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.71
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.72
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.73
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’74 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.75 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’.77
‘The truth untold’
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’.78 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,79 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 Heart80 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’.81 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’;82 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’;83 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’84 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 tho
se 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.85
Underlying these readings is the perception that war poetry is somehow more authentic than other kinds of poetry. ‘The true Poets must be truthful’ wrote Owen,86 and all too often war poems are read not as poetry, but as being realistic, accurate reportage – ‘the truth untold’, as it were.87 This belief in authenticity has a long pedigree, going back as it does to the war itself and the claims made by Kyle and Osborn for their anthologies, but in recent years there’s been a worrying tendency to value war poetry solely for the reality it apparently portrays. One curious side effect of this tendency is the way in which the seeming authenticity of Wilfrid Gibson’s early war poems has led to the widespread misconception that he must have served on the Western Front, when all his time in uniform was actually spent on Home Service.88 Another more serious consequence is that children are more likely to first encounter the poetry of the First World War not in English lessons, but as part of their History curriculum. A handful of poems, mostly by Owen and Sassoon, have become central to the study of the war as history at school level, with students being asked to analyze them not for their literary qualities, but for what they reveal about the experience of the war – in other words, as historical evidence.
Because of a lack of contextualization and the limited range of the poems on offer, this merely serves, as Ian Beckett has noted in his examination of how the war is taught in British schools, to reinforce ‘stereotypes of the Western Front as a theatre of unrelieved terror, deprivation and disillusionment lacking all meaning’.89 Small wonder, then, that the historian Richard Holmes should find that ‘whenever I go into schools, I always find myself up against Wilfred Owen.’90
‘War’s classical name should have been Proteus’91
This selection of the poetry of the First World War actively addresses these issues. Edmund Blunden evoked the shape-hanging god Proteus when trying to describe the complexity of his wartime experiences and The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry reflects this idea in that it offers a much wider range of poems than is usually found in modern selections of war poetry. More importantly, it presents them not in the usual narrative, but rather as a series of thematic groupings. As such, it’s probably closer to wartime anthologies such as Osborn’s and Kyle’s than to more recent collections, in that it tries to illustrate the sheer diversity of First World War poetry without arranging that poetry so that it tells a particular story. Instead, I’ve tried to organize the contents of this book so that the reader is offered a variety of different perspectives on the same common wartime experiences, not merely though the mingling of different voices in each section, but also through the juxtaposition of different sections.
I’ve tried to be more protean than most recent editors of war poetry, but aesthetic and practical considerations have meant that some kinds of poems have had to be omitted. To give the selection some coherence, I’ve only included poems by combatants which deal with the realities of trench warfare in Northern France and Flanders; although other theatres of war such as the Eastern Front and the Dardanelles also had their fair share of poets, it’s the Western Front which was and still remains the primary imaginative focus of the First World War. Similarly, I’ve also chosen not to include any extracts from two of the most sustained poetic responses to the war, T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, and David Jones’s In Parenthesis;92 given their scale and complexity, these two poems really need to be read whole in order to be properly appreciated. In the case of some long sequences of individual poems, however, I’ve taken the liberty of selecting parts of them on the grounds that these extracts stand alone as complete poems in their own right.
The main part of the anthology is divided into five major sections, each exploring a particular area of wartime experience. The first, ‘Your Country Needs You’, takes its title from the caption to the famous wartime recruiting poster and brings together the poetic response to the outbreak of the war and the experiences of those ordinary men who ‘answered the call’ and quickly found themselves in khaki. Within this section, ‘Let the foul Scene proceed’ presents a selection of reactions to England’s declaration of war on Germany in August 1914 and is followed by ‘Who’s for the khaki suit’, which examines the drive for recruitment and the pressures placed on ordinary men to enlist. Finally, ‘In Training’ deals with the basic training undergone by these men as they prepared for active service: the fatigues, the route marches, the process of embarkation and then the journey to the war zone.
