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First World War English Elegy and the Disavowal of Women’s Sentimental Poetics
Twentieth-century poets dismiss elegy with its commitments to consolation and compensation, Sandra M. Gilbert has argued, even as they invent “a new poetics of grief.”1 Jahan Ramazani adds that “Violence and irresolution … guilt and ambivalence” characterize the new “poetry of mourning,” which has arisen from the political events of the twentieth century, “as warfare was industrialized and mass death augmented.”2 This anti-elegy, these critics tell us, is poetry’s cure for the “insufficient … sentimental consolations of the funeral parlor, the condolence card, and the pop song.”3 Unlike other critics of elegy, Ramazani is explicit about high culture rejection of the popular nineteenth-century tradition of sentimental elegy, represented most famously by Felicia Hemans and Lydia Sigourney. Even women poets of the twentieth century must, he suggests, “bypass” the mournful poetess or nightingale tradition in order to establish a feminist poetics and to be taken seriously. It is difficult, however, to understand this anti-elegiac genre’s relationship to the demands of the twentieth-century state on its citizen poets if we discount the sentimental tradition, whether in the form of contemporary greeting cards or nineteenth-century laments about dying children.
“Who dies?” may, as Ariela Friedman puts it in her study of death and masculinity in modernist fiction, have become a more urgent question than “who speaks?”4 Critics of elegy in the twentieth century have shown that who we mourn and how we mourn are part of the production and reproduction of structures of gender, class, sexuality, and nationalism, obvious for example in the hagiography that followed the death of Ronald Reagan in 2004, an election year in which the United States was at war with Iraq. The main critical paradigms for understanding elegy all share this emphasis on the transmission of power and the continuity of social hierarchies, whether it be a question of [End Page 431] Bloom’s anxiety-of-influence model in which the poet replaces the dead rival through the act of poetic mourning; the Freudian-derived poetics in which poetry is a work of mourning that enables a successful compensation for loss through the substitution of another object for that which was lost; or, lastly, the feminist political model that treats classic elegy as a kind of initiation ritual, “a site of male bonding, power production, and authorial identification.”5 Such work defines a context in which we need to reconsider how critics make a claim for elegy as an important modern genre.
Poetry is able, as Ramazani asserts, to play a significant role in the cultural work of mourning because and not despite poets’ rejection of consolation. But if the work of mourning is also the work of cultural transmission, then we need to be careful about what disappears from view as a result of tracing a single line of descent for twentieth-century anti-elegy from the classic and classical English tradition of Milton’s “Lycidas” and Shelley’s “Adonais.”6 The dismissal of the sentimental tradition as purely mawkish and consolatory detaches the high culture anti-elegy of the twentieth century from a messier history in which the relationships among gender, sexuality, national identity, and genre are neither as static nor singular as they have seemed in even feminist analyses of the genre. The juvenile verse of the British feminist and peace activist Vera Brittain offers an important case study in the results of reconnecting the English elegy with the history of women’s sentimental poetics. Brittain’s diary, letters, and memoirs, in particular Testament of Youth (1933), have become ur-texts about women’s experiences of the First World War, making the war the origin for her commitments to internationalism, pacifism, and equal-rights feminism.7 Yet her first publication, Verses of a V.A.D. (1918), which appeared shortly before the end of the war, is a collection of elegiac poems written in a patriotic-heroic register that Elizabeth Marsland, in The Nation’s Cause (1991), has identified as characteristic of the war years.8 Such verse is the antithesis of the anti-elegy and the epitome of the “mournful poetess” tradition referred to by Ramazani. The study of minor individual poets alone cannot, however, reframe the weighty critical history of twentieth-century anti-elegy. For this, we need to see Brittain’s elegiac war poetry in the wider cultural context of debates about the role of war poetry during the First World War. As the prime conservator of literary value with a wide circulation, the Times Literary Supplement can give us access to this context. We will therefore use a discussion of the TLS’s vexed relationship to war poetry to reframe Brittain’s work, [End Page 432] examining a poetic exchange between two women poets published in March 1917, alongside the paper’s debates about the viability of war poetry itself.
The place of Verses of a V.A.D. within Brittain’s own limited oeuvre might seem to conform to a trajectory, familiar in First World War criticism, in which naïve youth gives way to disillusioned experience making untenable her early poetry’s sanctification of the soldier-hero. This is indeed the role of the war itself in the history of anti-elegy, where it has a special place. Zeiger writes of “the strain that the war experience placed on traditional (especially pastoral) elegiac conventions and decorums”; Ramazani analyzes Wilfred Owen’s refusal to turn poetry into solace, while Gilbert uses modernist poetry born out of the war to establish a generic taxonomy of the anticonsolatory elegy as the ground for her argument.9 Within this model, poetry such as Brittain’s can only be relegated to a mythic (and despised) past before the war has revealed modernity’s true horror. Yet recent First World War scholars dispute the idea of war writing moving inexorably from patriotic idealism to angry and ironic disillusion. A variety of responses to the war (patriotic, antiwar, enthusiastic, skeptical, critical, ironic, sentimental, and mournful) coexisted throughout the war and after.10 For this reason, a reconsideration of Brittain’s “terrible” poetry—unforgivable in its sentiments and style—can alter our understanding of the cultural work done by the elegies of angry soldier poets as much as those of sentimental wartime poetesses.11 Specifically, it can show us how and with what effects the soldier-poet came to inherit the role of the poetess in expressing the true heart of the nation.
