by Max Egremont
After the Somme and Passchendaele, these words came from a dead world. Soon the criticism, the mocking, began. Yet some, like Graves, Nichols and Sassoon, stayed admirers, at least of the idea of Brooke. In the 1920s, Virginia Woolf told a friend that she didn’t think much of the poems and perhaps this ‘ablest of men’ had been more suited to public life than to writing. Rupert Brooke might have become Prime Minister for he had ‘such a gift with people, and such sanity and force’. This seems unlikely; and Brooke has remained a poet. ‘The Soldier’ is perhaps the best-known sonnet of the twentieth century. The poems still sell, even if, as with Byron, much of the interest is in the romance of the poet’s life. Brooke’s version of war seems increasingly a distant curiosity.
Siegfried Sassoon was put up against Rupert Brooke, as a realist who understood war’s tragedy. In peacetime, however, Sassoon lost his anger. Heinemann published a selection of his war poems in 1919, which sold well, with critical opinion divided: the Nation writing of ‘A great pamphlet against the war’, and the London Mercury of mere ‘journalism’. In April 1919, Sassoon’s ‘Everyone Sang’ conveyed hope for freedom and change, not wholly realized by the poet. Propelled by his fame, and by mentors like Marsh and the priapic Cambridge musicologist Dent, Sassoon began a decade of guilt-ridden socializing and sex, briefly at Oxford before becoming literary editor of the Daily Herald and, billed as a hero poet, following Nichols on a lecture tour of the United States. Awkward in the public gaze, yet craving praise, he reverted to private publication of his poems. His post-war satires had too blunt an edge, or were too mild, even if influenced by the poet’s new left-wing views. Eventually Sassoon found a quiet lyricism which he stuck to for the rest of his life.
Robert Graves too went to Oxford, where he’d been about to go in 1914. He lived with Nancy and their child on Boar’s Hill and saw Edmund Blunden, who was also at the university, Graves noting the other poet’s drinking, shakiness and emotional talk of the trenches. It was at the Daily Herald that Sassoon first met Blunden, who’d sent him some poems, mostly set in the Kentish landscape, thus beginning what was for both of them a vital, if unequal, post-war friendship. Blunden’s post-war poetry had two main themes: loving evocations (Georgian in style, often quaint in language) of a passing country world and an obsessive remembering of the trenches. Even ‘Almswomen’ of 1920 – set in a sweet English village – shows the war’s shadow in a lament about death’s separation. As early as 1918, Blunden began a prose memoir.
A gap opened between those who’d fought and those who hadn’t. Before 1914, Britain and the new art of continental Europe had been getting closer; now, for many, the Continent meant death, obliteration and, even in peace, rumours of chaos. Some – mostly non-combatants like Eliot, James Joyce and Pound – still looked to modernism, to abstract art, to writing without clear narrative, whereas Sassoon and Blunden, even the more adventurous Graves, stuck to tradition, often yearning for an imagined, calm past. They had tried to tell of war’s reality, Wilfred Owen writing that ‘every word, every figure of speech must be a matter of experience’ and ‘I don’t want to write anything to which a soldier would say No compris’. Owen had known nothing of Eliot or Pound.
Ivor Gurney’s gentle father died in May 1919, and Ivor quarrelled with his strong-willed mother and scarcely spoke to his brother Ronald. Gurney’s genius didn’t impress the hard-working Ronald, who’d also fought in the war. He saw in Ivor only selfishness, arrogance, self-indulgence, even malingering.
Gloucestershire was what Gurney had dreamed of, in hospital and in France. How could he leave it again? ‘Crickley Hill’ shows how a name could set off rapturous memories. But in peace the old places couldn’t work enough magic against deepening depression and, like many landscapes, they were perhaps better in memory or in dreams. He rejoiced, however, in his friend Will Harvey’s return from a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany; and at a concert at Stroud, where Harvey read and sang his poems and Gurney played the piano, a member of the audience thought Ivor ‘wonderfully normal and well’.
Gurney stayed with the Harveys, happier away from his family, then worked briefly on a farm. In May 1919, he went back to London, to take up his scholarship at the Royal College of Music and study under Ralph Vaughan Williams. There was hope that a new London life, some success and the end of the war might help.
