The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry

by Various Contributors

  Blow, golden trumpets, mournfully,

  For all the golden youth far-fled;

  For all the shattered dreams that lie

  Where God has laid the quiet dead

  Under an alien sky.29

  Julian Grenfell’s ‘Into Battle’ is included as a fitting example of the Brooke-like ‘poet-soldier’, accompanied by a lengthy headnote emphasising not only his literary credentials but his untimely death in his country’s service. Although he didn’t write poetry himself, a tribute is also included to Lieutenant John Richardson on the grounds that he was a promising literary scholar and had apparently chalked up the words ‘O’er that he triumphed, o’er this may I’ in Anglo-Saxon in his trench to inspire his men.30

  ‘The soldier as poet, rather than the poet as soldier’

  By the following year, however, a new kind of war poetry had emerged. Although still written by those in uniform, it was distinctive enough for its practitioners to warrant a new label: these were not ‘poet-soldiers’ but ‘Soldier Poets’. Also called ‘Trench Poets’, usually by the popular press, this change in nomenclature is significant. If earlier war poets had been poets first and soldiers second, then this new breed were exactly the opposite and their work reflected this change in emphasis: using a new, unadorned kind of poetic language, they sought to capture the reality of life in uniform and, in particular, the realities of modern warfare. Arthur Waugh was only one of many critics who welcomed this new kind of war poetry as a significant development in contemporary writing:

  Poetry has, now for the first time, made War – made it in its own image, with all the tinsel and gaud of tradition stripped away from it; and so made it perhaps that no sincere artist will ever venture again to represent War in those delusive colours which Art has been too often content to disguise it in the past.

  This was, as Waugh argued, a truly authentic kind of writing which had transformed the literary representation of warfare: at long last, the poetry of war was being written ‘not by lookers-on, but by the soldiers themselves’.31

  Publishers were not slow to recognize the commercial possibilities of this new genre. Perhaps the most enterprising was Galloway Kyle, who cornered the rapidly expanding market in Trench Poets by rushing out slim volumes with inspiring titles such as Refining Fires and Songs of Youth and War.32 Aside from his habit of asking aspiring authors for money to help underwrite the cost of their own books, his business acumen is perhaps best exemplified by Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men, first published in 1916. In reality largely a shop window for his poetry list, the dust-wrapper of this anthology nevertheless calls it ‘the most significant literary volume connected with the war’ to have appeared to date. The grounds for this grandiose claim are expanded upon by Kyle in his preface; after describing the contents of the book as revealing ‘a unity of spirit, of exultant sincerity and unconquerable idealism that makes the reader very proud and very humble’, he continues:

  What seems to me to be the characteristics of this volume give it more than a literary and temporary value. When the history of these tremendous times comes to be written, the poetry of the period will be found to be an illuminating index and memorial.

  This is not poetry as literature, but rather poetry as reportage. Aware that the public enthusiasm for Soldier Poets had as much to do with authenticity as it did with aesthetics, Kyle deliberately created an anthology which presented ‘the soldier as poet rather than the poet as soldier’.33 And his commercial instincts proved to be right: Soldier Poets was so popular that it spawned both a ‘Trench Edition’ for readers on active service and, in the following year, a similarly successful sequel.34

  Also published in 1917, E. B. Osborn’s The Muse in Arms: A Collection of War Poems, for the Most Part Written in the Field of Action, by Seamen, Soldiers and Flying Men who are Serving, or have Served in the Great War has strong affinities with Kyle’s anthologies, similarly professing to show

  what passes in the British warrior’s soul when, in the moments of aspiration or inspiration, before or after action, or in the busy days of self preparation for self sacrifice, he has glimpses of the ultimate significance of warfare.

