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“Sunrise, Ruins of a Hospice” by Paul Nash, 1918

Santanu Das, editor

THE CAMBRIDGE COMPANION TO

 THE POETRY OF THE FIRST WORLD

 WAR 

336pp. Cambridge University Press.

 Paperback, £17.99 (US $27.99).

978 1 107 69295 4

Max Egremont

SOME DESPERATE GLORY 

The First World War the poets knew 

335pp. Picador. £20.

978 1 4472 4199 7

US: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. $28.

978 0 374 28032 1

Tim Kendall, editor

POETRY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR 

 An anthology 

368pp. Oxford University Press. £14.99

 (US $19.95).

978 0 19 958144 3

Guy Cuthbertson

 WILFRED OWEN

346pp. Yale University Press. £25 (US

 $40).

978 0 300 15300 2

Thomas Dilworth

DAVID JONES IN THE GREAT WAR 

220pp. Enitharmon. £15 (US $34.95).

978 1 907587 24 5

Published: 5 November 2014

The soldier poetsSEAN O’BRIEN

 We hope you enjoy this free piece from

 the TLS , which is available every 

 Thursday in print and via the TL S  app.

 This week’s issue also features previously 

 unpublished poems by Ivor Gurney,

 Daniel Karlin on Rudyard Kipling’s love

 of language, Alan Brownjohn on train

 travel and reading etiquette, Susannah

 Hecht’s account of the scramble for the Amazon – and much more.

 In her essay “Poetic Legacies of the First World

 War” in The Cambridge Companion to the

 Poetry of the First World War, Fran Brearton

 quotes the Second World War poet Keith

 Douglas’s apostrophe to Isaac Rosenberg in

 “Desert Flowers” – “Rosenberg I only repeat

 what you were saying” – as an indication that

 “The years 1939–45 are ‘remembered’ through

 1914–18”. The First World War, then, in some

 sense contains all that comes after. (Critical

 writing in the past thirty-odd years, certainly, has been working to dig itself out from under

 Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern

 Memory, 1975.) The war’s visible legacy 

 remains widespread and its perennial presence

 seems even stronger, as was to be expected, in

 the year of the centenary, although wars have

 almost ceased to be fought by large infantry 

 formations in close combat, and have become

 variously asymmetrical, unofficial and

 ungoverned by any agreed rules of warfare. In

 fact 2014 has been marked not only by extensive

 commemoration and broadly educational

 activity, but by some urgent efforts to clarify 

 and define what went on, what it meant, and

 what it was worth. Michael Gove has given us

 his account of the matter. Santanu Das, editor

 of the Cambridge Companion, includes essays

 on poetry by women, and from all parts of the

 United Kingdom and Ireland, as well as from

 British colonies, to illuminate the expanding

 frame of reference. More generally, the fact that

 poetry figures so largely in public perceptions of 

 the conflict (seemingly the last time it

 performed such a role) complicates and lends

 significance to the subject. Sir Philip Sidney,

 himself a soldier, cited Aristotle’s claim that

 poetry carried more weight than history or philosophy, being free of the one and able to

 substantiate the claims of the other. We shall return to this.

 Reading the First World War involves much mapping – for example, the slow (or, more rarely,

 rapid) shifts in the opponents’ lines, and the overlaying of actual terrain with place names imported

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DUNCAN KELLY 

The mind of Max Weber

 ARI KELMAN

Red Cloud’s war

CHARLES POWELL

Talking to ETA 

LUCY DALLAS

Ice cold in Iceland

 There is something

 undeniably  adolescent in this will to mindlessness

 by the soldiers, which in turn sustained the imaginative presence of familiar places and conceptions.

