; Dawn breaks open 1ike a wound that b1eeds afresh.

Though these images may evoke disgust and dismay, Owen do es not compromise,

nor a1101-1 us to evade our respons ibili ty:

Snatching after us who smote them, brother, PaHing at us vlho dea1t them war and madness.

(ONenls sense of responsibility manifested itse1f in many vlays: as p1eading

for the inarticu1ate; as demand and accusation on beha1f of the suffering;

llD.S.R. lt!e11end, "Wilfred Olven: Poetry, Pit Y and Prophecy," Northern Revievl, VI, no. L (act.-Nov. 1953), 32.

79

as fraternal love for his comrades in misery; and also, as here, as a

sense of personal guil t -- which he explores more closely in "Strange

Meeting.") These mad soldiers are a standing indictment of the sane.

Everyone, Owen included, is made culpable by their condition. Their

isolation is complete.

"Disabled" is also based on the concept of isolation. A man is

incapacitated and made impotent by his wounds -- the poet suggests a living

death. The thoughtless, almost accidentaI manner of his enlistment, the

pointless wounding and the lack of meaning in his sacrifice are aIl implied

in the description. It is a superb poem that recreates the suffering,

physical and mental, as the soldier mourns his past and agonizes in his

present. He had been a handsome, popular youth, attractive to girls:

Nm'1 he will never feel again hml slim Girls' waists are, or how \varm their subtle hands; AlI of them touch him like sorne queer disease.

Artists had wanted to paint him, but nov" ironically, there is no cclour

left in him for it has aIl been poured out into shell-holes.

Remarking his mutilated body, a solemn man enquired "about his

soul," for the future looks grim:

Now he will spend a few sick years in Institutes, And do what things the rules consider wise, And take whatever pit y they may dole. Tonight he noticed hml the women' s eyes Passed from him to the strong men who were whole. How cold and late it isl Why don't they come And put him into bed? Why don' t they come?

The poet almost makes this man's case his own in the last lines, so strongly

is he moved. His emotions are painfully genuine and passionately involved,

yet Owen has~lJanaged to gain the vital detachment which a11ov15 the facts

e

80

·to speak for themselves. This ru in of the war is alone and without any

future. What compensation can possibly be offered for this 105s? The

only solution is to stop war.

A similar detachment and a similar appeal to the readerls com-

passion are found in "A Terre." Here the fom of dramatic monologue allows

a wounded officer to addres5 the reader rlirectly. The poet is~ effaeed and

one is confronted by the pit Y of war:

Sit on the bed. Ilm blind and three parts shell. Be careful; eanlt shake hands now; never shall ••• l tried to peg out soldierly -- no usel One dies of war like any old disease. This bandage feels like pennies on rnw eyes. l have my medals? -- Discs to make my eyes close. ~~'glorious ribbons? -- Ripped from my own back In scarlet shreds. (That's for yourpoetry book.)

This mortally wounded man yearns for life, any life; as a "muekman," a rat,

a microbe or a flower. The fact of death is frightening. The lesson to be

learned is "the ultimate value of life, the one truly preeiolJs thing.,,12

However, with no choiee, the soldier tries to come to terms with death.

Reconciled to being dust in the earth, washed by rain and warmed by sun,

he pleads:

Donlt take my soulls poor comfort for your jest. Soldiers may grm-l a soul when turned to fronds • Carry TOY crying spirit til itls weaned To do wi thout 'l-lhat blood remained these wounds.

The weakness of the poem is a slight inconsistency of style. As ~ven

intrQduces the philosophy his language becomes more formaI. But generally,

technique is subordinate to the intense emotional content of the poem. It

is, with "Disabled," one of the most profoundly moving war poems. The

12Carl E ~ Bain, "The Poetry of Wilfred Owen," Emor.y University, Quarterly, XXI, No. l~ (1l\finter 1965), 27b.

81

speaker's despair and courage are painfuliy touching. But, most important,

one must note that the premise upon vlhich ·this poem is founded is affirmative:

the joy of life itself. This is the crucial answer to Yeatls objection.

The same is true of "Futility." Owenls great aesthetic problem

was the control of his m~n compassion and despair. Strong emotions are

centrifugaI forces which can pull any work of art out of shape unless

there is a fitm technical control o~er the subject. ~fuen this is achieved,

then the work of art becomes greater because of its emotional force. In

"Futili ty," for example, the poet addresses himself ta the re-vivifying

p01'lerS of the sun. A progression of these powers is revealed. The sun

a\~akens man by its warmth; it stimulates plant growth; it creates life

on earth. But can it bring back to life a dying soldier? We have come

full circle, since this man cannot be "awakened." Owen's cry of despair

is powerfully arresting:

o what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth's sleep at aIl?

The circular structure gives added ironie rneaning ta the bitterness of

Owen's grief and desperation, and thus saves the poem from mere emotionalism.

But 'l'lhat gives this poem even more weight is the realization that Owen is

able to give fun value to life. No more can a poet indulge in Romantic

death-wishes 1 Owen had well outgrown his youthful, languid posturings.

Religion, v!hich had once provided him with a meaning for life,

and some consolation, now serves mainly to provoke questions -- why does

God permit this carnage and why does Christ not intervene to prevent it?

-- or to provide bitterly ironie parallels for the experiences of t'lare

• 82

Sacrifice, for example, is redolent wi th religious significance. Christ-

ianity was for Ouen both an inadequacy l'lhich had failed him and, simult-

aneously, the source of a tentative framework for understanding the war.

Sorne of the shorter poems l'ri th religious themes ("At a Calvary near the

Ancre," "Le Christianisme" and "Soldier's Dream") reveal Owen's dilemma.