It is widely recognized that First World War poetry has been important to the twentieth century insofar as it represented a protest against the war and the patriotic values that supported it. The value of war poets such as Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Edmund Blunden, Siegfried Sassoon and others has lain in the rejection of their society’s unthinking acceptance of wholesale slaughter in the cause of national and imperial advancement. Seamus Heaney, for example, in a powerful essay on the political role of the poet in Northern Ireland singles out Owen because of his position as a pacifist who could only speak authoritatively as a soldier on active service.12 For Heaney, Owen represents the dilemma of political engagement for the twentieth-century poet; Owen’s death as a soldier-hero is the price he pays for the political and [End Page 433] aesthetic freedom he claims in his war poetry. Without his military life and death, his poetry is a currency without backing. Later critics have persisted in constructing an image of the war poet as the model for heroic resistance by poets, at the expense of a more historically accurate picture of First World War poetry in which less than one-fifth of the gigantic outpouring of verse (written by over 2,000 writers) was composed by soldiers on active service.13
Women wrote over a quarter of the poetry printed during the war, more, that is, than the soldier-poets. During and in the immediate aftermath of the war, women’s poetry was well represented and seen as making a legitimate, though specific, contribution to the literary war effort and to the work of memorializing the war during the twenties; for example, G. H. Clarke’s Treasury of War Poetry, 1914–1917 concludes with a section titled “Women and War” in which a series of poems by women were used to represent women’s traditional patriotic war work as mother, fiancée, mourner, and the bearer of the future.14 Women’s poetry appeared in single-author collections, anthologies, and the leading newspapers and periodicals of the day, such as the London Times, the Nation, the Herald, the Daily Mail, and TLS, as well as factory and trench newspapers, local women’s magazines and local newspapers. Lucy Whitmell’s “Christ in Flanders” was published in the Spectator on 11 September 1915, reprinted in a diocesan magazine, quoted in a sermon by the Bishop of London, and made available in leaflet form. It was even “answered” by a soldier in 1917.15 Poetry is unquestionably a historically significant part of women’s contributions to the cultural responses to the war.
Within the canon of war poetry, however, women’s poetry remains largely invisible even after a sustained effort by feminist critics to recuperate this oeuvre.16 Whereas women’s prose writing of the war was often rooted in women’s new experience as war workers, their poetry has seemed to later critics to be frustratingly embedded in traditions of feminine domesticity translated into a national register. Women poets yield their menfolk to the national cause and mourn their deaths as noble sacrifices. Although this picture erases more various responses, including both the infamous jingoism of Jessie Pope and Louisa Prior and the less familiar antiwar writings of Margaret Sackville, a large number of poems from the period fall into the category. May O’Rourke in “The Minority: 1917” scolds a young woman for forgetting that she treads “no mere commercial street, / But ground made consecrate by their spilt lives.”17 Another poet pays tribute to “those beloved graves of [End Page 434] Northern France,” asserting: “That Victory is ours because you died….”18 Even the most apparently personal meditations on loss, such as Marjorie Wilson’s “To Tony (Aged 3) In Memory T.P.C.W.,” participate in this sense that the soldier’s death is to be redeemed through the domestic, whether as individual home or national land:
And know it was for you who bear his name And such as you that all his joy he gave— His love of quiet fields, his youth, his life, To win that heritage of peace you have.19
Poems such as these have not fit easily into the later-twentieth-century model of the war poet as a lonely and dissenting voice, precursor of a tough and ironic modernist ethos, although as Marsland has argued their patriotism is more typical of war poetry than the angry disillusion of Owen, Sassoon, or Rosenberg.
“Great War patriotic-heroic poetry,” according to Marsland, represents “a vigorous poetic form perfectly suited for its historical role” as “the voice par excellence of the new sense of nationhood that came to fruition with the onset of the war.”20 Marsland herself lacks the context of more recent work on Victorian domestic and patriotic poetry to help explore the implications of her point; however, thanks to the work of critics such as Isobel Armstrong, Tricia Lootens, and Jerome McGann, we can now see that this vigorous new sense of nationhood necessarily involved the reinvention of older forms of patriotism and in particular patriotic verse.21 It is in this context that a young female poet like Brittain had to negotiate a position from which to speak within a strictly gendered definition of the nation and the place of women as its subjects. As we shall see, it was in the pages of the TLS, a public forum in which poetry was discussed as well as published, that such negotiation took place.