 Wilfrid Gibson’s ballad “Otterburn”, probably written in 1917, speaks of a “lad” killed in Flanders, a

 place which, the poet claims, lacks “clear and singing streams”): “when peace comes to Flanders, /

 Because it comes too late, / He’ll still lie there, and listen / To the Otterburn in spate”. This is partly 

 a myth of consolation, where the native good place is present in an imagined afterlife, but for a

 native of Northumberland such as Gibson the name had further significance as the site of the

 famous battle in August 1388, chronicled by Froissart, where the English forces were defeated by the

 Scots under James, Earl of Douglas. A part of the present war seemed already to have been fought,

 and an outcome anticipated. In “Otterburn”, the Earl foresees his own death: “But I have dream’d a

 dreary dream, / Beyond the Isle of Skye; / I saw a dead man win a fight, / And I think that man was

 I”. The roadside marker at Otterburn directs the eye through a wood to the killing ground. It is, like

 many such places, eerie and seemingly not quite finished with the event that marks it out. The

 battlefield is also close to the Ministry of Defence’s Otterburn Range, where artillery practice and

 other exercises take place – and close to the Scots border, which has recently been once more a

 source of southern anxiety. Gibson’s Otterburn is a place of peace and also anything but, haunted by 

 the remembered fury of battle. In its scale the First World War may have been unprecedented, but it

 did not exclude comparisons for the men who had to find a place in it. Edna Longley, writing on

 Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney, finds that “they configure war with the extent to which all life is

 ‘strange’ or unheimlich”.

Listen to the work of the war poet Ivor Gurney on TLS Voices

 One of the worst experiences for soldiers in the trenches seems to have been the sense that

 landscape itself had been dissolved and unwritten by the continuous bombardment known as drum-

fire, and replaced by what David Jones called “the unformed voids of that mysterious existence”.

 Place, ground to stand on and comprehend, took on especial importance in a war of attrition. The

 places from which the war poets came, and to which they looked back, were often as bloodstained as

 Otterburn – Wilfred Owen’s Romano–Welsh border, Jones’s half-legendary Welsh interior,

 Siegfried Sassoon’s Sussex where the Normans invaded, and Rupert Brooke’s more generalized

 England, dulled, as apparently it seemed to him, by the long post-Napoleonic respite from direct

 military threat.

 Wild Northumberland would have appealed to Julian Grenfell (1888–

1915), who lived for the hunt and who in peacetime also felt an

 aristocratic liberty physically to attack those of whom he disapproved.

 In Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the poets knew, Max

 Egremont writes that, at Oxford, Grenfell “chased a Jewish millionaire

 undergraduate round the quad with a stock whip and beat up a cab

 driver who overcharged him”. He viewed the battlefield as an extension

 of his estate, as Keith Douglas’s “Sportsmen” would later bring the

 amateurism of the hunt to tank warfare in North Africa. When, in

 Flanders, Grenfell stalked and killed three Germans, he recorded the

 fact in his game-book, “alongside the partridges”, as Tim Kendall puts

 it in his anthology Poetry of the First World War. The Other Ranks were also able to find in

 themselves the ferocity required by the situation – a theme whose afterlife is pursued in Tim

 Binding’s fiery, underrated novel Anthem (2003), which moves from the Second World War to the

 Falklands conflict and the King’s Cross blaze, to present the tribes of the British Isles as inherently 

 warlike, given the chance. In a civilian age it is more comfortable to suppose that war is imposed

 against the soldier’s inclination, but the current widespread English hostility to “Europe” might be a

 substitute for the ancient and somehow addictive release of going to the wars there, as though an

 enemy should be someone you can physically get at.

 Edmund Blunden, like many poets of the First World War, records the names the troops gave to the

 landscape they fought over – Larch Wood, near Ypres, for example, mentioned in “Concert Party:

 Busseboom”, is a name both convenient and homely, but charged in memory with subterranean

 horror. After the concert a barrage starts up: “To this new concert, white we stood; / Cold certainty 

 held our breath; / While men in tunnels below Larch Wood / Were kicking men to death” – for when

 the Germans discovered the British tunnels, the miners had to fight unarmed. In the words of Keith

 Douglas, one of Blunden’s Oxford students, the poet finds himself continually “returning over the

 nightmare ground”. In imagination, readers often find themselves doing the same.

