War Poets

Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 he does at times seem almost too prone to judge negatively the Europeans and not pass any judgment upon the practices that the Europeans took such pleasure in condemning. George Orwell suggested a sensible attitude that quite lacks Conrad's powerful resonances: we needn't approve of how others conduct their affairs, but we have no business being there ruling over them. How that ideology took shape by which the British- who tended to be more moralistic than other Europeans-convinced themselves that they deserved to rule over so much of the world becomes richly evident in Patrick Brantlinger's fine book. Peter Stansky _______________________________Stanford University_________________ WAR POETS Fred D. Crawford. British Poets of the Great War. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press, 1988. $35.00 Despite Paul Fussell, the Great War is now fading out of modern memory, as those who participated in it and survived, along with those who merely witnessed it, gradually join the rest of the generation that died in Flanders fields. With the end of living remembrance, names like Passchendaele and Ypres are being emptied of the immensity of their tragic significance and are receding into a landscape now so overgrown physically and spiritually as to obscure the hideous gashes that once were trenches and shell holes, that once were battlefields in which hundreds of thousands of young men were machine-gunned or blown to bits. Like Blenheim and Waterloo, these places will always remain significant in British military history-or, as here, literary history-but, except for the few specialists, the wider public now and in time to come will view them as subjects of anniverserial reminiscence or occasional cinematic spectacle, never quite sure of the when's and where's and wherefore's. With one possible exception: the poetry. Insofar as it remains alive, the war speaks to succeeding generations through its literature, especially its poetry. It is fitting that it should be so, for more than any other war in modern history-and perhaps in all history-the First World War provoked poetical responses from participants and onlookers alike. It was very likely the last time in Britain when serious poetry was read voluntarily by the so-called general public. Partly, no doubt, this popularity was due to a widespread sense that of all modes of literary expression poetry is the most overtly emotional; and this at a time when strong emotions were encouraged by and in a culture which 78 Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 habitually preferred to subdue or stifle them. These emotions included not only self-righteous hatred (at first of the enemy, later more often of the civilian warmongers at home), but also, openly avowed as rarely before, love and comradeship among men. Another, related cause of the popularity was, as Crawford recognizes, that poetry, for the first time since the Romantic period, crossed the lines of class and even of education in its authorship, and hence in its readership. Not that all or even most of this poetry was good. In retrospect at least, a great deal of it strikes one not only as bad but as comically bad, particularly in the exaggeration and falsity of emotion among the bulk of civilian poets. One of the considerable merits of Crawford's study is his readiness to acknowledge the existence of this "other" body of poetry, and thereby place the now canonical (indeed, almost canonized) war poets in a larger literary context. His account of Jessie Pope's bloodthirsty War Poems, for example, helps us understand the profound irony of Wilfred Owen's dedicating a draft version of "Dulce et Decorum Est" to her. Crawford reminds us (and we do need to be reminded) that the poetical response to the war, powerful and immediate as it was, was not unmediated : its context is as literary as it is military. Crawford's title, British Poets of the Great War, means what it says; this is not just another rehearsal of the greats. So, only the third ("Innovative Responses ") of the four sections of the book is devoted to individual poets, with the others (in this order) dealing with "Traditional Responses," especially the inherited notion...