As wives and mothers women had traditionally, of course, represented the feminine domestic, that metonymy for the heart of the nation. To properly understand the national resonances of this feminine domestic in the nineteenth century we need, Lootens argues, to return to Hegel’s account of the gendered state. For Hegel, the masculine state, representative of human and historical law, has to absorb and suspend feminine power, which is located in the family and domestic. In times of war, for example, the interests of the individual have to be put aside for the good of the whole, and the family gives up its men to the nation. This is what also makes the feminine the “internal enemy” of the state. [End Page 435] But the state cannot dispense with the feminine or divine law since the divine grounds its transhistorical or eternal mythos. Moreover, “the family is its element altogether, and the individual consciousness [located by Hegel in the family] is its general operative basis.” Thus, in his discussion of Antigone, where these relations between the public and the private in the state are best exemplified, Hegel argues that community requires that the dead soldier must be “wed” to the “lap of the earth,” returned to “elementary, eternal individuality.”22
As Elizabeth Barrett Browning reveals in her rejection of feminine patriotism in “Mother and Poet,” the woman’s job is to teach her sons “[T]hat a country’s a thing men should die for at need.” But ultimately, “the birth-pangs of nations will wring us at length / Into wail such as this—and we sit on forlorn / When the man-child is born.” In Browning’s poem the most telling point is that the speaker is a “poetess” whose losses as a mother render her unable to do more than mourn. “When you sit at the feast,” she declares to her fellow countrymen, “And are wanting a great song for Italy free, / Let none look at me.” As Lootens has brilliantly demonstrated, this refusal to speak for the nation is deeply contradictory for the nineteenth-century poetess because her very position as mother and poet defines her role for the Hegelian nation-state.23 Her job is to express the pure, nonviolent heart of the nation from the space of the feminine domestic. As such her act of renunciation, giving up her sons to the militaristic state, and then her profound mourning of their bodies when they are returned as dead heroes is all of a piece. Her pacific mourning, her very refusal to sing for the nation, further reclaims the state from its own aggression and allows the reader also to participate in this essential pacifism. Mourning and patriotism are deeply entwined and, as Marsland has so perceptively argued with reference to First World War poetry, they frequently make pro- and antiwar poetry virtually indistinguishable.24
Women poets in the nineteenth century could speak for the nation from the position of the domestic, as a space with an explicitly acknowledged national function. The Victorian poetess expressed the heart of the nation in the sense both of the core and the affective truth, but this feminine domestic and familial space was a space apart from the nation, preserved as pure and nonviolent. Thus, on a Hegelian model the nation-state disavowed its own violence and aggression, as manifested in war, through the innocence of its domestic heart. First World War Britain, by contrast, created the conditions for women poets to claim to speak for the nation in a public, civic mode instead of from [End Page 436] the private space of the domestic. As a number of feminist critics have pointed out, women were encouraged to enter into the workforce but were also actively controlled through the Defence of the Realm Act and the careful orchestration of femininity within organizations such as the VAD and WAACs.25 Antiwar politics was also actively resisted as in the refusal of travel permits to suffragists who wanted to attend the Hague Peace Conference. Nonetheless, the systematic politicization of women through the suffrage movement had set the terms for engaged, public citizenship as women during the war. At the same time, the government brought women into the war effort on an unprecedented scale by actively recruiting them for propaganda purposes. The Boer War of 1899–1902 had prepared Britain for this possibility, in, for example, the government’s answer to the antiwar campaigner Emily Hobhouse’s denunciation of the appalling conditions Boer women and children faced in British concentration camps in South Africa. Acknowledging the place of the camps in public, political debate as a woman’s issue, the government sent suffragist Millicent Fawcett to South Africa to lead a women’s commission to investigate the concentration camps.26 By 1914 the government was in the lead in its use of women’s voices for propaganda purposes. When recruitment posters ventriloquised women’s voices in “Women of England Say Go,” or when the novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward was employed by the government war information office to report on the war, the private domestic voice was reassigned to the public in ways that laid the groundwork for women poets’ claim to speak for the nation as citizens.27 The results are neither inevitably pro-nor antiwar.
Although the mobilization of the feminine domestic gave women poets new opportunities to speak for the nation as public citizens, this position was by no means simple to negotiate. In this context those who vilify Jessie Pope and the women who handed out white feathers can be recognized as responding to more than their blind and coercive patriotism. These women betray the implicit injunction that the woman poet should express the nation’s essential pacifism through a patriotic form of mourning for the national dead rather than embrace the unseemly pleasures of aggression. By contrast, Vera Brittain much more properly assumes the traditional role of the patriotic woman poet in Verses of a V.A.D. despite her feminism, already evident in her struggle to go to university and her attitude to women’s war work. Her poetry marks out both the possibilities and limits of reinventing a feminine domestic poetics for women during the war. [End Page 437]
In Verses of a V.A.D. Brittain actively cultivates the authority of the speaker as patriot through the volume’s title, which identifies her as belonging to the group of women war workers that most epitomized respectable female patriotic service.28 Thus patriotism dovetails with the claim to speak from actual experience that is now so familiar a part of our later understanding of war writing. Marie Connor Leighton, who wrote the foreword, feels impelled to justify this poetry of action rather than imagination as “new and vigorous,” yet with a venerable forefather in Rudyard Kipling.29 Brittain’s positioning herself as female war worker, rather than poetess or lady, signals the wartime shift in discursive space for the woman poet. Her entitlement as a female poet to speak for the nation is not derived from her association with domestic femininity. Instead, she asserts her place as a poet within the public sphere of national service, a fact that is underlined by Leighton’s need to establish a new literary genealogy for her work as poetry of action comparable with Kipling rather than Hemans.
