World War I Poets (3/18). What prompted England to declare war on Germany on August 4, 1914, was that Germany decided to make war with France by going through Belgium, violating that country's neutrality. What had already happened by then was that Archduke Ferdinand of Austria had been murdered in Serbia. Austria, with Germany's support, retaliated by declaring war on Serbia. Serbia had an ally in Russia. Russia was bound by treaty in an alliance with France (and Britain), so Russia and France went to war against Germany and Austria. That's when the Germans decided to go through Belgium to attack France, and that was the final straw that prompted Britain to declar war on Germany. The conflict, however, had been a long time coming, for various reasons. (There are any number of web sites for exploring World War I.)

The response of poets to the first world war is a subject that is complicated by the very issues of aesthetics that we have been studying. We've noted in passing that Yeats had no time for this poetry; he wrote in 1936 that "passive suffering is not a theme for poetry . . . some blunderer has driven his car on the wrong side of the road--that is all" (qtd. in David Perkins, A History of Modern Poetry I:267). The kind of poetry that had developed in England in the first part of the century was more given to rustic charm than to the realities of trench warfare.

But all of that changed, "changed utterly" as Yeats said in another context. Poets who saw action in the war had to grapple with such brutal situations that they had little choice, if they were honest, but to blend their experiences with high doses of irony and cynicism. The cold realism of Synge's depiction of Christy's wounded "da" provided a better model than the work of some of these poets' more immediate predecessors.

We begin with one famous poem by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915). His sonnet "The Soldier" became, in its patriotic lyricism, symbolic of the heroism the the British soldiers. But it also became symbolic of a lost sentiment--of a transcendent faith in the rightness of the war's cause that was not sustained by later poets. Looking back, most observers conclude that if Brooke had not died while on duty in the Aegean in 1915--if, for example, he had lived to see more of the war's true atrocities--he would have gone on to write poetry that was more critical of the war. As it was, though, when he died all England mourned, and for all its soldiers. His poetry spoke to a wide audience, probably because he so successfully identified the soldier with England itself: "If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England."

And we need to bear in mind that this sentiment was echoed in lots of other popular poetry of the time.

War poets who were fortunate enough (they might question the word "fortunate") to live longer into the war came away with much more ambivalent feelings--to say the least. Their role model was more likely to be Thomas Hardy than Brooke. Born in 1840, Hardy was of a generation older than they were; and yet his way of combining simple rural scenes with tones of stark disillusionment seemed prophetic of the war poets' turn of mind. Hardy's ideas about war were formed by a slightly earlier, minor conflict between British and the Boers (Dutch farmers) of South Africa. The Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902) forced a kind of crisis of English imperial identity: the struggle was not in the name of "civilizing the savage races" but rather it brough the British into conflict with other white Christians. Further, the British here introduced to the world the concept of the "concentration camp," and, worse, they were guilty of interning thousands of women and children. It was hard for Hardy to feel "patriotic" about such things.

In the aftermath of the Boer War, Hardy wrote "Drummer Hodge." Note the contrast between his treatment of the soldier and Brooke's. For Hardy, there is no lesson, no redeeming cause to be won, nothing but the sad loss of a life, in an unknown and unfriendly place.

Contrast Hardy's "Drummer Hodge" with Brooke's "The Soldier." The identification of the nameless, thus rather abstract idea of "the soldier" who stands wholly and unquestioningly for "England" is entirely absent. This soldier is simply one poor "drummer Hodge," who really "never knew" what he was fighting for, or why. Consult your class notes and your own interpretation for how to work this comparison out in detail.

"Channel Firing" takes place against the literal "rumblings" of World War I: the poet can hear gunnery practice across the English Channel. But the speaker of the poem is in the grave! (Hardy seems to have had some fun literalizing the old cliché about noise so loud it could "wake the dead.") The light, ironic attitude toward weighty questions of war, of life and death, is characteristic of Hardy's voice, and in turn of later war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg.

"In Time of `the Breaking of Nations,'" written during the war, is typical of another voice of Hardy's--not so ironic as somber, simply matter-of-fact. This stark depiction of what he thinks will outlast the wars and rumors of wars is an interesting counterpoint to some of the more immediate war poetry that we will go on to read.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). According to David Perkins, Owen had been "a dreamy, bookish boy" who was "of delicate health . . . From childhood he had loved poetry and was particularly fond of Keats. He was already writing verse in the manner of the early Keats and planed a volume with the diffident title, 'Minor Poems, in a Minor Key, by a Minor.' After a serious illness, he spent two years in France (1913-1915) in order to avoid English winters. . . . When the war began he felt it his duty to enlist, despite his health, and was accepted for service in the Artist's Rifles (1915). In a letter to his mother he spoke of his ambitions as a poet: "To be able to write as I know how to, study is necessary; a period of study, then of intercourse with kindred spirits, then of isolation. My heart is ready, but my brain unprepared, and my hand untrained. And all,--untested. I quite envisage possibility of non-success.'