The second section, ‘Somewhere in France’, takes its title from a phrase commonly used in soldiers’ letters and explores some key aspects of everyday life on the Western Front. ‘In Trenches’ deals with the experience of being in the front line, and has been loosely arranged to create a picture of a typical day in the trenches. ‘Behind the Lines’ examines those times when soldiers were in reserve or on rest, and thus had the luxury of observing the delights or otherwise of military life in wartime France. The final subsection, ‘Comrades of War’, explores one of the central experiences of the Great War for most men: the bonds of friendship and love that were formed between serving men of all ranks. Familiar as this concept may be from the work of officer poets, I’ve here tried to show that such powerful ties permeated all ranks and were, for many, the most significant of their lives.
‘Action’ examines the harsh realities of armed conflict. ‘Rendezvous with Death’ is a selection of poems giving an insight into what went through soldiers’ minds when faced with the possibility of their own impending deaths. As the title suggests, ‘Battle’ deals with the experience of active warfare; it’s arranged so as to give an overview of what happened in any given action, from the laying down of bombardments through the actual fighting itself to its immediate cessation. ‘Aftermath’ explores the repercussions of any given battle: the sense of relief felt by many at having survived, the experience of the wounded and shell-shocked and, of course, the presence of the newly dead. This latter theme is approached not merely through the writing of those who fought, but also through the poetry of those back home in Britain who could only sit and wait for news of their loved ones.
The introduction of the civilian experience of the war in this section forms a bridge with the next, ‘Blighty’, which looks at serving soldiers’ bonds with home and the experience of returning to Britain after active service. ‘Going Back’ focuses on the conflicts of emotions felt by soldiers returning from the Front, whether on leave or because of wounding, whilst the sense of alienation that some felt is developed in the next section, ‘The Other War’. Much of this section explores the sensation that many serving soldiers had of being a race apart when in Blighty, but also emphasizes the point that the war at home was similarly traumatic and difficult for those left behind too. ‘Lucky Blighters’ is used ironically as the title for the final subsection, of course: whilst getting ‘a Blighty one’ was something many soldiers craved, the poems here show just what the reality was for those so seriously wounded that they could not return to France.
The last major section, ‘Peace’, examines the end of the war and its aftermath, both short-term and long-term. ‘Everyone Sang’ explores the personal and political implications of the Armistice, two themes which are developed further in the next section, ‘The Dead and the Living’. Here, both public and private commemorations of ‘the Million Dead’ are juxtaposed with the experience and emotions of those who
survived – the widows, the grieving parents and the demobilized. ‘Have you forgotten yet?’ explores the long-term impact of the war on its survivors, showing the variety of ways in which the war and its experience continued to permeate the work of these veterans throughout the twenties and thirties.
The anthology as a whole is framed by two single poems. A. E. Housman’s ‘On the idle hill of summer’ serves as a kind of prelude, introducing not only the major themes of the collection, but also the rhetoric and stylistic patterning present in so much First World War poetry; Housman’s A Shropshire Lad93 was a wartime bestseller and its influence, in terms of both form and content, can be found everywhere in the poetry of the period. For a coda, I’ve included Edmund Blunden’s ‘Ancre Sunshine’; written in 1966, this seems to be the last poem that Blunden wrote and also the last war poem to be published by any survivor of the war. As such, it seems to me to be a highly fitting way to end this selection.
The last word should perhaps be left to Charles Carrington. A survivor of both the Somme and Passchendaele Offensives, he lived to see the war he had fought in become distorted almost out of all recognition:
Just smile and make an old soldier’s wry joke when you see yourself on the television screen, agonised and woebegone, trudging from disaster to disaster, knee-deep in moral as well as physical mud, hesitant about your purpose, submissive to a harsh, irrelevant discipline, mistrustful of your commanders. Is it any use to assert that I was not like that, and my dead friends were not like that, and the old cronies I meet at reunions are not like that?94
I hope that he would’ve found the protean war depicted in this selection of poems more familiar.
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry Page 3