WAR POETS
By PATRIC DICKINSON
" WHERE are the war-poets ? " In the first months of the 1939 war one was often asked this question, even by intelligent people, and saw it asked in the Press. In the months following May, 1945, did one hear, " Where are the peace-poets ? "
Somehow the idea had arisen that a war-hyphen-poet was a species distinct and different from poeta vulgaris. Now ask: " Who were the war-poets ? " Too often the reply goes something like this. " Why, there's Rupert Brooke of course, and er . . ." The legend of Brooke, whose five heraldic sonnets show so clearly how little he knew of war, is the beginning. Brooke died of blood-poisoning on St. George's Day, 1915, on the way to the Dardanelles. He was not killed in action, never saw action, never saw war, never imagined war save in terms of an ideal romantic adventure. The sonnets are not war sonnets ; they are recruiting sonnets, and that is how they reacted upon their contemporaries. It is a mistake to belittle them from 1946, either poetically or for their spirit ; but to expect any poet in 1939 to write like that was idiotic.
The 1914 war dragged on and the poets went to it ; and here there is a difference. The poets of 1914 went to war as soldiers, not as poets. The poets of 1939 went to war as poets. In fact, there was talk of commissioning war-poets to record in the same way as artists. This is significant for two reasons. The status of the poet in the intervening years had risen considerably ; society was far more prepared to accept poets ; and, secondly, the poet was left far more free to write his own poetry, if he could.
For the poets of the first great war had already spoken out. Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen had already said all there was to be said ; they were, of course, anti-war poets, and that is why they are not mentioned as often as Brooke. Sassoon and Owen were both obsessed with the suffering of the individual soldier, the pity of war. It seemed to them that to express these feelings in poetry, to shock the conscience of the world, was the one function of the poet in war. " The poetry does not matter," said Owen. What mattered was only the truth. Sassoon's question, " Does it matter, losing your legs ? " is far from "Now God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour."
Sassoon's voice was heard. That was all he could expect. He had related the poet to twentieth-century war, which is not the same thing as saying that he was a war-poet. Wilfred Owen's voice was not heard at the time. He was killed within a few days of the armistice, but his poetry did not begin to live until Edmund Blunden's complete edition of him was published in 1931. It was then seen that we had lost a poet of great power and originality. Owen's method, his use of consonance and assonance, had a great deal of influence on the poets of the 'thirties. But by that time his subject- matter had ceased to be immediately vital, and it was lumped in with his manner. There is always this difference between the influence of form and that of content.
We shall not find that Sassoon's or Owen's content influenced the poetry of entre-deux-guerres. Indeed, as a poet Sassoon pro- gressed from his anti-war poems to satires, that is anti-social poems ; to contemplative metaphysical lyrics, that is to a final renouncement of action. These later works contain his most mature and his best work, but it is doubtful if they are read as his earlier works are. It is interesting to note in contrast how in joining the army his total liberation from personal responsibility allowed Edward Thomas to be a poet. That exquisite talent was set free, and his poetry, practically none of which is about war, was written by means the war which also destroyed it.
The term war-poet, then, seems to be rather misleading. But there is undoubtedly an attempt to label certain poets of the 1939 war as war-poets. The most likely victims of such a connotation are naturally poets killed in the war. Alun Lewis and Sidney Keyes take first place. Lewis is a most interesting study. For him, as for Edward Thomas whom he intensely admired, the war gave a sense of release, a sense of dispensation from all but the imme- diate problems.
" I have no more desire to express The old relationships."
As with Thomas, the war gave him the chance to be a poet, but for a different reason. Lewis was essentially a prose-writer who turned to poetry because of the urgency of saying what he had to say, as conversely Sassoon turned to prose reminiscence after the war. But Lewis's themes are still his personal variation on the basic triad of Dante: Love, War and Death. His poetry is of love and death qualified by war. The element of war is not dominant.
In Sidney Keyes it hardly exists, for he was already obsessed by death. Since he was very young his exploration of death was intellectual, of a rare and intense quality ; and where Lewis is exploring death by means of love and war, that is by means of human experience, Keyes is seeking love and war—and life—through death. To call these two young poets war-poets is as stupid as to call Tennyson or Matthew Arnold peace-poets.
The immense amount of poetical activity during the 1939 war is remarkable. During the 1914 war the Poetry Bookshop published its series of anthologies of Georgian Poetry, which contained work by such divergent poets as Brooke and D. H. Lawrence. If we actually read them in order to discover what common factors the Georgians possessed, so that when we now use Georgian as a term of critical abuse we may know what we mean, it may be instructive to substi- tute " war " for "Georgian " and see how far that makes nonsense.
Apart from the individual output, there have been many antho- logies of this war. Poems from the Forces (2 vols.), Poetry in War- time, Poems of this War, etc.—they cannot be said to have founded a school strong enough to become a critical term in twenty years' time. The reader will find in these volumes poets who were estab- lished as plain poets before the war, and poets who are not very likely to be established as plain poets after their demobilisation. But one thing these volumes should do is to dispel for ever the idea that there is a specialised category of " war-poet." What we must always mourn is the loss of poets in war, whether it be Brooke or Keyes or Sir Philip Sidney.
Let us hope for the future that the designation war-poet will never, have to be applied. For the past, the sooner it is dropped the better, for in much the same way as the value of an actor is stulti- fied when he is dubbed a film-star, so the definition war-poet has done great disservice to the reputation of certain poets and has obscured the true value of their work.
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