 Blunden stands up well here. Kendall’s judicious selections, and his concise and useful introductions

 to each of the chosen poets, suggest that his anthology will become a standard work (although it’s a

 pity Edward Thomas’s “Lights Out” is omitted). He is also prepared to provoke, as shown by his description of Grenfell’s “Into Battle”, written a few weeks before the poet’s death, as “one of the

 finest and most problematic poems of the War”, which seems to be stretching a point. Grenfell’s

 Nietzsche-on-horseback approach commends violence as an activity in itself:

 “And when the burning moment breaks,

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 And all things else are out of mind,

 And Joy of Battle only takes

Him by the throat, and makes him blind –

Through joy and blindness he shall know,

Not caring much to know, that still

 Nor lead nor steel shall reach him so

That it be not the Destined Will.”

 There is something undeniably adolescent in this will to mindlessness. Kendall quotes Elizabeth

 Vandiver’s comment that Grenfell “excludes the Christian idea of altruistic sacrifice in favour of a deeply Homeric presentation of individual achievement in battle, where battle is its own justification

 and a valiant death its own reward”. It’s true that nobody looks to Achilles for much in the way of 

 political and historical analysis. Ulysses in Troilus and Cressida has his measure in viewing his

 heroism as synonymous with vanity. Grenfell’s attitude recalls a comment by the Spectator’s “High

 Life” columnist Taki on watching the grim and desolating German film Stalingrad  (1993): that after

 all the Germans were quite understandably in pursuit of “glory”. Other viewers may have felt they 

 had wandered into a slaughterhouse. Why does combat stand in need of ennoblement anyway, if the

 activity is sufficient unto itself? To mitigate the absence of sorrow and pity?

 Patrick Shaw Stewart’s only extant adult poem, “I saw a man this morning”, surely leaves Grenfell

 outclassed. Shaw Stewart, a friend of Grenfell, and the leader of Brooke’s burial party, was killed at

 Cambrai in 1917. He had anticipated the Dardanelles campaign in Homeric terms, as a chance to

 walk the ground of epic. According to Kendall, he wrote the poem in July 1915 when recalled from

 leave on Imbros, writing it in his copy of A Shropshire Lad , though Elizabeth Vandiver’s essay “Early 

 Poets of the First World War” (in The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War)

 suggests that it may have been composed later. On balance it seems like a work of recognition rather

 than more remote reflection. The poet comes to imaginative maturity in the course of seven

 Housman-shaped quatrains, closing:

 “O hell of ships and cities,

Hell of men like me,

Fatal second Helen,

 Why must I follow thee?

 Achilles came to Troyland

 And I to Chersonese:

He turned from wrath to battle,

 And I from three days’ peace.

 Was it so hard, Achilles,

So very hard to die?

Thou knewest, and I know not –

So much the happier I.

 I will go back this morning

From Imbros over the sea;

Stand in the trench, Achilles,

Flame-capped, and shout for me.”

 The dutiful sacrifice foretold seems to weigh more than Grenfell’s sense of it, partly because Shaw 

 Stewart values what he is likely to lose while understanding the terrible “flame-capped” appeal of the

 conflict. His approach is dignified rather than psychotic.

 To have fought “like an angel”, as Owen wrote of himself, forbids any resumption of innocence. Guy 

 Cuthbertson’s biography Wilfred Owen focuses in detail on the poet’s innocence and his efforts to

 keep it. Provincial, lower-middle-class, from a family that had sunk somewhat in the social scale,

 Owen, in Cuthbertson’s account, felt he deserved a better place – better than grimy Birkenhead and

 boring Shrewsbury, where his father was a railway official; better education (Shrewsbury rather than

 the local technical school), a place at Oxford, or in London, or Reading, rather than a post as an

 assistant to a low-church vicar in rural Berkshire; a better way to spend his young manhood than

 enlisting and training for war. Teaching in Bordeaux suited Owen, who was handsome and

 personable and attractive to both men and women. He could foresee a life of writing and a way out

 of the confines of class. Having delayed, he signed up in October 1915, insisting that “I now do most

 intensely want to fight” and going on to do so with distinction twice over.

 Cuthbertson’s biography is both absorbing and irritating. His sense of place and milieu and of 

 Owen’s response to them is very strong, as is his depiction of the constraints and miseries of lower-

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middle-class life, of Owen’s time at Craiglockhart hospital, and of his literary friendships, but there

 are far too many rhetorical questions, must-haves and probablys where no evidence is available, and

 dead-end speculations on matters such as whether Owen, briefly living in Bloomsbury while

 training, might have seen Yeats working by candlelight at his upper window. This kind of thing can

 be left to the reader. Cuthbertson’s readings of the poems are clear and informative, though the case

 for Owen’s poetry scarcely needs to be made at present.

 With Ivor Gurney, things may seem less certain. Though he has eloquent advocates, not everyone

 will see the appeal of Gurney’s poems, as distinct from the terrible and compelling story of his life

 and descent into madness. Kendall includes seventeen pieces by Gurney. (He gives Sassoon the same

 number, while Owen has twenty, Edward Thomas has ten, Blunden ten and Robert Graves seven.) Numbers are not, of course, a satisfactory guide. But while “To His Love” is a fine elegiac lyric and

 there are flashes of power in the long poem “The Retreat” and the briefer “Signallers”, much of 

 Gurney’s work is technically at sea. Even an effective piece of remembered observation, such as the

 “consolatory” encounter with Welsh-speaking soldiers in the “sandbag ditches” in “First Time In”,

 gets imprisoned by a need to chase rhyme which in turn undoes the rhythmic impetus of the poem’s

 close. A previously unpublished poem, “The Stokes Gunners”, records the visit from a mortar team

 who have moved on by the time the Germans return fire in kind. Kendall quotes Charles Sorley’s

 comments in a letter: “For either side to bomb the other would be a useless violation of the

 unwritten laws that govern the relations of combatants permanently within a hundred yards . . . of 

 each other, who have found out that to provide discomfort for the other is but a roundabout way of 

 providing it for themselves”. How could this be better expressed? It seems cruel to note that Gurney 

 concludes: “the Gloucesters who desired peace or desired battle / Were left to pay the piper –

 Cursing Stokes to Hell, Montreal and Seattle”. Kendall remarks, “Aside from their considerable

 distance from the front, it is unclear why these cities of Canada and the United States respectively 

 have been singled out”. It’s the rhyme, again: desperate measures.

 David Jones is hard to represent in an anthology, but the three excerpts from In Parenthesis chosen

 by Kendall do justice to the strange clarity and dramatic suppleness of Jones’s work. In comparison

 with some of his fellow war poets, Jones, writing after the war, seems liberated from what Ted

 Hughes called “the terrible, suffocating, maternal octopus” of English poetic tradition, free at times

 to write with a visionary practicality about the compressed intensity and localization of military 

 experience: “no so-called seven ages o’ man only this bastard military age”. Jones, according to

 Thomas Dilworth in David Jones in the Great War, remained on active service longer than any 

 other British writer of the time. Dilworth’s book, superbly illustrated with Jones’s drawings, includes

 a gripping and horrific account of the suicidal attack on Mametz Wood (which forms Part VII of In

 Parenthesis), where Jones was shot in the leg. Of all the poets, Jones perhaps invested most in a

 sense of place. In a letter he commented on the Bois Grenier section, recalling discussions with his friend Leslie Poulter:

 “we went into glowing details & wondered if the unexploded projectile lying near us would go up

 under a bright holiday maker & how girls in muslin frocks would stand & be photographed on our

 parapets. I recall feeling very angry about this, like you do if you think of strangers ever occupying a

 house or garden you live in & love. There was a great sense of possessiveness among us. It was

 always “our trenches” “our dugouts” – we knew exactly the kind of shell he was likely to put on . . .

 we knew the best way across the open to where the big crater was, where the good water was. Some

 twist of traverse in a disused trench-system had for us something of the quality of the secret places

 lovers know.”