The most evident emotional reaction which he had to the war l'TaS pi ty.

Since pit y seemed to him a Christian virtue and since the war was most

un-Christian, O\ven lvas in a philosophical and logical quandry.· From it

came two great poems, "Apologia Pro Poemate Meo" and"Greater Love."

The former portrays the troops as God, not in simple fashion,

but in a complex pattern of attribution. The first line of each of the

first eight stanzas states a qualit,y which the poet has gained in the

trenches: laughter, loss of f~ar, exultation, fellowship, joy and beauty.

Each is gained through and because of the hell in the trenches and each is

a quality of religious ~xperience:

l, too, saw God through mnd --The mue! that cracked on cheeks \orhen lvretches smiles. 1~ar brought more glory to i~heir eyes than blood, And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child .

l have perceived much beaut,y In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight; }Ieard music in the silentness of dut y; Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.

Owen deliberately reverses tradi tional ideas in order to state a new faith.

God is man; beauty is ugliness; music is silence; and so on. But it is

an exclusive faith. To relieve his sense of outrage, he savagely renounces

aIl non-combatants and isolates himself and. his comrades in this new,

mutually consoling reconcilement with the Ivar:

•

•

•

Nevertheless, except.you share With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell, Whose lvorld is but the trembling of a flare, And heaven but the highway for a shell,

You shall not hear their mirth: You shall not come to think them weIl content By any jest of mine. These men are worth Your tears. You are not worth their merriment.

As John Bayley has said; "It should be tires orne to be told that one is

deficient in feeling for and understanding of something one was not there

83

to understand, ,,13 but this poem carries the reader along by sheer force of

emotion. The new faith seems àemonic (in its strained, hysterical laughter)

only because of Owen's disturbed Christianity. Actually this merriment

. is close to a modern concept:

Merry i t'lITas to laugh there ~fuere death becomes absurd and life absurder.

Had he lived, Ov]en would surely have found no mysteries in the Theatre of

the Absurd. Through the war he found realities l'ihich later writers

(Beckett and Ionesco J for exal'lple,) sa,,] in aIl human activity and being.

But i t Hould be wrong ta suggest that he had clarified these concepts in

1918. He was groping for a light to illumina te his experience and give

it meaning. It is, perhaps, only in retrospect that Owen's themes

(isolation, an existentialist grasp on life for itself alone, absurdity,

etc.) reflect ideas which became so important ta other, later writers.

"Greater Love" also uses the themes of pit y, isolation, and the

identification of man with GOd.ll

, As ·the poet constructs an image-by-image

13John Bayley, "But for Beaumont-Hamel," The Spectator, CCXI (Oct. 1~th,1963), L,19 •

lLiJ .N. Cohen (in his article, "Wilfred Owen's Greater Love," Tulane Studies in English, VI,No.l (196L,), 1-7) discusses the tenets of OvJen 15 spir-

itual credo. It is quite true that he was a spiritual poet, but it is my feeling that Ot",en 's concepts were becoming more unorthodox than Cohen suggests.

comparison of sensual and sacrificial love -- in which the latter is

demonstrated as the higher, superj_or fom -- it becomes clear that dead

and maimed solcliers exemplify the perfection of this spiritual quality

which is love:

Red lips are not so red As the stained stones kissed by the English dead.

Kindness of t-JOoed and wooer Seems shame to their love pure. o ~ove, your eyes lose lure

When l behold eyes blinded in my steadl

Your slender attitude Trembles not exquisite like limbs knife-skevred,

Rolling and rolling there ~fuere God seems not to care; Till the fierce love they bear

Cramps them in death's extreme decrepitude.

By stating God' s alienation from man, Dt-Ten suggests that man himself has

taken over God's place in the spiritual system ("God is lovel") Thus the

solcliers are allusively compared 1vi th Christ, but Christ in his human,

sacrificial form:

Heart, you were never hot Nor large, nor full like hearts made great with shot;

Ancl though your hand be pale, Paler are al1 which trail Your cross through flame and hail:

~feep, you may 1r1eep, for you méi;Y- touch them not.

Again the reader is excluded from this religious experience because he is

not a participant in the mystery of sacrifice. From the conventional

Chris tian idea, "grea ter love ha th no man • • ." Owen has derived a new

definition which helps to portray and explain, if not ta reconcile, the

condi tion of the soldiers. They are isola ted from their fellm-J men and

from God, and by the nature of their acts they become a perfection which

God himself used to embody.

8L

This superb poem, with its masterly yet subdued technique, gains

added power from the poetls detachment. He, too, can only stand back in

awe and reverence before this great happening. The reader identifies him-

self with Owen in an attitude of worship. The structure of the poem is a

masterpiece of development, both in its logic and its juxtaposed image r,y ,

which compels one to accept the conviction and pathos of the climax.

Owen had nothing but scorn and contempt for those civilians -

who, t-lithout the excuse of having been battered into insensitivity by

trench experience, were indifferent to the suffering and slaughter:

But cursed are the dullards whom no canon stuns • • • By choice they made themselves immune To pi ty and whatever mourns in ma.n Before the last sea and the hapless stars.

This curse in "Insensibility" can only be measured in its full force after

one has felt the pOHer of "Greater Love."