Despite the title’s claim, neither Brittain’s nursing nor her experiences in the war zone are finally the credentials most central to her claim to speak as a female patriot. The bulk of her poems are devoted to Brittain’s other and wholly traditional war work, that of the woman who gives up her men to the national war effort. In fact, only seven poems out of twenty-eight are about Brittain’s V.A.D. experience, and two of those are elegies for nurses who die because of the war. Not for nothing does Leighton write the foreword; as both mother of Brittain’s dead fiancé and popular romance writer she underwrites the still-unknown Brittain as romantic heroine, as does the volume’s dedication to Roland Leighton’s memory. Brittain embraces the classic female task of mourning the dead soldier. Verses of a V.A.D. features a series of elegies for soldiers, clustering them to make grief work the volume’s main focus. Her 1934 Poems of War and After restores the chronological order of both events and dates of composition so that the poems with other subject matter necessarily interrupt the relentless sequence of mourning that dominates Verses of a V.A.D.30
Feminist critics understand Brittain’s commitment to female mourning in Verses of a V.A.D. as a “retreat into the familiar responses of conventional femininity.”31 Although true, such a reading fails to engage with the national role of a specifically female poetics of mourning with its Hegelian dimension. Brittain’s elegy “In Memoriam G.R.Y.T.” offers a clear example of how mourning the soldier’s death can be the occasion for the woman poet to contribute to the idealization of the nation.32 [End Page 438] Mourning a young friend and correspondent who was “killed in action at Monchy-le-Preux, April 23rd, 1917,” she associates his words with “nameless glamour” and idealizes his “young god-like gait” and “frank bright laughter.” Each “dear remembrance” is “hallowed by a Day / That made of youth life’s offering to the sword.” G.R.Y.T.’s death is thus elevated to heroic sacrifice with militarism opposed to life. The backward-looking chivalric medievalism of the poem, equivalent to the transformation of her fiancé Roland into the French hero Roland de Roncevalles, is easily recognizable as part of what Paul Fussell long ago identified as an attempt to comprehend modern industrial warfare by recasting it in an older language.33 Significant also is the religious sentiment of the second stanza, where the speaker speculates about a future “intimacy” beyond the grave. This sacred framing of the soldier’s death carries the trace of the Hegelian topos in which femininity represents the divine law that engenders the masculine nation-state. In Brittain’s poem, the young soldier is figuratively returned to the sacred feminine, where he and the female speaker “may yet completion see / Of intimacy sweet though scarce begun.”
Brittain’s poems arguably inscribe a feminine response to the war consistent with her location as a young feminist struggling with a patriotic verse tradition. Her poems do the women’s work of mourning. The constant reiteration of loss, the contamination of despair and disillusion, the “slow corroding stain” that “will creep upon each quest but newly tried,” the turning of world to waste, mark a recognition that the patriotic tradition of mourning was still viable.34 Brittain’s early work offers feminist criticism an alternative model of women’s war poetry; it does not offer the consolation of explicit antiwar protest, nor the awful betrayal of jingoism. Instead, it wrestles with the insistent, but crucially contradictory, demand that women do their feminine patriotic duty as poets. Brittain is not a nineteenth-century poetess, however, and her adoption of the tradition of the national domestic is complicated by the new conditions of First World War public discourse.
While Brittain writes from the traditional position of female mourner, her elegies intrude on the mainstream masculine tradition of English elegy, from “Lycidas” through “Adonais” and “In Memoriam.” This is not because they conform closely to the conventions of the pastoral elegy, although Brittain’s poems often refer to the language of “Adonais.”35 The connection to the masculine high-culture genre is a result of a shift in the relationship between the bereaved speaker and the young men who are mourned. The soldiers of Brittain’s poems are different from [End Page 439] the familial sons, lovers, and brothers of nineteenth-century female elegy, because she includes herself in a male brotherhood as a matter of both biography and genre.
Brittain’s friendships at the outset of the war were the result of her brother’s public school network of friends, all of whom were killed during the war. In 1914, she had been in search of intellectual and professional peers as she fought against her father’s prejudices for the right to a university education and professional life of her own. Her brother Edward provided such a group when he brought home his glamorous school friend Roland Leighton.36 Brittain swiftly appropriated Roland to herself as fiancé and literary peer. She went on to correspond not only with Roland and her brother, but two other friends of Edward’s until each was killed. Outliving this circle she became their elegist, supplanting them in the very act of memorialization. Most striking, in her elegies for Roland, who was also a poet, she takes the place of the soldier-poet. The female poet, having claimed a position as fellow citizen, the soldier’s peer, comes into competition with the male soldier poet. This realignment of the relations between female sentimental elegist and the classic tradition does more than mark the woman writer’s struggle for cultural authority. It is also paradoxically the mark of a passage of the symbolic power to purify the nation. Soldier-poet replaces poetess as the true patriot.
An exchange between two women poets in the pages of the TLS during March 1917 illustrates the nature of this shift from poetess to soldier-poet and its significance for understanding how the antielegists of the twentieth century might inherit the contradictions of the poetess’S role. Maud Allan Bell’s “From a Trench” appeared on the correspondence page of the TLS on 22 March 1917 with a note explaining that it was a response to “the correspondence in The Times Literary Supplement, March 1, 1917.”37 The following week the newspaper published a direct response to Bell’s poem, “In England” by Mary [sic] O’Rourke.38 The exchange would be unremarkable were it not for the fact that “From a Trench” appeared anonymously and for the public context of the correspondence pages of the nation’s leading literary journal with its circulation of about 40,000. In Bell’s case the poem’s title, “From a Trench,” its first-person combatant speaker and the omission of the author’s name represent the poem as actually, rather than fictionally, by a soldier-poet so that when O’Rourke refutes Bell’s poem she almost certainly believes that she is responding to a soldier on the front line. Bell’s poem originated in an exchange of letters about the [End Page 440] exact color and species of crocuses once abundant in the river meadows around Nottingham. The countryside of Nottinghamshire, remarks the reviewer of Highways and Byways in Nottinghamshire, in the article that began the debate, is “the sort which stand[s] in the heart of most of us for England.”39 Industrialism, however, has “spread a wide grey skirt over the Trent meadows” to the detriment of the crocus which is at the heart of a local, seasonal tradition: crocusing. The final letter in the series marks the continuing, albeit embattled, presence of the crocuses in “three small fields.” Bell’s and O’Rourke’s poems appear in the following weeks in the place of further letters as contributions to the debate. At issue between these two poems is the complacency of the civilian population, and therefore the value of the soldier’s sacrifice for his country.