  Where it differs, however, is in the way in which Osborn attempts to provide a definitive portrait of the typical ‘Soldier Poet’ – such an individual regards war as ‘the greatest of all great games’, displays no antagonism towards ‘a most hateful enemy’ and deliberately eschews ‘the brazen trumpet of self-advertising patriotism’35 – and in the way in which he arranges his contributions thematically, rather than alphabetically by author. Some of his groupings, such as ‘Before Action’, ‘Battle Pieces’ and ‘In Memoriam’, would not look out of place in a contemporary anthology, but the inclusion of sections on ‘The Christian Soldier’, ‘School and College’ and ‘Chivalry of Sport’ strike a somewhat incongruous note, to the modern reader at least, in a collection which professes to bring together only poems ‘for the Most Part Written in the Field of Action’.

  They seem incongruous because one of the most longstanding assumptions about the First World War is that pre-war concepts such as Valour, Honour and Glory – what Robert Graves memorably called the ‘Big Words’36 – didn’t survive the tribulations of the Western Front. ‘Idealism perished on the Somme’, wrote A. J. P. Taylor some fifty years later:

  Rupert Brooke had symbolised the British soldier at the start of the war. Now his place was taken by Old Bill, a veteran of 1915, who crouched in a shell crater for want of ‘a better ‘ole to go to’.37

  All too often, this change in attitudes is articulated in literary terms, usually by recourse to May Wedderburn Cannan’s neatly aphoristic statement that soldiers ‘went to the war with Rupert Brooke and came home with Siegfried Sassoon’.38 Whether Brooke is contrasted with a cartoon character or one of the better-known poets to have emerged from the war, the message is still the same: ‘the initial patriotic fervour that compelled many young men to enlist in the summer of 1914 had, in most cases, by 1916 collapsed into cynicism and anger’.39

  Anthologies like Kyle’s and Osborn’s, however, paint a very different picture, a picture which is reinforced by even the briefest survey of those war poems which were never published in book form.40 If anything characterizes this material, it’s the way in which it shows not only that a vast number of serving soldiers still believed in the old values right up until the end of the war, but also that they were content to use a variety of poetic styles to express these beliefs. Many do indeed strip away what Waugh calls ‘all the tinsel and gaud of tradition’ from their poems, but others are content to still use those self-consciously Brookian techniques supposedly obliterated in the mud of France and Flanders. And with this diversity of approaches comes an equal diversity of subject matter and sentiment, leaving the lasting impression that faith in the war and a belief in the ‘Big Words’ was as much a part of Soldier Poets’ raw material as the unburied dead, the waterlogged dugout and the ubiquitous poppy. Experience may have introduced a new realism into war poetry, but this realism didn’t necessarily bring in its wake the pessimism and resentment so often attributed to the later years of the war.

  Aphorisms like Cannan’s also offer a highly distorted picture of how the wartime reading public understood and valued the poetry of Brooke and Sassoon. The implication that Brooke’s famous sonnets encouraged a generation of young men to war is not supported by recent oral histories dealing with the early years of the conflict.41 Their importance, as Bernard Bergonzi has noted, rested on the fact that they ‘formed a unique focus for what the English felt, or wanted to feel’ in wartime42 and this explains why they remained so popular with troops and civilians alike throughout the whole of the war. A year after he had written his own ‘Sonnets 1917’ as ‘a sort of counterblast’ against Brooke, Ivor Gurney wrote to a friend from a war hospital to express his disappointment that Osborn had failed to include more Brooke in The Muse in Arms; interestingly enough, he was also annoyed that there were too few
contributions from Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon.43 Similarly, although highly regarded today, Sassoon was seen as something of a minor poet during the war years, and his presence is barely registered in wartime anthologies.44 Contemporary reviewers, whilst recognizing the anger and bitterness in his poems, were in agreement that they were ‘not poetry’ but rather ‘the harsh, peremptory, colloquial kind of versification that we have so often mistaken for poetry’ or, in Virginia Woolf’s more generous view, ‘the raw stuff of poetry’.45 Nor were these poems seen as being particularly outspoken or dangerous; rather, they were seen as the work of ‘a young man, eager to pursue other aims, who, finding the age out of joint, resents being called upon to mend it’.46 Perhaps the best illustration of how post-war perspectives have obscured the wartime reception of Brooke’s and Sassoon’s work is supplied by no less a person than Winston Churchill: despite being an ardent champion of Brooke, Churchill was also a great fan of Sassoon and went as far as learning ‘several of the Counter-Attack poems by heart’.47