Ivor Gurney’s second collection, War’s Embers, came out in 1919. It didn’t sell well, perhaps because Gurney was still unknown in the little magazines that were then important in literary life. Escaping from home and family while at the Royal College of Music, he revived old friendships in or near London. Like many of those who fought, Ivor Gurney felt anxious and lost in a civilian world, as ‘The Interview’ and ‘Laventie’, written in 1921–2, show. ‘After War’ is about rest out of the line rather than a new peacetime life. His music and poetry went on bringing back the war. ‘The Silent One’ is about the distance, suggested in the accent and absurd courtesy, between a polite public school officer and his men.
Gurney got a job in the income tax office in Gloucester with Marsh’s help, but his bad breakdown made such work impossible. His family endured further threats of suicide, garbled stories of interior voices, a refusal to eat or to sleep, rages and abuse of his brother Ronald for being crazy enough to work.
In September 1922, Ronald Gurney wrote despairingly to Marion Scott. The family couldn’t cope. Ivor Gurney entered asylums, first in Gloucester, then in Kent; and after December 1922 he never saw Gloucestershire again. Poems and music still came, sometimes published or performed, and there were still admirers like Marion Scott and the composer Gerald Finzi. The asylum poems go over the past, as in ‘It is Near Toussaints’, ‘The Interview’, ‘The Bohemians’, ‘First Time In’ (remembering his battalion’s welcome into the trenches from the Welsh troops, how the Welsh songs had never sounded more beautiful than ‘here under the guns’ noise’) and ‘Memory’, written between 1922 and 1925. ‘War Books’ declared that he’d written from ‘heart’s sickness’, to escape hunger or the worst of the war and to bring back the Cotswolds. Ivor Gurney recalled the ‘needing and loving-of-action body’ that he’d been. The war could seem preferable to a grim present, even if his life had been at risk.
Edward Thomas never fell into obscurity. His 1920 Collected Poems had as its frontispiece a romantic photograph of the poet looking down in melancholy, and there was a list of his twenty-three books and two edited anthologies. Walter de la Mare wrote a foreword, declaring, in an attack on modernism, that Thomas had ‘detested mere cleverness’, that he had resembled, perhaps even surpassed, Clare and Cobbett, Morland and Hardy, Hudson and Doughty, for ‘England’s roads and heaths and woods, its secret haunts and solitudes, its houses, its people – themselves resembling its thorns and juniper – its very flints and dust, were his freedom and peace’. There was, de la Mare thought, ‘nothing precious, elaborate, brilliant, esoteric, obscure in his work’. The description of Thomas’s looks, abruptness, yearning for solitude and dislike of being confined in a city portrays the poet as a solitary, mysterious outsider. Robert Frost, increasingly famous in the United States, praised his old friend’s work, helping it to become known there.
Helen Thomas broke down after Edward’s death. In the early 1920s, she published a memoir with frank depictions of her husband’s early sexual innocence that annoyed some of his friends, including Frost. Helen yearned for living memories of him. Ivor Gurney had set some of Thomas’s poems to music, and mentioned him in his post-1918 poem ‘The Mangel-Bury’ (‘Edward Thomas had fallen at Arras’) about the war dead and also in ‘I Saw England – July Night’ where home is ‘a village of lovely knowledge’ that held Thomas, Shakespeare, Hardy and Borrow. In 1932, Helen Thomas went with Marion Scott to see Gurney in his Dartford asylum.
At first the patient seemed normal; then, still obsessed with sinister messages, he said, ‘It was wireless that killed Edward.’ Helen waited, and they spoke of the country near Gloucester before goi
ng into another room, where there were other patients and a piano, and Ivor Gurney played. Helen Thomas heard that Gurney avoided the asylum’s garden, thinking it tame compared to the wilder land of his imagination. Attempting perhaps to evoke this wildness, on another visit she brought Edward Thomas’s old maps so that they could trace where he’d walked near Dymock; and Gurney, who’d known the landscape, seemed happy as this, or his version of it, came back. She thought that he should be released, but it was believed that he would kill himself if he were.
Ivor Gurney died in December 1937 of pleurisy and tuberculosis. He’d just seen the proofs of the number of Music and Letters, put together by Marion Scott and Gerald Finzi, that was entirely about his work. Unable to take it in, Gurney murmured ‘It is too late…’ He was buried at Twigworth, near Gloucester. A later attempt at a memorial came in 1954 when Edmund Blunden edited and introduced a selection of seventy-eight of Gurney’s poems. The book received little attention. The great War Poets boom had not yet begun.