“From a Trench,” in the voice of a combatant, impatiently contrasts life on the frontline with an English spring, using a refrain, “There are crocuses at Nottingham!” (the title used by the TLS for the correspondence) to underline a tortured ambivalence about civilian England. On the one hand pastoral England is what makes civilian England worth fighting for: “We live in holes, like cellar rats, / But through the noise and smell / I often see those crocuses / Of which the people tell” and those “Thousands of buds at Nottingham” are “Ungathered by the Hun.” But that same civilian world is full of “silly fools at Nottingham / Who think we’re here for fun,” and the bright blue of the crocuses at home is contrasted with grass trampled “into a purple slime” at the front. The speaker is by no means sure if England is worth the hell of trench experience; the cost may be too high as is revealed by the use of “because” in the last lines: “Why! There are crocuses at Nottingham!… Because we’re here in Hell.”40 Because of the soldier’s willingness to fight, the crocuses are still able to bloom, yet the soldier not the civilian bears the cost. The exclamation “Why!” further marks the place of a question that cannot be directly asked in the pages of the TLS under war conditions, “is it worth it?” and the answer that is implied by the very absence of the question mark. In other words, “Why!” becomes equivalent to a rhetorical question, already answered in the negative by the exclamation mark, and by the word “Hell.”
Bell’s appropriation of the male combatant’s voice allows her to both scrutinize the capacity of the civilian to imagine successfully the experience of the combatant and to enact her own ability to do so. Whatever “silly fools” believe about frontline experience the female poet is in the clear, a point reiterated by Reilly’s inclusion of “From a Trench” in [End Page 441] Scars Upon My Heart, where it asserts the woman’s imaginative power to overcome her position as a symbol of the home front, a position that famously earned her the scathing contempt of actual soldier-poets like Sassoon for “worshipping decorations” and believing “that chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace.”41 The issue of women’s precarious authority on matters of war can, however, distract us from the specific relationship between the soldier-speaker of the poem, its subject matter, and the circumstances of its original publication.
The speaker’s ambivalence about the value of his sacrifice turns on the question of England’s purity and innocence as a linchpin in the rhetoric of nationalism. Through the contaminating “noise and smell” of war he can still “see” the crocuses, a conventional pastoral figure for the unassailability and purity of Englishness, still “[u]ngathered by the Hun.” The sexual implication here is also invoked in Bell’s use of “little girls at Nottingham / Who do not dread the Boche,” and “young girls at school” who are safe from Hun atrocities, unlike the “little boys” who despite never having heard a gun may yet have to share the speaker’s experience for themselves.42 But Bell’s rhetoric of purity barely maintains itself. The children’s ability to guarantee an image of England worth fighting for depends on their ignorance of war. Knowledge of war would, it is implied, contaminate their innocence. If, however, the imagined national space of the home front collapses into the space of military endeavor, as it does in the government’s militarization of the civilian population, then the national domestic loses its power to guarantee national purity. The “silly fools” are culpable for their willful misunderstanding of war as heroic adventure or “fun” both because the knowledge of its realities is available to them and because they are in a new sense serving the national cause as civilians. Here the poem parallels the correspondence to which it responded. The almost self-parodic obsession with the genus and color of the flowers, calculated to drive a frontline soldier to distraction, turns the TLS, or at least its readers, into the “silly fools” of the poem. The question in Bell’s poem of the value of the soldier’s sacrifice turns therefore not on the justice of the cause but on the value of Englishness. As a result the poem’s angry ambivalence may be best understood as a response to the impossibility of successfully maintaining the fiction of national innocence in its old forms. We can see this issue energizing O’Rourke’s reply the following week.
O’Rourke responds to the soldier’s condemnation of the home front by assuming the voice of England, asserting that “none forget in England [End Page 442] now, / The wasted lives and powers.” Her speaker describes a landscape made alien to itself by the effects of war. “[T]he maimed, the blind, the witless, throng / Our unassaulted ways, / Around our lives, the broken lives.” Even more significant England is haunted by its dead: “There are ghosts abroad in England, now, / And crying winds in England, now.”43 The pastoral landscape of England, which ought to function as a touchstone for the enduring value of Englishness and a guarantee of national innocence, is now defined by absence, loss, and exile. “To-day the lonely winds are loose, / and crying goes the rain,” writes O’Rourke, as “we walk the fields they knew, / The Dead who died in pain.”44 The female poet’s ability to speak for the nation, as woman, is couched here in the familiar rhetoric of mourning domestic and national losses as if they were one. And, once again, the more O’Rourke grieves for the war’s waste the more she testifies to the purity of England’s emotional core. Yet, like Brittain, O’Rourke is in a competitive relationship to the soldiers she assiduously mourns. Although she follows the tradition of many poets before her including of course Hemans, Thomas Hardy, and Rupert Brooke in marking the soldier’s foreign grave (“In other fields, in other earth / The laughing hearts lie dumb”45) her poem is pitted rhetorically against the soldier-poet whose verse she answers.