"The following year he was commissioned in the 5th Reserve Battalion. The experience of trench warfare, vividly described in his letters home, quickly deepend him emotionally as a poet. . . . Invalided home in June 1917, he met Siegfried Sassoon, and the older writer encouraged and helped give direction to Owen's poetry. Despite the efforts of his friends to find him a staff position in England, he was sent back to France (August 1918) as a company commander and put in the front lines. He received the Military Cross for gallantry under fire (October 1) and was killed a week before the Armistice."

Perkins goes on, "If Owen at his best wrote more powerfully than the other war poets discussed, it is not through a great realism but through an ampler gift in traditional and 'Romantic' qualities of style and imagination, which unite with the realism and qualify it. . . . When he sought later to make readers feel the war as he felt it, he did not lose these earlier sources nor did he cease to be interested in technique. 'I am a poet's poet,' he wrote in a letter of 1917. One finds in his greater poetry a combination of qualities that often appear only in separation--traditional Romanticism with realism, moral and political passion and purpose with technical elaboration and control. Though there is only one theme--'My subject is War, and the pity of War'--there is a great variety of greatment--parable and vision, narrative, subjective lyric, dramatic monologue, case history--and a wide range of feeling."

"Anthem for Doomed Youth," which is a traditional sonnet in form, is a good example of Owen's combination of the romantic and the realistic--or more specifically the way he juxtaposes the sublimely religious (an "anthem," with metion of "orisons" and "prayers" and "bells" and "choirs) ironically against the stark imagery of "those who die as cattle." Note the chiasmus in the last two lines of the octave (i.e., the first stanza, which in a sonnet has eight lines): the "choirs of "wailing shells" followed by the "bugles" calling from "sad shires." Note also the way the last line of the poem works, through the repeated "d" sounds to help us visualize the turning out of the lights.

"Dulce Et Decorum Est" similarly achieves its impact through starkly realistic images, mostly through the action itself, which records a gas attack as it is happening. The ryhthm of the sounds combines with the language itself to emphasize the shocking urgency of the moment. But although, as Perkins notes, "its realism and horror, bitterness and irony, force and directness" take the poem "far from the traditionally 'poetic,' . . . there is, even here, something of a 'Romantic' heightening. It appears in the phrases 'All went lame; all blind,' where the repeated 'all' lends something sublime and visionary to the scene. It appears also in the controlled use of assonance and alliteration to bind the lines together, so that even in a poem that seems an immediate report of actual experience, one finds the complex pattern of 'l' and 'b' alliteration in

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind.

"This use of vowel and consonant pattern Owen had caught from Keats," Perkins continues, pointing out that it can also be seen in

"Strange Meeting" (in your anthology). In this poem, which ends in a confrontation between a soldier and "the enemy you killed," Owen has perfected his trick of rhyming consonants but not vowels ("escaped"/"scooped). This technique, which we'll see later picked up by Auden, effectively suggests that the war has put something out of joint. The last line, which ends in an ellipsis and is shorter than it should be, suggests, perhaps that this confrontation is too much for words. (For this poem and all the others in this section, consult your own class notes and to come to your own readings.

As "Strange Meeting" shows, Owen tends to focus on, even to idealize, the common soldier--another facet, according to Perkins, of his Romanticism. He uses this intense idenfitication with the soldier's experience for what is ultimately a political purpose. "He once described himself as a 'conscientious objector with a very seared conscience.' With a moral loathing of the war and a huge anger at the civilians who tolerated, supported, or profited from it, he thought of himself as a voice through which the sufferings of the soldiers could be pleaded. And he believed that only if he shared their sufferings had he the right to speak for them" (Perkins I:283).

This identification takes obvious religious dimensions in some poems, in which it is evident that, as Perkins writes, Owen believed that "their suffering released or created in them a spiritual worth. One of the poems "built on the paradox of the spiritual emerging out of the foulness of war" is

"Apologia Pro Poemate Meo" (in your anthology). Here, the speaker makes it clear that the civilians' conventional Christianity is less sufficient than is the truly sacrificial suffering of the soldiers. Once again, the emphasis is on those who have had the direct experience of being in the trenches.

Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1917) (3/20). Like Owen, Rosenberg had his mind set on poetry before the war interrupted--another "lost poet," as the electronic archive at Emory poignantly puts it. "Break of Day in the Trenches" illustrates his skill in turning the tropes of Romanticism in upon themselves. The imagery of the poppy is particularly notable for its allusion to an earlier, more comforting, and very popular poem about the real fact that poppies were planted over the grave sites in Flanders:

"In Flanders Fields." This poem first appeared anonymously in the popular journal Punch on December 6, 1915 (the same month that Vera Brittain's Roland died); it was written by John McCrae. Although the situation of this poem is not as idealistic as Brooke's in "The Soldier," the lyricism of the language and of the way the poppies fill up the view give the poem an air of comfort and consolation.

But all of that is subject to ironic inversion in Rosenberg's poem, which was written seven months later. Paul Fussell's critical notes are helpful in thinking about it.

According to Perkins, "If Owen and Rosenberg had survived the war, poetry in the twenties would have been different. America would not have enjoyed the same predominance, for these were the English contemporaries most likely to have challenged Eliot . . . . As it was, the prestige of British poetry was maintained by the surviving Georgians [poets whose era was defined by that of King George], the Sitwells, Robert Graves, and D. H. Lawrence, and especially by the older generation, by the aging Hardy and the Anglo-Irish Yeats."

Perkins goes on to say that "There was no significant connection between the important poetry of the war and that of the first Modernists. Eliot, Pound, and their fellow poets adopted traditions completely different from those of the war poets. They were advancing on their own lines before the war began. Sassoon, Owen, and the other Georgians at war had no influence on their work. Nevertheless, some of the emotions and effects the Modernists made their own were similar to those called forth by the war--disgust and horror, realism and satire. The war poetry undoubtedly helped prepare an audience for the Modernist poetry of the 1920s. But the audience for the Modernists, so far as they had an audience, was formed not so much by the poetry of the war as by the war itself. More than any other event, the war engendered the spiritual atmosphere of literature in the postwar period" (I:288-89).

Part of what Perkins is saying here plays into a long-held belief that the poetry of World War I, like the war itself, was a thing apart, a terrible anomaly, and at least in literary terms separate from the main currents of aestheticism/modernism/(and later) postmodernism. I think, rather, that we need to stress the commonalities between the war world and the home front--and this kind of stress is what our War Poetry anthology is seeking to achieve also. As its editor puts it,

"The concentration by many critics on war poetry as a special case of twentieth-century literary history has had a number of consequences: the variety of its forms have been reduced; the variety of responses to war have been reduced correspondingly, and, ironically, access to the variety of experiences of war has also been limited" (1-2).

One obvious area in which the war poetry is limited is in its handling of the experiences of non-combatants--especially women. Rosenberg's "Girl to Soldier on Leave," in its failure to communicate a credible female voice (although he at least tried, as others did not), suggests that there may be more "experience" we ought to consider. Perkins is right, at least, to point out that World War I had a pervasive impact on the culture that it left in its wake. And so we turn to Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth.

Vera Brittain (1893-1970) (3/25, 3/27). With a promising academic career at Oxford ahead of her, Vera Brittain became caught up in the events of the war, and her life took on a purpose and a direction that went far beyond her "provincial" training. Her memoir Testament of Youth, begun in 1929 and published in 1933, is both a personal and a public account of her experiences.

Her decision to write a memoir was made in the face of other memoirs that had already been published by men who experienced the war. She thought that her own story was worth telling, for its similarities to theirs but perhaps more important for its difference.

"With scientific precision," she recalled later, "I studied the memoirs of [Edmund] Blunden, [Sigfreid] Sassoon, and [Robert] Graves. Surely, I thought, my story is as interesting as theirs? Besides, I see things other than they have seen, and some of the things they perceive I see differently" (qtd. in Jean Pickering).

Brittain's memoir differs from the male versions of the war memoir in that the men--for example, Robert Graves--tend to want to bracket the war experience as something that they need to give a separate meaning to in order to proceed with the rest of their lives. Graves' title, Goodbye to All That, suggests what his strategy is. Brittain, in contrast, builds her memoir along the lines of a romantic comedy: although we are quitting our formal reading of the memoir with her lover's death, the story goes on to show that after years of hardship, she reaches the traditional "comic" ending of marriage and life "happily ever after." And since this is a memoir based on a real life story, we see that what Brittain has in fact done is to allow the experience of the war to color and shape the way she lives the rest of her life.