 This intimacy of response links to the drawings Jones was producing: on the one hand sketches of 

 trench life, with men working, cooking, sleeping and keeping watch, and on the other the heavily  allegorical medievalism of pieces such as “Captive Civilisation and the Black Knight of Prussia”,

 where a bound, bare-shouldered Civilisation looks for release from her grim captor as a Christian

 knight approaches bearing the scroll of the Law. Jones’s post-war life’s work was to synthesize the

 mundane and the mythic. With In Parenthesis myth and history are used to map immediate trench

 experience, to dramatize a life at once mundane and epic, homely and implacably violent, lived in a

 wasteland, “a place of enchantment” whose landscape spoke with what Thomas Malory called “a

 grimly voice”.

 Though his Colonel accused him of shirking his duty by refusing a commission, Jones professed

 himself incompetent. His difficulties as an artillery spotter suggest he was being honest, and he

 remained a private for the duration, prone to minor infractions such as taking a walking stick on

 parade, or stealing a leek from the officers’ supplies on St David’s Day to wear on his helmet – an act

 as necessary to the preservation of a sense of identity as singing hymns was for Welsh soldiers. Rather than hymns, Kendall provides a generous selection of “Music Hall and Trench Songs”. The

 songs favoured by the Other Ranks, who had a keen sense of their own expendable place in the

 larger scheme of things devised for them elsewhere, have a refreshing robustness and humour,

 cleansing to the palate and the ear. Kendall gives a mild version of “Mademoiselle from Armenteers”

 (“She hasn’t been kissed for forty years”): obscenity both unifies the group and provides its members

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 Sixty thousand casualties on the first day of the Somme sounds like quite a mistake. And what was the lesson learned? It’s not clear.

PRINT

Iris Murdoch’s philoso-fiction

 29 October 2014

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 3 September 2014

Paradise Lost re-read

 21 May 2014

 with a glimmer of dissenting autonomy, as it continues to do in working-class life. “Après la Guerre

 Fini” is brutally matter of fact in its misogyny (the pregnant Mademoiselle “can go to hell / Après la

 guerre fini”), but there are also adaptations of great formal ingenuity, such as “The Old Barbed Wire”

 and A. P. Herbert’s “That Shit Shute”, about the unpopular General Shute. “The Bells of Hell”,

 perhaps the best of all, could have fitted into The Waste Land : “O Death, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-

ling / O Grave, Thy victor-ee? / The bells of hell go ting-a-ling-a-ling’, / For you but not for me”.

 Max Egremont concludes his absorbing account of the war as

 experienced by eleven poets, including the now forgotten Robert

 Nicholls, with an attempt to sum up the pros and cons of the conflict.

 In his judgement the long-established and widely held liberal view  that the war was a needless catastrophe does not answer to the facts

 of German expansionism and Britain’s treaty obligations. When he

 turns to the conduct of the war itself, he admits that “There were

 mistakes, not least in Haig’s obstinacy and determination to go on, at

 the Somme and Ypres in the autumns of 1916 and 1917”. It’s

 unfortunate that these sound like “mistakes” of the kind from which,

 authorities nowadays repeatedly assert, “lessons will be learned”.

 Sixty thousand casualties on the first day of the Somme sounds like

 quite a mistake. And what was the lesson learned? It’s not clear.

 Egremont goes on: “Surely it’s necessary to separate politics, even

 history, from the poetry”. Why? Because, it seems, while

 “The work of the British First World War poets can be seen as one of the most powerful collective

 statements not just against what happened on the western front but against all war . . . it reflects

 individual experience rather than objective judgement. How could it do otherwise? Every work of art

 is restricted by what has inspired it, and war is a more powerful restriction than most. War poetry 

 can’t be isolated from its circumstances – a limitation perhaps and also one that acts against broader

 historical truth.”

 So poetry is both part of the texture of history and politics and yet set apart from them, created by 

 circumstance and yet impotent to speak with authority about it. So much for Aristotle, Sidney and

 much subsequent thought about the nature and powers of the poetic imagination. The convenience

 of Egremont’s argument to a revisionist case is evident, but if imagination is not a power, and if 

 poetry can be reduced to the status of a hobby pursued on the sidelines of “broader historical truth”,

 why are we bothering to read it in the first place?

Sean O’Brien’s Collected Poems appeared in 2012, and he is the co-editor, with Don Paterson, of 

 Train Songs, which was published last year. He is Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle

 University.