The extent to which the home front poet of the war attempts to speak for the nation is the degree to which she finds herself in competition for the same rhetorical space as the soldier-poet. We can see this at work in the body of O’Rourke’s poem where she explicitly pits home front against front line as she converts Bell’s first spring flowers, an image of pastoral continuity, into macabre reminders of the war dead:
There are crocuses at Nottingham And jonquils in the South, And any Dorset child may press A snowdrop to her mouth. The broken flesh that Flanders keeps, It, too, may have its flowers, But are they haunted, memory-sad As these new buds of ours?46
The abrupt juxtaposition of the images of the dead soldier’s flesh and the child’s mouth pressed against a snowdrop makes it seem, for a nightmarish instant, as if the rotting soldier’s body is actually in the child’s mouth, even despite the quite abstract and conventional term “broken flesh.” Yet O’Rourke’s question about the flowers of Flanders (“are they haunted, memory-sad / As these new buds of ours?”) is undoubtedly [End Page 443] crass predicated as it is on equal value for equal suffering. The tendency to measure one experience against the other is the inevitable result, as many feminist critics have pointed out, of defining war experience exclusively through male combat, delegitimizing in advance the experience of the noncombatant. More than this, competition in the stakes of suffering arises in a text whose overt intention is to emphasize the soldier’s suffering because the national domestic no longer underwrites the poetess’s elegiac claim. How else would O’Rourke find herself locked in unseemly polemic with one of England’s heroes in the public arena of the correspondence pages of the TLS?
O’Rourke has been duped, however, since she is unknowingly responding to a woman’s imagined rendering of the soldier’s position. We can only speculate about the intentions of either Bell or the editors of the TLS, but the results are rhetorically complex.47 The removal of Bell’s name poses the poem as more than a direct expression of the feelings of a soldier on frontline duty. The author of the poem is transformed, by implication, into the iconic figure of the soldier-poet. We can see how this apparently trivial moment in the correspondence pages is symptomatic of a wider concern with the forms in which the poet can properly speak for the nation if we now turn to the TLS’s extensive discussion of the relationships among war, poetry, and patriotism between 1914 and 1918. A series of articles and reviews, beginning with two position pieces in the autumn of 1914, “Patriotic Poetry” and “War and Poetry,” shows the paper struggling to craft criteria for good war poetry consistent with its existing views on poetry.48
The official standard of the TLS was Wordsworthian: “some tranquility of mind, some perspective and imaginative reaction are necessary to the writing of poetry,” claims the writer of “Patriotic Poetry.” He continues: “how shall truth and beauty be sung in days burdened with anxiety, haunted by the wildest of hopes and fears?” This view that war was inherently incompatible with true poetry extends to the expression of patriotic feeling. Here the TLS struggles to come up with a definition that can acknowledge that “a poet … is of no country” because of his commitment to aesthetics and imagination which transcend the narrow confines of nationalism, and yet allow the English poet in 1914 to be patriotic. The solution is that “every poet is a man, and every man” is “the lover of his country, so every poet is a patriot.” Hardly adequate, this conclusion depends on the argument that poetry comes from the self, and that love of country is a deeply personal feeling derived from “our first remembrances, first fears and ventures, first solitude and [End Page 444] friendships.” England is “her poets’ beauty and peace, the highway of their pilgrimage, the woof of their dreams, the earthly foreshowing and foreshadowing of their paradise.”49 Not surprisingly the articles that follow struggle to distinguish between true personal expressions of this love of country and rhetorical exercises in patriotic fervor.
Poets were chided for speaking “for the nation rather than for themselves” and for writing like their “idea of a national poet,” although the paper also published conventionally patriotic verses by poet laureate Robert Bridges, Hardy, and Henry Newbolt.50 Thus, war incited an unhealthy demand to speak for the nation rather than out of the poet’s self where all real poetry comes from. Public rhetoric was not poetry according to the TLS. Only by “withdraw[ing] his mind from the progress of events” could real poetry emerge since “a poet must speak for himself if he is to speak for the nation.”51 The soldier-poet enters this context as both a problem and a solution. The combatant in the middle of action is, more even than the civilian, “too near the events which inspire them,”52 a view that was to prove convenient later in the war as a way of editing out the more inconvenient truths of increasingly bitter soldier-poets. Nonetheless, Julian Grenfell’s inspiring and patriotic poem “Into Battle” of 1915, written shortly before he was killed, offered the paper a way out of its dilemma. Grenfell “found tranquility in the midst of battle” and therefore the perfect coming together of patriotism and poetry: “This is his intuition which he won for himself, which came to him after duty done. He knew what had happened in his own mind and that knowledge made his poem. But such intuition cannot come to poets at home still watching and waiting in the anxiety of mere spectators.” 53 The view that the soldier whose duty is, in a sense, always already done is ideally placed to write patriotic poetry of war that conforms to the Wordsworthian model paves the way for the soldier-poet as the ideal spokesperson for the nation.