Ivor Gurney had been helped by Eddie Marsh; Edward Thomas too had known Marsh and had been at the Poetry Bookshop in January 1913 for the launch of the first Georgian anthology. The Georgians then had seemed fresh, even shocking. It was Marsh’s hour. By 1918, that was passing.
A Georgian volume, the fourth, came out in November 1919, also published by Harold Monro at the Poetry Bookshop, with a very short introduction by Marsh, still the editor, that included the facetious comment, ‘I hope it may be thought to show that what for want of a better word is called Peace has not interfered with the writing of good poetry.’ The sense of a dying movement was intensified when the critic Middleton Murry, among others, declared that most of the poems were limp.
Marsh had another try in November 1922, with a final volume that, for the first time, included Blunden. Now sales crashed: 8,000, in contrast to the 19,000 of November 1915. Marsh himself was caricatured in H. G. Wells’s 1925 novel Men Like Gods as the civil servant Freddie Mush, renowned for his ‘Taste. Good taste … He’s dreadfully critical and sarcastic. Mr Mush with his preposterous eyeglass and love of good food … spoke in a kind of impotent falsetto…’
In 1926, Robert Graves, who’d been in the later volumes, claimed that the Georgians had become too ‘concerned with Nature and love and leisure and old age and childhood and animals and sleep and other uncontroversial subjects’. By then Graves was in thrall to the American modernist writer Laura Riding; and 1922, the year of the last Georgian collection, was also the year of Eliot’s The Waste Land, of Joyce’s Ulysses, of Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room.
Virginia Woolf thought at the end of 1918 how quickly the war had faded, perhaps not surprising since few of her friends had had any part in it. Six years later, when describing a farewell dinner given for Edmund Blunden who was going to teach at Tokyo University, she made no mention of the poet’s time in the trenches – so vital to his writing – even though he was clearly still suffering from it. Instead she wondered loftily, ‘Did we believe in Blunden’s genius? Had we read his poems? How much sincerity was there in the whole thing?’ Sincerity there would have been, for many people loved Blunden, even if some, notably Siegfried Sassoon, looked on him with condescension.
Woolf was thinking of the limitations of Blunden’s work. Memories of such strong and terrifying experiences did impose a limit, through their power. The poets couldn’t leave the war, even if, like Robert Graves, they wanted to move on. When Graves lived in a village near Oxford, many of the locals called him Captain Graves (a title which Thomas Hardy said he envied). As a veteran, he was asked by the vicar to speak at a church service commemorating the war dead and rebelled by choosing as his text poems by Sassoon and Owen instead of the patriotic theme of dying for your country. Graves’s affair with Laura Riding took him into new territory; and his autobiography Goodbye to All That, a best-seller in 1929, showed a resolve to leave England. After 1918, as if determined to forget, to avoid dreams of a lost pre-1914 paradise, he often seemed didactic and brisk, even when his subject was love. ‘The Rock Below’, from the 1923 collection Whipperginny, displays hope of rebirth, of escape. Graves stayed apart from Eliot and Pound and is closer to another kind of poetry: a realism, even nostalgia, that stretches from Hardy, Masefield, through the Georgians, through parts of Auden and MacNeice, to Larkin and to Hughes. Edward Thomas is there, as are post-war Sassoon and Blunden.
Isaac Rosenberg is harder to place. The first peacetime edition of his poems (published in 1922) had a long introduction by the Georgian poet Laurence Binyon, to whom Rosenberg had sent his work. This starts patronizingly with ‘Of the many young poets who gave their lives in the war, Isaac Rosenberg was not the least gifted,’ noting also that ‘whatever criticism can be made of his poetry, its faults are plainly those of excess rather than deficiency’. Binyon goes on to quote from the poet’s letters and say how the ‘straining and tormenting of the language’, the immaturity, didn’t reflect enough the hard work and rigorous ‘self criticism’ of their author. He left Rosenberg out of his 1924 anthology Golden Treasury of Modern Lyrics.