Consult your class notes and your own reading for further thinking about this work. Here, I'll conclude with a passage from one critic, which discusses one of the main questions that we addressed in class--what was Brittain's motivation for entering the war effort? Was it love of country, or love of Roland, and in any case, what are we to make of it?

Jean Pickering writes, "The feminism which, aroused by her family circumstances, prompted Brittain to work for a place at Oxford also sent her into nursing with the VAD. This activity had a personal basis: during 'three radiant days of July 1914' (Testament of Youth 87)--'the one perfect summer idyll [she] ever experienced' (91)--she fell 'more deeply and ardently in love than [she] had ever been or [was] ever likely to be' (121) with Roland Leighton, her brother's friend, a 'brilliant, reserved, extravagant personality' (114). Like most of his class and generation, he volunteered early in the war, persistently applying for a commission until he at last managed to get one with the Norfolk Territorials in October of 1914. His frame of mind, so typical of the public school boy at the beginning of the war, is clearly indicated in a letter he wrote to Vera:

"'I feel that I am meant to take an active part in this War. It is to me a very fascinating thing--somethin,g if often horrible, yet very ennobling and very beautiful, something whose elemental reality raises it above the reach of all cold theorising. You will call me a militarist. You may be right'" (104).

"From the very first, Vera's love of Roland was colored by the fear of losing him. Before he went to France, he promised her that, if he died there, 'he would try to come back and tell [her] that the grave was not the end of [their] love' (130). Her anxiety for his life was further compounded by 'a new fear that the War would come between [them]--as indeed, with time, the War always did, putting a barrier of indescribable experience between men and the women whom they loved, thrusting horror deeper and deeper inward, linking the dread of spiritual death to the apprehension of physical disaster' (143).

"Hard as she had worked for a palce at Oxford, she now determined to ask for a leave of absence to become a nurse--the nearest female equivalent of Roland's military service. Yet she had little of the patriotic fervor animating the first male volunteers, the most famous spokesman for which was Rupert Brooke, already dead in the Aegean, whose outlook contrasted wildly with the poets at the end of the war when the writers in the trenches had begun to understand the scale of the casualties and the folly of the generals sending them to France to die in the mud. Unlike Roland, Vera was not motivated by abstract notions of glory. In her diary she recorded her real reason for volunteering for Red Cross Service: 'He has to face far worse things than any sight or act I could com across; h e can bear it--and so can I' (154). Her feminism implied a total egalitarianism; from the first she accepted the drawbacks as well as the advantages her philosophical position entailed. She risked her comfort, even her life, in support of a principle drawn ultimately from her own experience.

"She realized that 'public events and private lives had become inseparable' (98); she never forgot it. Her commitment, first to pacifism, then to socialism, came about because of her personal involvement in the war, both her vicarious experience of life in the trenches through Roland, and her own direct participation when she nursed Tommies and Huns with the most appalling injuries. The sheer physical waste of war was more apparent to her than to the policy makers who, at some remove from the actual, dealt in national honor. They, of course, were shielded from the knowledge of conditions in the trenches, as was the general public, from whom the news was deliberately kept, much to the ironic amusement of the men in France, who received the daily papers from England but whose letters home were strictly censored.

"The number of maimed and dying who passed through Brittain's hands impressed upon her what it took civilians years to grasp: that her own losses were representative of those suffered by her entire generation. . . . Cut off from her contemporaries she felt entirely alone, as though their deaths had invalidated her past. At this point her sense of the personal merged into the life of the nation and of the world and never again separated from them."

That phrase Pickering closes with here--"never again"--is a phrase that Brittain uses more than once in her memoir. Such finality it has--"never again." It's a phrase that sums up what was really lost in World War I--the strong sense that the world was as stable and progressive as the Victorians had convinced their children that it was. The phrase echoes in a poem about the war by a more recent British poet, Philip Larkin, "MCMXIV" (he put the title in Roman numerals to give special weight to the year "1914"--as if it were chiselled on the side of a marble building)

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marraiges
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.

And the tragic inevitability of the war's disproportionate impact on the younger generation is expressed memorably in a poem by a poet of Hardy's generation, A. E. Housman:

Here dead we lie because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

Brittain's memoir reminds us that the losses reverberated far beyond the trenches.