By May 1917, two months after the publication of Bell’s poem, the soldier was at the center of the TLS’s theory of war poetry. In “The Soldier Patriot” the paper argues that “love of country” depends on its un-self-consciousness.54 It is “something inexpressive, never to be directly intended, much less to be anatomized in terms of ’ics and ’isms.” Once it is “thought of as patriotism” and becomes public “the best of its spiritual fragrance is lost.” The article goes on to outline the ways in which our “fighting poets” can teach the noncombatant to write verse in which love of country is enacted rather than performed, “shadowed forth in familiar symbols—sights and sounds and odours of the quiet [End Page 445] English countryside, the frozen fugues of old English buildings … in a thousand other nearer and farther symbols.” It is the soldier-poet who can, a reviewer of Robert Nichols’s “Ardours and Endurances” argues, make of the war “an experience which is altogether in a different order of being.”55 The transformation of the war into something “of higher value”56 is also at stake in a review of Sassoon’s Counter-Attack in July 1918. Evidently troubled by his criticism of the war, the reviewer saw him as refusing “palliative or subterfuge” to “give us the raw stuff of poetry.” A backhanded compliment, rawness constitutes a criticism of Sassoon’s rejection of aesthetic transcendence in the form of “beauty and art” even as it acknowledges his poetic power.57
Like the nineteenth-century poetess, the soldier-poet’s task is to reveal a sacred truth beyond war. Both have the same function of making war not glorious but pure. The writer of “Poetry of War,” whose eulogy to Grenfell initiated the rise of the soldier-poet in the pages of the TLS, ends his essay with a definition of the essence of war poetry. Citing Milton on the “Victory and Death of Samson” in “Samson Agonistes,” he writes: “That is how we should feel in the day of victory … beyond this sudden cruel flaring glory there is another glory, lasting and white, of the spirit of man which can so clearly reveal itself in battle and death and in tears wept proudly over the dead.”58 For this writer, and for the TLS, the soldier who takes up this challenge must be pro-war, as was Grenfell in his lines: “And he is dead who will not fight; / And who dies fighting has increase.”59 The patriotic soldier-poet is less familiar to us today than the protest poets such as Owen and Sassoon, but the TLS’s valorization of this figure allows us to see how he came into competition with the woman poet as poetic voice of the nation. What we can see from juxtaposing the fortunes of Bell’s poem in the TLS with the paper’s attempts to produce a definition of war poetry is that the soldier-poet enters the rhetorical space previously occupied by the poetess, because it is he who can now produce for the nation the necessary transcendence of its military aggression. The TLS’s decision to publish “From a Trench” anonymously, as if indeed written by a soldier in his Flanders dugout, indicates a recognition that the soldier-poet rather than the woman now has the power to express the true heart of the nation.
The stakes of this argument are important for our understanding of both male and female First World War poets, whether pro- or antiwar. [End Page 446] The importance for understanding the fortunes of women poets in their attempts to negotiate their role during the war should already be clear from the case of Vera Brittain. But Brittain’s postwar fortunes can also tell us something about why the history of the female patriotic elegy should still matter, and in particular what difference it makes to the way in which we understand anti-elegy in the twentieth century. In her 1933 war memoir, Testament of Youth, Brittain makes extensive use of poetry to help build a portrait of the generation of young men and women sacrificed to the war. Alongside her diary and correspondence poems become the touchstone of authenticity for her representation of the period. Not surprisingly, given the iconic relationship of poetry and the First World War, the BBC’s 1979 serialization of Testament of Youth also makes poetry central to its dramatization of the war years.60 At key emotional moments we hear poems read by a disembodied male voice.
But few of these poems were included originally by Brittain in the autobiography. The hallmark of the many poems that she quoted in the memoir is their “sentimental consolation,” regardless of the gender of the poet. Well-known names such as Kipling and Brooke mingle with names now forgotten except by literary critics, such as Alice Meynell, Sir Owen Seamen, Rose Macaulay, May Wedderburn Cannan, Walter de la Mare, W. E. Henley, and William Noel Hodgson. These poets, along with her own verse, represent a set of attitudes and values Brittain identifies with the war generation. They also make up the tradition of patriotic poetry that Marsland identified as having disappeared from later accounts of First World War poetry. By contrast the BBC replaces almost all of these poems with the familiar canon of war poems by Owen, Sassoon, and other soldier-poets, poets who are understood by literary historians of the war and in the popular imagination to have replaced naïve patriotism with ironic disillusion, and to epitomize authentic critical knowledge of modern warfare. These protest poems are relayed as historical truth about the war, particularly because in the early episodes they are read over documentary film footage of the period that shows graphically horrible scenes from the trenches. This historical reportage as truth comments, moreover, on both the young woman Vera’s experience and, implicitly, on Brittain’s original text, which now requires reframing with the voice of the soldier-poet. This instance of the soldier-poet once again taking the place of the poetess should make us pause. The words of Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, and others can replace Brittain’s apparently consolatory elegiac texts [End Page 447] because they perform the same function better than we might wish. The angry and satiric anti-elegies of the soldier-poets express what we want to hear: that war is wasteful, tragic, and costly.
Our willingness to listen to the soldier-poets’ voices is our guarantee that we have learned the antiwar lesson of Brittain’s text, although not of course a guarantee underwritten by history. It is also the moment at which these poets, like the nineteenth-century poetess, are charged with expressing the purity of the nation’s heart. The contradiction of the female poet speaking from the national domestic, whereby the louder she expresses her grief and even her anger the more she fulfills her role, now also belongs to the soldier-poets whose very anger promises to save us from our own implication in state violence. For this reason, the attempt to construct a modern tradition of anti-elegy cannot afford to ignore the mournful poetics to which it is claimed to be an antidote.