  ‘All the poet can do to-day is warn’

  ‘After the war, I think men will not write of the war nor think of it much for a long time.’48 Nowhere did John Masefield’s wartime prophecy prove to be more accurate than in the case of war poetry. The majority of those who made their poetic debut during the First World War fell silent after the Armistice and only a handful, such as Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden went on to have successful post-war careers as poets. Many felt that they had already said all that they wanted to say, whilst others needed time to come to terms with their experiences; all seemed to share the unspoken belief that it had suddenly become ‘Very bad form | To mention the war’.49 This feeling was echoed by the reading public, and the market for war poetry dried up almost as quickly as it had appeared. To all intents and purposes, Edward Thomas’s gloomy prediction about the longevity of poetry written in the midst of a war looked like coming true.

  Only Rupert Brooke’s work continued to sell in any substantial quality during this period; by 1926, the combined sales of 1914 and Other Poems and the later Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke: With a Memoir had reached 300,000 in Britain alone.50 For a nation in mourning for its dead, his poetry offered consolation to the bereaved whilst at the same time transforming their sacrifice into something which transcended the squalid realities of post-war life. As ‘the salient factor in a martyrology of the war’,51 Brooke became more popular than ever, his ghostly presence permeating memorial volumes such as St John Adcock’s For Remembrance to such an extent that their contents almost seem like acts of ventriloquism: ‘in the years of peace, our souls had put on too much flesh, we had become gross and sordid, had forgotten our ideals’, Adcock writes, ‘and now the war had suddenly uplifted us from the slough, restored our manhood to us and touched us to noble issues’.52 Indeed, such was Brooke’s importance as a symbol of national sacrifice that Stanley Casson could write in a piece about his burial in land belonging to St George’s monastery on Skyros: ‘For once St George of Skyros and St George of England have met on common ground’.53

  The myth of Brooke first came under serious attack at the end of the ‘twenties, when the publication of novels and memoirs such as Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Foxhunting Man, Graves’s Good-Bye to All That and, in particular, Eric Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front provoked the literary cause célèbre known at the time as the ‘War Books Controversy’.54 Here were a series of books which not only broke the decade-long taboo on writing about the war, but did so in the kind of terms that explicitly contradicted the idea that it had been either ennobling or necessary. As more and more of these books – dubbed ‘the Lavatory School’ of war writing by J. C. Squire in the pages of the London Mercury55 – appeared over the next two years, strengthened by plays such as R. C. Sherriff’s Journey’s End and films like Lewis Milestone’s adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front,56 it was Brooke’s poetry which fell out of favour and his reputation which suffered most. His popular readership remained strong – a new and enlarged edition of The Collected Poems sold steadily throughout the ‘thirties and ‘forties – but the arrival of these works which, in the words of outraged veterans, only showed ‘the murky side of war and the bad side of human nature’ and were ‘an insult to ex-Servicemen’57 ensured that the idea of him as some kind of poetic St George could no longer be seriously entertained.

  Brooke’s place was taken by a poet whose work fitted in more readily with this new way of understanding the war. Wilfred Owen had lived to see only five of his poems in print before his death in November 1918, and it was only thanks to the efforts of Edith Sitwell that a larger selection of his work, Poems of Wilfred Owen, was put before the public two years later.58 Sitwell’s choice of poems, carefully made and arranged so as to emphasize Owen’s compassion and moral indignation, presented a picture of a tragic, selfless, talented young man whose humanism in the face of wartime atrocity spoke out from every poem. This picture was reinforced by Owen’s own Preface, with its stress on the relationship between ‘Poetry’ and ‘pity’, and by the measured introduction supplied by his old friend Siegfried Sassoon, which spoke of allowing Owen’s poems ‘backed by the authority of his experience as an infantry soldier’ to speak for him.59 But despite receiving an enthusiastic critical reception – John Middleton Murry declared that Owen was ‘the greatest poet of the war’60 – the book failed to capture the public’s imagination and soon sank without trace.