Most of Owenls trench poems are, fundamentally, close-ups of the

"lar -- al though they are of widely different kinds, from "Elcposure" to

"Hental Cases. Il "Greater Love" and "Apologia," with their primarily

philosophical themes, vievl the war from a wider perspective. In "The

ShOvl" Owen pictures his subject from a vantage point high above the ground

and recognbes, with disgust, its cannibalistic quality. Solàiers and

armies are revealed as giant caterpillars, preying upon each other in a

landscape as desolate as the moonls. Before the vision fails, ~Ten is

shmm his mm "fresh-severed head" by Death, who has been his escorte The

85

tone of the poem is not so much fear as revulsion. There are no individuals

or human beings save for the poet himself, ·which is rare in Owen 1 s trench

• poetry. The poem is focused on him in an impersonal setting. Yet, as he

is able to make the death of one soldier an elegy for a11 the '\olar dead, so

in himself he finds the slayer and the slain simultaneously -- the slain-

Owen is a reflection of personal loss, but the slayer-~len reflects cosmic

10ss.15 Despite, or perhaps because of, his compassion, Owen could never

exonerate himself from guilt. He did not 'tvant to dissociate himself from

the blame which he attached to man for fighting wars.

"Strange Meeting" explores this idea, among many others, but

from a viewpoint underground -- into his subconscious? -- and reveals the

profoundest insights of Owen into his- subject. Generally, his aesthetic

detachment tvas not such that the intensity of his emotion was ever lost

-- indeed, his restraint and control often emphasized it. Even in

"Grea ter Love" and "Apologia," which are philosophical poems, the emotion

fills them with a palpable pressure. In "Strange l1eeting," however, the

emotion is not only subordinate to aesthetic and philosophical discipline,

but also to prophetie vision.

There are many facets to this remarkably complex, yet unfinished

86

poem. Owen. explores the relationship betvleen killer and killeè. in terms of

responsibility for wasting life. These two can also, and more profitably,

be viet-lTed as twin aspects of the poet himself, embodying as they do both

his guil t and his sac rifice. OHen a Iso offers impressively prescient

ideas on a future that he was never to see, as he explores the historical

implications of the Har. Finally, he analyses the functions of the poet

l5J.M. Cohen, lIOt-ren's 'The Shmv'," The Explicator, XVI, no. 2 (Nov. 1957), 163.

•

•

or artist in a new world which will evolve, scarred and brutalized, from

the conflict.

The poem opens with the poet isolated from the turmoil of battle

in a tomb-like, silent tunnel. He meets an apparition among the dead

which recognizes him and then he realizes he is in Hell:

Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, And no guns thumped, or down the· flues made moan. "Strange friend," l said, "here is no cause to mourn." "None," said the other, "save the undone years, The hopelessness. Whatever hope iR yours, Was my lire alsa; l \-Tent hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world, l1hich lies not calm in eyes, or braideà hair, But rnocks the steady running of the hour, And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here.

In the hunting, depressive echoes of the para-rhymes, this shade reveals

his despair (which is the poetls own.) The truth is untold of "the pity

of war, the pit y war distilled." vJhat is nON ta prevent a disastrous

future?

Now men will go content with what we spoiled, Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. They,.~lill be swift vlÏ th the swiftness of the tigress. None will break ranks, though nations trek from progress.

Had the poet lived he could have stood out as a dissenting voice in this

enveloping evil. ("In the conviction that everything must be subjugated

to the war we see the origins of the totalitarian state in mind

87

which subjects aIl human activity to the overriding needs of the state. n )16

Courage was mine and l had mystery, Wisdom was mine and l had mastery: To miss the march of this retreating lrlorld Into vain citadels that are not walled.

16Rernard Bergonzi, p. 12~.

• Then, in one of the most striking passages, Dt'Ten re-defines the artist' s

rôle. No longer is he to be concerned with purely romantic or aesthetic

considerations (like the late Victorians and Georgians who were Owenls

irnrnediate predecessors,) but with social or political ones:17

Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels, l W(ll,td go up and l-lash them from Sl,eet wells, Even loTit.h truths that lie too deep for taint. l would have poured TTlY spiri t vli thout s tint But not through wounds; not on the cess of war. Foreheads of men have bled Hhere no '\oTOunds were.

The poet will accept to sacrifice himself, but not in wart Here again,

Orlen's Christian background is revealed, as he derives from it a social

function. The artist's truth will serve in the same way as the saiht's

miraculous faith. As a preview of the concern of future artists with

88

their social and political commitment it is, once more, very prescient.

The poe;n ends wi th the revela tion, "I am the enemy you killed,

my friend," and the essential unit:r betvJeen the t'\olO distinct entities

(enemy and friend) is re-inforced.

Thus Ûl-Jen' s feelings, which have so often been mentioned before

(love, pit Y and responsibility) are here all refi~ed and reduced together

to becorne a dispassionate statement which is extraordinarily comprehensive.

"Strange Neeting" is a profound poem. In it the poet imposes an order on

the chaos of Vlar Hhich neither belittles nor confines the subject, but

h'hich il1uminates it \-lith truths and insights only great artists can find.

17John H. Johnston, Eng1ish Poetry in the First Horld War (Princeton, 196L), p. 197.

• lt is, too, a poem superb in its demonstration of poe tic technique. The

language embodies dark tonalities and rich allusiveness. The half­

rhymes,18 l-ri th their fa lling echoes, add a sombre digni ty to the themes.

The rhythm, lV'i th its unobtrusive regulari ty, has an effect of solemn

89

intonation which is appropria te to the subject. Owen creates a mysterious

atmosphere in accord with the revelations of this apparition which is a

part of himself.

The main inspiration for aIl of Owenls trench poetr,y was his

sense of responsibility. As he wrote in a letter to his mother:

l came out in order to help these boys -- directly, by leading them as weIl as an officer can; indirectly, by watching their sufferings that l may speak of them as Hell as a pleaser cano l have done the first. (p. 580).

The same idea is expressed poetically in "The Calls." Here are noted the

various summonses tû which man must respond: bells, sirens, and bugles.