The next Rosenberg collection came in 1937. T. S. Eliot refused to write a foreword because (he said) of the conflict with his position at Faber & Faber (a rival publisher), and W. B. Yeats declared he couldn’t stand the ‘windy’ poetry, so it was left to Siegfried Sassoon, who felt flattered to be asked. The trouble was that Sassoon, although admiring the poems, couldn’t think of what to say about them; they were so different from his own writing, particularly from what it had become after the war. One of the editors offered a phrase about Rosenberg being ‘a fruitful fusion between English and Hebrew culture’; probably Sassoon himself came up with the idea that the verses were ‘scriptural and sculptural’. The leading critic F. R. Leavis wrote an article in praise of Rosenberg; Marsh continued rather dutifully to try to help ‘poor little Isaac Rosenberg’s’ reputation as an artist and a poet. In the next war, the poet Keith Douglas, remembering ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, wrote in ‘Desert Flowers’:
Living in a wide landscape are the flowers –
Rosenberg, I only repeat what you were saying …
A new Collected Poems (with the same Sassoon foreword) came out in 1949. By then Rupert Brooke’s war had been eclipsed; fading also was the idea of a lost generation of brave young British aristocrats who might have saved the world. Between the wars, partly because of their mother’s memoir of them, the Grenfell boys – Julian and Billy – were seen in some conservative circles as magnificent examples of English manhood and chivalry. There were admirers whom they and their family would probably not have wanted, like the best-selling historian Arthur Bryant, an apologist for Hitler, who compared Julian to ‘a trumpet call in men’s hearts to remind them how valiant, how beautiful, how generous man at his best could be’. But as the war became thought of as inexcusable rather than glorious, ‘Into Battle’ could seem offensive, if beautiful, even typical of an absurd euphoria that had led to slaughter. The socialist critic and poet Jon Silkin wanted to exclude Julian Grenfell’s poem from his 1978 Penguin Book of First War Poetry, putting it in only because of its fame. To Silkin, Rosenberg seemed the greatest poet of the war.
By the 1960s, Wilfred Owen was the modern master. The preface to his poetry (‘This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them…’) said that his poems were about the transformation of war from the Edwardian view of military glory formed by Newbolt, Kipling and W. E. Henley or by G. A. Henty’s popular historical novels – and maintained by Brooke and Grenfell – to one of horrific suffering.
Owen’s ascent had been slow. In 1919, the Sitwells printed seven of his poems in their journal Wheels, dedicating the edition ‘To the Memory of Wilfred Owen M.C.’ It was ironic; Owen had been proud to be thought a Georgian whereas Wheels, more modernist, had been set up in opposition to Marsh’s anthologies, although it had far fewer sales. Some critics paid attention; the traditionalist J. C. Squire dismissed Owen, but Middleto
n Murry told Katherine Mansfield, ‘It’s what Sassoon might have done, if he were any real good.’
In 1920, Chatto and Windus published The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Edith Sitwell and introduced by Siegfried Sassoon, who had wanted to leave out the famous preface, thinking that it took attention away from the poems. Sassoon’s introduction avoided analysis, saying that the book showed ‘profound humanity’ and ‘absolute integrity of mind’, and that he agreed with Owen’s view of the war. Mrs Owen, Wilfred’s adoring mother, was pleased. Edmund Blunden, in the Athenaeum, under the headline ‘The Real War’, declared that these poems were by ‘one of the few spokesmen of the ordinary fighting man’ who had articulated rebellion, in spite of his pride in enduring the pain and his wish to do his duty as an officer. For Blunden, after reading Owen, ‘it is almost impossible to conceive of any other point of view … There is no other philosophy in modern war.’
The small edition sold out. Edith Sitwell was an inaccurate editor and corrected several errors in a quick, and small, reprint. Scott Moncrieff, Robert Nichols and Middleton Murry reviewed the book, all, to Sassoon’s fury, mentioning the rumour of Owen’s 1917 cowardice.
In 1931 came the most complete and accurate edition yet of Wilfred Owen’s work, edited, at Sassoon’s request, by Edmund Blunden. This stayed within a quite small readership. But the poet’s fame was growing. By 1933, W. H. Auden was writing of Owen and Katherine Mansfield in ‘The Malverns’:
‘The poetry is in the pity,’ Wilfred said,
And Kathy in her journal, ‘To be rooted in life,