The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (3 page)

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.
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But despite receiving an enthusiastic critical reception – John Middleton Murry declared that Owen was ‘the greatest poet of the war'
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– 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.
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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'
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– 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'.
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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.
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For all the efforts made to promote Owen during the 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
.
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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';
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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';
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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:

Every sector becomes a bad one, every working party is shot to pieces; if a man is killed or wounded his brains or his entrails always protrude from his body; no one ever seems to have a rest…Attacks succeed one another with lightning rapidity. The soldier is represented as a depressed and mournful spectre helplessly wandering about until death brought his miseries to an end.
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It also meant assuming that Owen's individual response to the realities of war was shared by all who saw active service, creating the impression that everyone in uniform must have also experienced, as Andrew Rutherford puts it, the same trajectory of

First of all a naive enthusiasm for war and then, after the shock of battle experience, an overwhelming sense of disillusion, anger and pity, culminating in pacifism and protest.
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These ideas can be seen at work, to a greater or lesser degree, in all of the ‘sixties anthologies of war poetry. I. M. Parsons'
Men Who March Away
is perhaps the most typical, not only in the way in which Parsons prefers to emphasize the horror and suffering of war in his choice of poems, but also in the way in which those poems are arranged in a series of thematic sections – ‘Visions of Glory', ‘The Bitter Truth', ‘No More Jokes', ‘The Pity of War', ‘The Wounded', ‘The Dead', ‘Aftermath' – which correspond closely to the development of Owen's wartime sensibility. Not surprisingly, he's also the best represented poet in the collection, and Parsons uses his introduction to both justify this decision and incidentally also offer a full and detailed rebuttal of criticism of Owen's personality and poetry.
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Over the past three decades, continuing popular interest in the First World War has meant that this construction of the war has gained a currency well beyond the merely literary. Today, it is accepted as ‘the truth about the war'
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and can be found being reiterated not only in fiction, drama and film, but also in both popular and serious journalism, in radio and television documentaries and, in particular, in textbooks and other educational materials. With the widespread acceptance of it has come a corresponding surge of interest in both Owen's life and his poetry. Countless books about him and his work – including three authoritative biographies, numerous critical studies, two selections of his letters and nine separate editions of his poetry – have all appeared since the early ‘seventies, and there is now even a guidebook
for travellers wishing to recreate his experiences on the Western Front.
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Moreover, his recreation as a fictional character, most notably in Stephen MacDonald's highly popular play
Not About Heroes
and Pat Barker's award-winning
Regeneration
trilogy, has meant that he has reached a much wider audience than most twentieth-century poets.
⁷⁶
It's no coincidence that the sixteen names permanently commemorated on the memorial to the poets of the First World War in Westminster Abbey should be surrounded by a quote from Owen: ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity'.
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The existence of this monument is a public acknowledgement of the unique cultural significance of First World War poetry, confirming its status as what Andrew Motion has called ‘a sacred national text'.
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Yet it is precisely this sanctification which has resulted in a number of problems with how war poetry is currently constructed, read and valued going largely unnoticed. At the heart of these problems is the restricted and restrictive nature of what might be called the canon of First World War poetry. Of the tens of thousands of poems which found their way into print during and after the war, only a few hundred are still being reproduced and read today. Similarly, only a small number of those who wrote during and about the war have been remembered for posterity; the most complete bibliography of First World War poetry published to date lists well over two thousand individual poets,
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but only
a few of these names will be familiar to contemporary readers. Who, for example, still reads the poems of Sergeant Joseph Lee, Harold Begbie or ‘Klaxon'? All three were highly popular during the war, but all have since faded into obscurity.

This selectivity is the legacy of those editorial orthodoxies which emerged in the ‘sixties and which still influence both the form and content of contemporary selections of First World War poetry. Put simply, modern anthologies tend to only favour those poems which stress the horrors of the war, which are compassionate about the suffering of those who endured it and, preferably, translate that compassion into anger towards war and those who perpetuate it. The reason why such a limited range of poems should be preferred isn't hard to find – aside from reflecting the image of the war which emerged in the ‘sixties, such a limited body of work fits all the more easily into the Owenesque narrative of war experience which materialized at the same time – but it's had the damaging effect of marginalizing a vast body of other poems and created a highly distorted but enduring image of what the poetry of the First World War is actually like.

In recent years, however, a number of anthologies have been published which seek to challenge these assumptions. Katherine Reilly's
Scars Upon My Heart
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appeared in 1981 and brought women's poetry of the First World War to popular and critical attention for the first time. Seeking to broaden the definition of war poetry to include those women who served in uniformed organizations such as the Red Cross and the Voluntary Aid Detachment or –
more challengingly – those women who had been civilians throughout the war, it sought to question the idea that war poetry was an entirely male preserve, and a preserve that was reserved only for those who had seen active combat. Unfortunately, it had a negligible impact on the contents of subsequent anthologies. Aside from a couple of notable exceptions, most anthologists either continued to ignore women's war poetry completely or instead only included the odd poem by women because it seemed to echo the sentiments of established male war poets. And it's surely no coincidence that the Westminster Abbey memorial doesn't include a single female name.

The notable exceptions were Dominic Hibberd and John Onions'
Poetry of the Great War
, published in 1986, and Martin Stephen's
Never Such Innocence
, which appeared two years later. Both offered, as Stephen put it, ‘a rather more varied range of poems than is normal in anthologies of First World War verse'.
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Hibberd and Onions, recognizing the impossibility of making ‘the war's poetry follow a single inclusive line' chose to create a selection which provided ‘a readable and reliable picture of poetry by British writers composed during or soon after the Great War';
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In so doing, they revived a number of poets who don't easily suit the popular idea of what a war poet might be. Stephen spread his net wider, to include work ‘by writers hitherto considered rather second-division' and those ‘whose verse flickered into only the briefest fire of fame during and after the war';
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again, his selection was designed to offer a variety of new perspectives on the experience of the war and how that experience was
transmitted. In both cases, however, their efforts seem to have had little or no influence on the composition of popular selections of war poetry.

A conservative canon naturally encourages conservative ways of reading. In the case of First World War poetry, restricting the canon only to poems which are judged to be worthwhile because they combine the presentation of direct experience with the articulation of ‘a seared conscience'
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has meant that readers naturally enough use one or both of these criteria to judge the worth of any other war poems they may encounter. The value of a particular piece of poetry is then determined either by how ‘authentic' it seems or by whether it can be interpreted in the light of what is known about its author's attitude towards the war. Where there is a lack of biographical information about a poet or when a particular poem doesn't seem to fit in with what is known about its author, the solution tends to be the same: the reader naturally falls back on the Owenesque model of the ideal war poem – authenticity plus sensitivity – and adjusts everything else in their reading to fit in with this model. So, for example, Rudyard Kipling's ‘Epitaphs of the War: Common Form' is usually interpreted as being either an expression of his guilt over his only son's death in 1915, or as a condemnation of those who encouraged young men like John Kipling to go to their deaths on the battlefield. Both readings fit, of course, very neatly into conventional interpretations of what war poetry should be like, but both also ignore the fact that Kipling remained an ardent supporter of the war, even after the loss of his son. The
reading offered by Hibberd and Onions in their discussion of the problems raised by these kinds of interpretations offer another, which seems far more convincing: that the target of Kipling's scorn was in fact ‘the doves who had, in his opinion, failed to warn and arm the country before August 1914' and thus had, indirectly, caused the death of his son.
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