~~en pictures himself as being out of the war now, safe and lazy because

"l've done my drill." But he cannat escape:

For leaning out last midnight on my sill l heard the sighs of men, that have no skill To speak of their distress, no, not the willl

A voice l knmv. And this time l mus t go.

The poem was unfinished and 50 Has Owen's task, for, of course, it was not

a task lV'hich would have enàed Hith the Armistice. An of his poetic energy

went into fulfilling his self-appointed rôle of pleader and in this he was

brilliantly and aIl tao briefly successful.

l8See Annemarie Ewing TQwner, U\{elsh Bardic Neters and English Poetr,y," The l1assachusetts Review ~ . VI (196L-65), 6H-62L, for a discussion of the origins of para-rhyme.

Owen has received much more critical attention than any other

trench poet and his reputation and popularity continue to increase.

Benjamin Britten has used nine of his poeT~ as lyrics for songs in his

War Requiem (first produced in Coventry Cathedral in 1962.) But although

most of the attention has been favourable, there have been dissenters.

W.B. Yeats, in refusing to include ~lenls poetry in the Oxford Book of

Hodern Verse, wrote to Lady Dorothy t'lellesley:

When l excluded vlilfred Owen, \olhom l consider unworthy of the poetls corner of a country newspaper, l did not know l was excluding a revered sandwich-board man of the Revolution •••• He is aIl blood, dirt and sucked sugar stick. There is ever,y excuse for him but none for those who like him.19

(J .H. Cohen shows that Yeat's dislike N'as in part because he recognized

his own early romantic verse in Owen's juvenilia and responded unfavorably

to the mementa, and in part because ~lenls poetr,y had been used as a whip

ta castieate the 1 reactionary 1 Yeats by the left-wing poets of the

thirties • ) 20

Criticism of Owen tends to be concentrated on the nature of his

emotional response to the war; its limited range and its repetition:

The best of Ot..ren1s lyrics are necessarily developed in terms of a single emation -- an emotion that cannot be maintained or repeated without psychological strain or aesthetic loss • • • • The very intensity of the autr.or's passion tends to exhaust both the emotion and the force of its stimulus. Unless pit y is generated and objectified wi th in a large tragic context, it cannot of itself support a tragic vision; as a motive for lyric poetry, i t tends to become sentimental or

19(.J.B. Yeats, Letters on Poetry from ~1.B. Yeats to Dorothy Ttlellesley (London, 19LO), p. 113-.- -- --

20J .11. Cohen, !lIn memory of l'l.B. Yeats and Hilfred OvJen,!I Journal of English ~ German Philology , LVIII (Oct. 1959), 637-6L9.

90

• obsessive regardless of the eloquence wi th 'Vlhich i t is developed. vfuen the compassionate attitude ia apparently the only attitude with 10Jhich war can be truthfully described the possibilities of poetr,y are severely restricted. 2l

Welland approaches the problem from a different point of view.

91

He does not agree with the generalization implicit in Johnstonls judgment,

and, while recognizing the weakness ta which Johnston refers, exonerates

Owen from blame in this regard:

It, cannat be claimed for Owen that he tv-as invariably successful in avoiding the morbid and the sentimental, but the :extent ta which he does avoid them may not un­reasonably be also attributed to the quarrel 'Vdthin himself [a reference ta Yeatls distinction that "we make out of the quarrel with others rhetoric, but out of the qua rre l wi th ours el ves poetnr," J out of which sprang so much of his best poetry.22

Criticism is focused upon Owenls emotional response partly be-

cause he himself dre'VT a ttention ta i t in his draft "Freface." Here he

states i t as his intention ta l'eveal the "pit Y of vlar. The poetry is in

the pit y." Compassion, like responsibility, is a rich source of poetr,y

and can flow into many forms, but like a11 riches, tao much at one time

is cloying. Owen suffers if one reads tao many of his poems at one

sitting, but is not the same true of any poet l'Iho expresses intense emotion

in sensuous language? (One thinks of Owenls idol, Keats.)

There is in Owen, however an almost frightening intensity. He

concentra ted a11 of his poV/ers of imagina tion, intellect and feelings upon

his inescapable subject, without any avoidance or relief. There is,

accordingly, an occasional strain and tendency tO'VTards hysteria. But if

21Johnston, p. 206. 22vlellend, ! Cri tical Study, p. 61.

• 92

he is often on the brink of nervous collapse, it is remarkable how weIl

controlled he is in his poems. While only allowing himself the escape of

infrequent ironies, and these more often bitter than amused, he was still

capable of producing sorne very great poems. These are among the finest of

this century, not merely as war poems but as poems inany category. They

may not have "objectified pit Y within a large tragic context" -- like

Yeat's 'tragic joy', one imagines -- but how valid is that as a criterion

for final judgment?

The point is surely that ~len was in many ways an innovator.

Bergonzi notes, "Owen registers the change in sensibility from heroic to

anti-heroic and gives the letter a stature equal to the former.,,23 In

other words, Owen demonstrates the twentieth-century change in sensibilityl

Similarly, Hilda Spear makes another essential point: "The 'anti-poetic'

element which has developed in v.Tilfred Ot.1en 1 s work was the more forceful

because he was conversant with the terms and themes of romantic poetryj

these he interpreted in his own way. ,,2L 'l'bus Owen could utilize another

poetic tradition for his own purposesj adapt the familiar to a new phenomenon.

While the distinctions between emotion and sentimentality, grief

and morbidity are very fine, many poets would be very happy indeed to be

able to move their readers to feel as successfully as Owen d')es. One can

only regret that, like Rosenberg, he was not given the time to revise his

23Bergonzi, p. 126.

2)lHilda D. Spear, "t-Tilfred Owen and Poe tic Truth," University of Kansas Review, XXV, no. 2 (1958), nl,.

1tlOrk and explore more of his talent in peace. Given a "rider range of

experience he would have become a very great poet: the clarit,v of his

revelations; the depths of his insights and the technical mastery over

poetry that he was beginning to shoH a11 support this vie1,r.

93

.f .,

VI. CONCLUSION

Trench poetry must be regarded as a unique and distinctive mode

in English literature not only because it is an expression of a unique

situation (with its Olfln imagery, language and attitudes), but also because

it appeared at a time of transition in literature. After the ~var one

recognizes a different sensibility and a new outlook in society, which

poets stated in new forms and with a changed diction.

It is both useful and dangerous to class the trench-poets to­

gether into one group (as it is t·1ith the Hetaphysicals, the Augustans or

the Romantics). Sassoon, Graves, Rosenberg and ~~en are inevitably joined

by vocation and shared experience: each was determined ta show the war in

i ts physical reali.ty. Butafter this one must acknowledge the manifold

differences.

Graves and Rosenberg lrlere not poets of protest in the direct

manner of Sassoon and ~en. Graves and Sassoon were not the equals in

technical ability of Ovren and Rosenberg. The ternperaments of the four

Here very different. That they were four sensitive young men, lrlhose minds

Here seared by the horrors of lrrar is evident, but the quality of artistic

egoism or toughness t~as qui te different in each. Rosenberg could rise above

his personal distress and the immediate situation to trace out huge symbols

of war. Ovlen could transcend protest in order to probe into the effects

of Har on. individuals and humani ty; could begin ta discover net-! psychological

and philosophical reali ties, "t-lithout a trace of self-pit y • Graves explored

his personal response to the war, fincling escape into fantasy a remedial

occupa tian, but balancing i t by a brutal confrontation with the physical

reality around him. Sassoon's outrage lvas directed into propaganàa, neatly

•

95

changing a tradi tional poetic formula from glorification to censure.

Hm-lever, despi te their individuali ty, these four poets do share

sorne common themes and attitudes.

As the heirs of the Georgian tradition, their response to Nature

while in the trenches i8 noteworthJ7 • Each became appalled, as his service

at the front continued, by the debasement of natural beauty parallel to

the degradation of the human body, alive or dead. The wartime landscape

was disgusting and squalid, a fitting backdrop for the brutalities of the

trenches. "VJhen the soldier-poets described beauty, i t toJas mainly in tones

of nostalgia or irony. Men who have no peace of mind or body do not find

sereni ty and grandeur in Na ture •

Owen and Rosenberg ta ok this attitude "andexpanded it. Man, in

close contact with the earth and with death, can begin ta appreciate the

indivisibility of life. "Pushing up daisies" is a literaI truth. Poppies

gretv from men' s bodies and but tercups caught the fallen blood for moisture.

Corpses, whether buried or not, merged into the earth. The concept of the

cycle or chain of being vlas given a new immediacy and urgency by the trench­

poets. The philosophical, pantheistic, religious and metaphysical ideas

of man vIere tested by this intense ai-Jareness of death. Sorne could be

sharpened and clarified, "t-Jhile others lost their validi ty.

Si~ilarly, in a cammunity of suffering, man's reliance upon his

neighbours is emphasizecl. Have ever the axiorns (whether religious or

social) pertaining ta brotherly love and mutual dependency been stated so

urgently and insistently as by these trench-poets? At the same time, the

96

bitter paradox of their mutual hopelessness in the face of impersonal war

can only highlight a dilemma which is basic to the human condition. The

intense emotions in trench poetry spring, in large measure, from the help­

less unoerstanding of this facto Fatalism is relatively easy when human

suffering is seen as an act of God (after aIl, it might be meaningful or

necessar,y,) but when it is the result of human activity out of control,

then a calm response is aIl but impossible. This is a situation better

knol'ln in the twentieth-centur,y than ever before.

In extreme phJrsical and emotional duress, not only their own but

their companions l also, the trench-poets could not find comfort in traditional

concepts and values~ The war precluded philosophical calm. A conventional

religious outlook seldom proved immune from the stress of this crisis. But

religious concepts can be re-made or moulded anel-T in the heat of a poetls

emotional response, as both Ü1ven and Rosenberg demons tra te. The usual

associations and connotations of the word "God" did not prove equal to the

occasion, nor did the traditional rôle of Christ, as explained in Church

teachings, seem adequate to the realities of the trenches.

It becames clear that the compulsion to write about the war l'laS

as much a moral necessit;r as an aesthetic one for the trench-poets. But

the morality had ta be derived from actual and immediate experience, not

from theoretical or traditional teaching. There l'Jas manifestly an obligation

to re-examine accepted values by men \-.Tho realizecl their isolation from aU

other parts of their society.

This isolation was both regretted and jealously guarded. Protest

and descriptive poetry, by definition, seeks to initiate into awareness

97

those who are unknowing; involve them in the poetls reality. Simultaneously

the soldier-poets despised the ignorance and indifference of the "others,"

with varying degrees of bitterness. Almost always, the poetls enemies

were not the soldier's. The Germans are rarely vilified or attacked

except in early patriotic effusions. Patriotism, itself, as a viable

belief, did not long survive the pressures of trench warfare. It was

another traditional social value which was examined and found wanting by

these poets.

Trench-poets can be credited, too, tV'ith a large share in the

liberating of verse from the formalism of Georgian poetry. vii thout a

manifesto like Wordsworth 1 s "Preface, li they changed the language and

themes of poetry by their practise. Simplicity, colloquialisms and cadences

of common speech became very forceful in their developing styles and ex­

periments; came to have value in poetic theory. The imagery which is

characteristic of their verse is drawn, in large part, from the impact

of mechanical war upon defenceless humanity. Ugly, unpleasant and dangerous

man-made objects can be the stuff of very powerful imagery. The recognition

of man affected by monsters of his own creation (as distinct from God; the

devil, fate or Nature,) has echoes in much subsequent literature. Mechanized

warfare leads to stresses akin to those felt in automated society. The

individual's essential littleness and fragility are shmm not in relation

to the Gods or heroes, but to social and military forces of man's mm

making. This has a very contemporary ring to it, as does the trench-

poets' implied aesthetic to "tell it like it is."

• Overall, there are t'VlO impressive features in this war poetry.

The first is its variety. The war could not reduce poetry to a single

voice. Coming frorn a cornmon literary heritage (even RosenLerg adrnired

98

and sought the approval of the Georgians,) and experiencing the sarne

conditions, these four poets yet found highly distinctive modes of ex­

pression. Although they shared the subject of trench warfare, they dernon­

strated the resiliency of poetry, not only not to be muted in the rnost ad­

verse circumstances, but also to flal" in many different streams from the one

source. An examination of areas of similarity only emphasizes the

essential individuality of these four poets.

The other striking feature of trench-poetry is its modern and

familiar ring; its contemporaneity. Although the lands cape has changed,

the issues, attitudes and techniques of trench-poetry are still very

relevant. Anti-war and pro-love expressions are a part of the very fabric

of contemporary societ,y; and who has concentrated these values as ex­

plicitly as the soldier-poets? Protest against impersonal rulers and social

forces which impinge disastrously on the welfare of millions of unknown

sufferers is as tenaciously strong today as then; its exposition as com­

pelling.

The modern era has known existentialism, the quantum theory,

"God is dead ll theology, the theatre of the absurd and visual media offering

direct reportage. Such an era can sympathize with and understand trench­

poetry. For it came from an event Hhich helped shape and direct the modern

era more than anything else.

• 99

The ~lentieth century has no place for the values in epic forms

of art. It is an aesthetic vlhich is based on premises which no longer

pertain (the glorification of an aristocratie individual locked in defiant,

tragic struggle vJith superhuman phenomena, vietV'ed from the perspective of

a stable but naive idea of the universe). They ceased to have validity

during the first world war and the trench-poets knew this, if only in­

tuitively. The social fabric; the religious practices; the aesthetic moulds;

the order, stabili ty and calm of pre-war days were violently amended or

destroyed around them. As people became more aware of the changes and

understood them better, so later poets could reflect more upon the

subtleties of their condition. Trench-poets '\-Tere not vouchsafed this

priviledge, but they had indicated the lines along which their successors

were to work. The socially conscious poets of the twenties and thirties

recognized their debts to the soldier-poets. From our perspective, fifty

years later, t-18 can appreciate their disorientation and dislocation. The

measure of their achievernent should not be a previous aesthetic principle,

but a modern rèsponse.

Trench-poetry is forthright and humane, deriving pm-1er from

great personal honesty. These are qualities to which contemporary society

pays homage in i ts films and folk-songs. lrJhile none of the soldier-

poets a.re great (there are, after aIl, very few great poets,) they did

create a meaningful poetry and sorne few excellent poems. Even ignoring

the circumstances in vlhich they 1'1rote, this is an achievement.

VII. APPENDIX:

100

1) Siegfried Sassoon

Sassoon was born in 1886 into a wealthy family. His education

was in the hands of private tutors until he went up to Cambridge in 1905.

He did not take a degree, however, and after some time devoted to country

sports and poet.ry, he went to London in 191~, at the invitation of Edward

11arsh and Edmund Gosse. vJhen war was declared, Sassoon welcomed it as a

chance to break out from the rut of literary society in which he found

himself.

He enlisted on 3rd August, 191~, but because of an accident he

did not begin training until early 1915. In November he went as an officer

in the Royal Welch Fusiliers to join his regiment in the trenches. He met

Graves and began a close friendship. In the trenches he was known as "l'1ad

Jack" because of his outstanding heroism, for :lhich he won the Mili tary

Cross. In 1916, l-lhile on hospital leave in England, he found his increasing

objection to the war encouraged by the group at Garsington (Lady Ottoline

Morrel, Phillip Horrel, Bertrand Russell, Clive Bell, Middleton Murry, etc.).

In February 1917 he vIaS in France again until wounded in April. He then

worked on a declaration of protest against the vJar and England's war aims,

which his friends gave the widest publicity. He l-laS saved at his trial for

insubordination by Graves, who convinced the court that Sassoon l.as suffering

from neurasthenia.

T:Jhile at Craiglockhart Hospital for treatment, Sassoon met Wilfred

Owen and worked on his Q1-ln poems for Counter-Attack. In February 1918, he

was sent to Egypt, but only served there for tv.ro rnonths before returning

to France. In July he was wounded again and served no more at the front.

•

101

After the war, he took an interest in poli tics for a while,

becoming a journalist for the left-wing Herald, but this did not last for

long and finally Sassoon retired to the country, occasionally publishing

private editions of his poetry.

2) Robert Graves

Graves was born in 1895 into a wealthy, middle-class family with

artistic inclinations. His schooldays at Charterhouse were largely

miserable and he had no time for further education before the war broke

out. He enlisted irmnediately and was commissioned in the Royal Welch

Fusiliers. In Hay 1915 he was sent to France where he stayed, with only

one short leave, for over a yea r until he '\o7as severely wounded (reported

dead originally,) in July 1916.

lIe was invalided to Eng1and, returned to the trenches for a

brief whi1e in January and February 1917, and then returned to Eng1and

tvhere he remained for the rest of the 1rTar. He served in training camps

at Oxford and in the south of Eng1and until the end of the war.

He met many writers in Oxford and London both as a resu1t of his

reputation as a trench poet and as a result of Sassoonts introductions.

Graves, however, .vas not impressed by the Garsington group and suspected

the motives of many of the pacifists and conscientious objectors.

After the ~'lar he married, went up to Oxford to study, and finally,

after trying to make a civilian life for his family under pressing

financial difficu1 ties, H8nt to Cairo University to teach. This was not

a suc cess and he was obliged to return to Eng1and in ord~r to continue

• 102

as a writer. He ultimately settled on the island of Majorca.

3) Isaac Rosenberg

Rosenberg was born in 1890, one of-eight children in a ver,y poor

Jewish family. In 1897 they moved to London and vlhen Rosenberg was four­

teen he was apprenticed to a firm of engravers. He attended evening

classes in art at Birbeck College, where his 1-lOrk caught the attention of

three wealthy ladies "\-Tho sponsored his studies at the Slade School of Art

from 1911 to 191b. While at the Slade he began to write poetr,y, eventual1y

being encouraged by Edward Harsh and Laurence Binyon.

His poor health and the threat of tuberculosis decided-him to

go to South Africa in June 1914 to stay with a married sister. In Hay

1915 he returned to England and enlisted in the ranks.

Apart from a brief leave and a few spells of rear area dut Y , he

l'JaS at the front from ,Tune 1916 until he was kil1ed on active service on

lst April, 1918. This was a period of some tHenty months which he could

only make bearable through his corresponcience Hith literary friends in

London (Marsh, Binyon, Lascelles Abercrombie and Gordon Bottomley). He

had very little opportunity to revise his '-lork or to prepare it for

publica tion.

!l) Vlilfred Owen

(À,Jen vJas born in 1893 into a middle-class family of very modest

means. His education \-Jas interrupted by several moves, but he finally

matric:ulated frorn London University in 1911. - From then until 1913 he

stayed at Dunsden in Oxfordshire, the pupil and lay assistant to the vicar

• 103

there. He was deep1y shocked and moved by evidence of rural poverty in this

parish.

In 1913, having fai1ed to win a scho1arship to Reading Universit,y,

he went to Bordeaux as a teacher in the Berlitz Schoo1 of Languages there.

He soon became a private tutor in a wea1thy bourgeois family.

In August 1915 he en1isted in the army, was commissioned in the

Manchester Regiment, and went to the front in December 1916 for a six­

month tour of active service. In June 1917 he 't-laS sent to Craig10ckhart

Hospital suffering from neurasthenia. After meeting Sassoon he gained

an entrée into li terary circ1es in London ivhich gave him grea t encourage­

ment. He served in training camps unti1 being sent back to the trenches

in September 1918. The fo11owing month he won the Mi1itary Cross. He

1,.TaS killed in action on the l,th November, 1918.

•

VIII. BIBLIOGRAPHY

•

•

PRIYlARY WORKS

Graves, Robert , Co11ected Poems. London, 19L8.

Collected Poems. London, 1960.

Fairies ~ Fusiliers. London, 1917.

Goodbye To lli~. London, 1929.

, ~ The Brazier. London, 1916.

Poems: 191tl-1926. London, 1927.

10L

Owen, Hilfred , The Collected Poem~, edited by C .D. Lel-IÏs. London, 1963.

, The Col1ected Letters, edited by Harold Owen and John Bell. London, 1967.

Poems, edited by Siegfried Sassoon. London, 1920.

Poems, edited by Edmund Blunden. London, 1931.

R.osenberg, Isaa c, The Col1ected ~vorks, edi ted by Gordon Bottomley and Denys Harding. London, 1937.

Poems, edited by Gordon Bottom1ey. London, 1922.

Siegfried Sassoon, Co11ected r~. London, 19L7.

Counter-Attack and other Poems. London, 1918.

Memoirs si. George Sherston, 3 volumes. London, 1937.

The 01d Huntsman and other Poems. London, 1917.

Picture Show. London, 1919.

Siegfried 's Journey 1916-1920. London, 19t15·

• 10;

SECONDARY ir!ORKS

Bain, Carl E. , IIThe Poetry of vlilfred Owen,1I Emory University Quarterly, XXI, L (196.5), 26.5-276.

Ba;vley, John, IIBut for Beaumont-Hamel, Il The Spectator, CCXI (Oct. Lth, 1963), L19-L20.

Bergonzi, Bernard, Heroes' Twili~ht: ! Study of ~ Literature of the Great War. London, 196 •

Bewley, Marius, "The Poetry of Isaac Rosenberg," Commentary, VII, 1 (19L9), 3~-LL.

Blunden, Edmund, "Siegfried Sassoon's Poetry," London Hercury, XX (June, 1929), 156-166.

------- , Undertones ~ War. London, 1928.

___ ---:~_:__' War Poets: 191~-1918 (TJTriters and their Work), no. 100 ). London, 19~

Carr, Ian, IIEdmund Blunden and the 19lL,-181ilar," Stand, IV, 3 (196L), L8-51.

Cohen, Joseph M., "In Memory of W.B. Yeats -- and Hilfred Owen," Journal of English and Germanie Philo1ogy, LVIII (1959), 637-6L9.

____ -::-:---:-:- ' IIIsaac Rosenberg: from Romantic to Classic," Tulane Studies in English, X, (1960), 129-1L2.

____ ..",..,._"""'- ' "Olr18n 's 'The ShOH'," The Exp l ica tor, YJlI: 2 (1957), Item No. 8.

Robert Graves. London, 1960.

, "The Earth is Hungry," The Listener, LXXIV (Nov. llth, ----::-1=96,-.,5~), 753-755. -

, "The Three Roles of Siegfrip.o Sassoon," Tulane Studies ----..,---=-in English, VII (1957), 169-185.

, IIThe \rlar Poet as Archetypal Spokesman," Stand, IV, 3 -----,(":'"19~6~L'), 23-27.

____ ~~_ , ''1t!ilfre<1 (}J,ren: fresher fields than Flanders," English Literature ~ Transition 1880-1920, VII, 1 (196L), 1-7.

, III'Tilfred (}J,ren's Greater Love," Tulane Studies in English, VI 0:956), 105-1.17.

•

•

106

Cut1er, F.W., 85-92.

lISo1dier Poets of Eng1and,1I Sewanee Review, XXVIII (1920),

Daiches, David, IIIsaac Rosenberg: Poet,1I Commentary, X 1 (L950), 91-93.

PoetEl ~ the Modern~. Chicago, 1940.

Enright, D.J., IIRobert Graves and the dec1ine of Modernism,1I Essays in Criticism, III (1961), 319-337.

, IIThe Literature of the First Wor1d \'Var,1I in The Modern Age, ed. Boris Ford, V~l. VII of The Pelican G~ide to mnglish Literature (London, 1904), 15LI-169.

, lIThe Truth Told~" The Ne'V1 Statesrnan, LXVI (Sept. 27th, 1963), 409-L10. - -

Evans, Ifor, 1949.

English Literature between ~ Hars, 2nd. edition. London,

____ --,...,..,...,.. , Eng1ish Poetry in ~ 1ater Nineteenth Century, 2nd. edition. London, 1966.

Fairchild, H.N., ~ of .ê.. Changing Poetry 1880-1920, volume 5 of ~ligious Trends in Eng1ish Poetry, 'b'V'Olumes. London, 1962.

Gardner, Brien, ed. QE. the Line to Death: ~ War Poets 191L-1918, London, 196L. Antho1ogy of 1-1ar poetry.

Gerlach, Lee, "Uri ting Poetry on the Occasion of a ~lar, Il Spectrum, IV, 1 (1960), 12-21.

Gose, Elliott B., "Digging In,lI Col1p.~e English, XXII, no. 6 (1961), 417-419.

Harding, D.~!., "Aspects of the Poetry of Isaac Roser.berg,1I Experience Into v!orcls (London, 1963), pa~es 99-103.

Johnston, John H., English poetry .2f. the First ~'Ior1d War, Princeton, 196LI.

Jones, David, In Parenthesis. London, 1937.

Keynes, Sir Geoffrey, ! Bib1iography of Siegfried Sas~. London, 1962.

Lindeman, Jack, lIThe tTrench Poems t of Isaac Rosenberg,lI Li terary Revie'I-T, XI, L (1959), 577-585.

Hanning, Frederic, Her Privates VIe. London, 1930.

MatthehTs, Geoffrey, tlBrooke and Ovren,1I Stand, IV, 3 (196L), 28-3L .

Harsh, Sir EdHard, ed. Georgian Poetry, 5 volumes. London, 1922.

Monro, Harolè, Some Contemporary Poets: 1920. London, 1920.

107

Mur:ry, J. Midd1eton, "Mr. Sassoon's Vlar Verses," The Nation, XXIII (Ju1y 13 th, 1918), 398. -

-------, The Evolution of an Intellectua1. London, 1920.

Owe~, Harold, Journey from Obscurity: Wilfred Owen 1893-1918, 3 volumes. London, 1965. - - --

Parsons, I.M., ed. Hen vJho March Away: ~ of the ~ \llorld ~. London, 1965. Anth010gy of War poetry.

Pinto, Vivian de Sola, Crisis in English Poetry 1880-1940. London, 1951.

Richards, Frank, 01d S01diers Never Die. London, 1933.

Sergeant, Howard, "Siegfried Sassoon: A Poet of War," Contemporary Review, ccrI (1962), 37-41.

Seymour-Smi th, Hartin, Robert Graves (lTriters and their vJork, no. 78). London, 1956.

Silkin, Jan, "Rosenberg and Sassoon," Stand, IV, 3 (1964), 35-40.

Spear, Hilda D., "v-Tilfred Owen and Poetic Truth," University of Kansas RevievJ, XY:J, no. 2 (1958),110-116.

Stead, C.K., ~ ~ Poetic. London, 1964.

Sturge-Hoore, T., Sorne Soldier Poets. London, 1919.

SHinnerton, Frank, "Three Rogue Poets," Figures in the Foreground (London, 1963), pages 198-213.

Thomas, Dylan, Quite Early ~ Horning. London, 195L.

Thorpe, Michael, Siegfried Sassoon: A Critical Study. Leiden, 1966.

Towner, Annemarie EvJing, "Helsh Bardic iYIeters and English Poetry," The lfJassachusetts Revie'l-l, VI (l96L-65), 614-62L.

Hellend, D.S .R., "Half-P-hyme in T;Ji1fred Ov18n: Its Derivation and Use," Revie'l-T of English Stuclies, N.S. 5, l (July, 1950), 226-2L1.

v-Iilfred Üt-len: ! Critica1 Study. London, 1960.

, "l,Tilfrec1 OHen: Poetry, Pi ty and Prophecy," Northern ---~R;::-e-v-:i-ew-,' VI, no. !I (1953-!,), 29-36.

1l'!hite, Hilliam, "1rJilfred Ovlen (l8930191e.): A Rib1iography," Serif, XI, L (1965), 5-16.

Yeats, W.B., Letters ~ Poetry ~ Dorothy Hellesley. London, 19!,O.

ed. The Oxford Book of Hodern Verse. London, 1936.