  It was the appearance of Edmund Blunden’s revised and enlarged edition of Owen’s poems at the height of the War Books Controversy that finally brought his life and work to a wider audience.61 Like Sitwell and Sassoon before him, Blunden emphasized the personality behind the poems, using Owen’s own letters to create the autobiography that he did not live to write; by recounting many of the real-life incidents which inspired the poetry, he also gave Owen’s work the validation of fact. As Samuel Hynes points out, the Owen that emerges from Blunden’s edition is ‘neither a hero nor a coward, but a sacrifice’ whose poems are made to seem ‘not so much acts of the imagination as testimonies’62 – in short, the ideal poetic martyr for a new generation of readers brought up to see the First World War through the perspective supplied by the Lavatory School of war prose.

  In his introduction, Blunden argued that Owen was ‘apart from Mr Sassoon, the greatest of the English war poets’.63 The younger poets of the ‘thirties held no such reservations, seemingly as infatuated with Owen the man as they were with his work: here was a poet whose ability to combine political commitment with compassion quickly made him not only a role-model but also a brother-in-arms to poets like W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender and C. Day-Lewis. Sometimes this identification can look almost like adolescent hero-worship, as in Auden’s lines:

  ‘The poetry is in the pity,’ Wilfred said

  And Kathy in her journal, ‘To be rooted in life,

  That’s what I want.’64

  Elsewhere, as in Day-Lewis’s critical tract A Hope for Poetry, it generates a persuasive argument for Owen’s continued relevance almost two decades after his death: ‘All the poet can do to-day is to warn’, Day-Lewis misquotes approvingly, thus ensuring the validation of his and his friends’ poetic techniques as well as Owen’s.65 Of course, not everyone shared in this veneration. W. B. Yeats’s verdict on Owen – ‘all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick’ and ‘unworthy of the poets’ corner of a country newspaper’ – is frequently quoted as evidence of this reaction. But read in context, it becomes clear that his target was not Owen himself, but rather those sections of the literary intelligentsia who, as he put it, had turned Owen into ‘a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution’; in arguing that ‘there is every excuse for him but none for those who like him’, Yeats was trying to separate Owen from the mythology rapidly growing up around him, an all-too-rare aspiration at the time.66

  ‘Our number one national ghost’

  For all the efforts made to promote Owen during th
e thirties, he would have probably remained relatively unknown had there not been a remarkable resurgence of interest in the poetry of the First World War almost three decades later. This revival was part of a renewed fascination with the war during the ‘sixties, stimulated by four years’ worth of fiftieth anniversaries between 1964 and 1968, and which found expression in a variety of ways: in popular historical studies such as A. J. P. Taylor’s The First World War: An Illustrated History, in ambitious television productions such as the BBC’s The Great War, in plays and musicals like the Theatre Workshop’s Oh What a Lovely War and in feature films like For King and Country.67 More importantly, it led to a rediscovery and reassessment of the literature of the war, resulting in the reappearance, after decades of being out-of-print, of a mass of classic war novels such as Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero and Frederic Manning’s Her Privates We. It also meant the publication of four new anthologies of First World War poetry, two of which were specifically designed to be used in schools; coincidentally, this was the same amount of anthologies which had appeared over the previous forty years.68 Small wonder that, writing in the middle of the decade, Ted Hughes should call the war ‘our number one national ghost’;69 throughout the ‘sixties, its haunting presence could not be avoided.

  If Hughes’s ghost had a name, it would be Wilfred Owen. Published to great acclaim in 1963, C. Day-Lewis’s edition of Owen’s poems proved to be not only a commercial success – it was reprinted eleven times in ten years – but also highly influential in the way in which it shaped popular perceptions of the war over the next decade and beyond. In his introduction, Day-Lewis writes of the way in which Owen’s work ‘radically changed our attitude towards war’;70 this statement holds true not merely for Day-Lewis’s generation, but also for the generation for whom this new edition was intended. This did not merely mean reviving and reinforcing the apocalyptic image of the First World War which had so pained Cyril Falls thirty years previously: