The War Poets

ELT 37:3 1994 is not an authorized biography," she has been granted access to an abundance of primary and secondary material concerning Macaulay's life. In turn, Emery closes her book by providing her readers with a fairly lengthy bibliography in which she shares many of her sources with us. And yet she incorrectly dates the Alice Bensen biography of Macaulay, which was issued as part of the Twayne English Authors Series in 1969, as having been published in 1950, eight years before Macaulay's death. Emery also deletes The Legacy of Rose Macaulay, the subtitle of Josephine N. Passtj^s full-length study Eros and Androgyny (1988), which makes the work incorrectly appear as a secondary work rather than a primary work. And she entirely omits the only other full-length Macaulay biography, Rose Macaulay (1972), written by Constance Babington Smith, choosing instead to list only an essay by Smith—"Rose Macaulay in Her Writings"—which was published in 1975 as part of a collection of essays. Such bibliographical errors combine to make it seem as though Emery's is the first full-length work on Macaulay—authorized or otherwise—to appear since 1950, which deceptively increases the apparent importance of this biography. In the early morning hours of 30 October 1958, Rose Macaulay died in her own bed of a heart attack. She was seventy-seven years of age. Two months earlier, she had voyaged to Trebizond on a cruise, tracing the route of the Argonauts in their quest for the Golden Fleece. Writing in 1925, Macaulay had claimed that "at worst, a house unkept cannot be so distressing as a life unlived." Jane Emery has written a well-researched academic biography, full of fascinating detail, that joyfully celebrates the life that Rose Macaulay lived to the fullest. Cindy Huggins University of North Carolina at Greensboro The War Poets Adrian Caesar. Taking It Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. 246 pp. $69.95 THIS BOOK on suffering, sexuality and the war poets is sub-titled 'Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, Graves." These four names belong in the only category of English writers defined by their relation to a specific historical event: "the war poets" are those who wrote about the Great War of 1914-1918. For a number of reasons—including the way they have been overshadowed by their mostly non-combatant High Modernist contemporaries—they have tended to be passed over by more ven370 BOOK REVIEWS turesome contemporary criticism and have attracted not only a generous readership, especially among young people, but a criticism largely traditional and (as Adrian Caesar calls it) humanist. His study is welcome, then, in that it starts from a dissatisfaction with this "humanist " reading practice, and proposes a new approach. It is precisely the scandalously direct relation between this writing and historical (and military) event that has always made it hard to see clearly. There is no point in asking what sort of poet Wilfred Owen would have become without the war to write about, and it is hardly possible to assess his poetry, or Sassoon's, without involving our own judgments and feelings about war in general and that war in particular. We have to approach these still misunderstood writers not by trying to abstract their work from the event which is its subject, but by broadening our understanding of the event itself. The war was a struggle of more than military forces, a crisis in which every aspect of European culture underwent test and transformation, and the whole ofthat crisis is to be read in the best of the war poets. Caesar's project is to overturn what he sees as the conventional view that the writings of the war poets—Sassoon and the rest—was anti-war. Although Sassoon and Owen, at least, wrote poems of protest against the war, all four of these writers in fact offer a celebration of suffering in their war poems, says Caesar; and this glorification and enjoyment of suffering is the product of emotional habits inculcated in them by the dominant ideologies—Christian, imperialist and Romantic—of their upbringing, especially as these coagulate around the issue...