A poetic puddle

AS Armistice Day nears, many people will remember the First World War through the poetry it produced. The canon of mostly anti-war poetry is now widely taught in schools, providing an emotionally powerful approach to the conflict. There’s another aspect, however, and that is the sheer volume that was produced.

Anyone who sampled the battlefield letters and diaries held by the Imperial War Museum will have been struck by the number of ordinary soldiers who wrote verse. In 1916, the trench newspaper, The Wipers Times, warned against a ‘hurricane of poetry’. ‘Subalterns have been seen with a notebook in one hand, and bombs in the other, absently walking near the wire in deep communication with their muse.’

The verse was of varying standard; often, it did not subscribe to the more pacificist views expressed by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Patriotism was the default position. There was much stoicism and wry humour.

Great poetry is original, but, not surprisingly, most of the soldiers’ poetry of the Great War was derivative. Nevertheless, it gave an outlet for writers’ personalities and feelings. Many of them would have left school at 14, but their education had included an exposure to the classics of literature, learnt by heart.

The future Field-marshal Lord Wavell, a Wykehamist, but not a Varsity man, who lost his left eye at Ypres, did not write poetry, but he could recite formidable quantities of it. As Viceroy of India during the Second World War, he was able to submit his anthology of poetry, Other Men’s Flowers, to Jonathan Cape, having, without a good library, written much of it from memory.

Initially, Cape reacted against the soldierly tone. War poems come under ‘Good Fighting’, as love is consigned to an emotionally repressed ‘Love and All That’, but the firm relented and the book became a runaway success.

The Blake show at Tate Britain (Exhibition, September 11) reminds us that even great poets could be uneven. To judge from the uninformative captions, not even the organisers have read Blake’s epics—just as few people tackle Hardy’s The Dynasts.

These days, however, few poets even try to address big themes. Prizes and academic positions go to poets whose work is restricted to a narrow band of emotion; there is much examination of literary navels—poets writing about the act of writing poetry. Not much for Lord Wavell to get his teeth into.

Young people who, like the soldiers of the First World War, look to poetry to illuminate profound experience, will be disappointed.

There is now much examination of literary navels–not much for Lord Wavell to get his teeth into