Footnotes
1. Sandra M. Gilbert, “‘Rat’s Alley’: The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti)Pastoral Elegy,” New Literary History, 30.1 (1999), 1.
2. Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), xi, 1.
3. Ibid., xi.
4. Ariela Friedman, Death, Men, and Modernism: Trauma and Narrative in British Fiction from Hardy to Woolf (New York: Routledge, 2003), 5.
5. Melissa F. Zeiger, Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997). See also an excellent overview of criticism in Celeste M. Schenck, “Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-Constructing the Elegy,” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 5.1 (Spring 1986), 13–27.
6. See Peter M. Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985) for an influential account of this tradition.
7. Vera Brittain, Testament of Youth (London: Gollancz, 1933).
8. Vera Brittain, Verses of a V.A.D. (London: Erskine Macdonald, 1918); Elizabeth Marsland, The Nation’s Cause: French, English, and German Poetry of the First World War (London: Routledge, 1991), 14–28.
9. Zeiger, Beyond Consolation, 14; Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney; Sandra Gilbert, “‘Rat’s Alley’: The Great War, Modernism, and the (Anti)Pastoral Elegy.”
10. Names such as Owen, Sassoon, Margaret Sackville, or Nancy Mitford, who are associated with ironic disillusion or antiwar views, are numerous and familiar. Beyond the frequently cited enthusiasm of Rupert Brooke, writers such as Rudyard Kipling, Henry Newbolt, Radclyffe Hall, and Mrs. Henry Wood all supported the war as either an essential defense against German militarism or a necessary evil. For the argument against a homogeneous response, see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Rosa Bracco, Merchants of Hope: Middlebrow Writers of the First World War (Oxford: Berg, 1993); Marsland, 14–28; and Claire Buck, “Women’s Literature of the First World War,” Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War, Vincent Sherry, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 85–113. [End Page 448]
11. Tricia Lootens, “Turning and Burning: Casabiancas, Abstract Spheres in Extremis, and the Möbius Strip of National Sentimentality,” Unpublished typescript, 2004.
12. Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue: Selected Prose, 1978–1987 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1989).
13. Catherine Reilly, English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography (London: Prior, 1978).
14. G. W. Clarke, ed., A Treasury of War Poetry, 1914–1917: British and American Poems of the World War, 1914–1917 (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Co.; Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1917).
15. Nosheen Khan, Women’s Poetry of the First World War (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1988), 42–43. The reply, “To the Writer of ‘Christ in Flanders,’” was published in the Spectator on 13 January 1917.
16. For an overview of the extensive work now available, see Stacy Gillis, “‘Many Sisters to Many Brothers’: The Women Poets of the First World War,” in The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, Tim Kendall, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 100–113.
17. Catherine Reilly, Scars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War (London: Virago, 1981), 86.
18. Ibid., 20.
19. Ibid., 130.
20. Marsland, The Nation’s Cause, 22.
21. Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics (New York: Routledge, 1993); Tricia Lootens, “Hemans and Home: Victorianism, Feminine ‘Internal Enemies,’ and the Domestication of National Identity,” PMLA, 109 (March 1994), 238–53; Jerome J. McGann, “Literary History, Romanticism, and Felicia Hemans,” in Re-visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837, Carol Shiner Wilson and Joel Hafner, eds. (Philadephia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 210–27. See also Felicia Hemans: Reimagining Poetry in the Nineteenth Century, Nanora Sweet and Julie Melnyk, eds. (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
22. Lootens, “Hemans and Home,” 242.
23. See her excellent discussion of Browning’s poem in Lootens, “Victorian Poetry and Patriotism,” in Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, Joseph Bristow, ed. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
24. Marsland, The Nation’s Cause, 157.
25. See, for example, Jane Marcus, “Corpus/Corps/Corpse: Writing the Body of War,” in Arms and the Woman, Helen M. Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich and Susan Merrill Squier, eds. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989); Claire A. Culleton, Working Class Culture, Women, and Britain, 1914–1921 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); Joan Montgomery Byles, War, Women, and Poetry, 1914–1945: British and German Writers and Activists (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1995), 17–32.
26. Paula Krebs, Gender, Race, and the Writing of Empire: Public Discourse and the Boer War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
27. Ward’s role is discussed in Helen Small, “Mrs. Humphry Ward and the First Casualty of War,” in Women’s Fiction and the Great War, Suzanne Raitt and Trudi Tate, eds. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 18–46.
28. Sharon Ouditt, Fighting Forces, Writing Women: Identity and Ideology in the First World War (London: Routledge, 1994).
29. Brittain, Verses of a V.A.D., 10.
30. Vera Brittain, Poems of the War and After (New York: Macmillan, 1934). According to Brittain the volume was published as a result of letters from readers of Testament of Youth who wanted to know where they could find her poems, which had been used as epigraphs at the beginning of most chapters.
31. Deborah Gorham, Vera Brittain: A Feminist Life (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1996), 115.
32. Brittain, Verses of a V.A.D., 31. [End Page 449]
33. Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).
34. Brittain, “Roundel,” Verses of a V.A.D., 28.
35. See, for example, “Roundel” where “disillusion’s slow corroding stain” echoes Shelley’s “contagion of the world’s slow stain,” or in the stellar imagery of “Looking Westward.”
36. See Brittain, Testament of Youth, 81. Also Letters from a Lost Generation: The First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends, Roland Leighton, Edward Brittain, Victor Richardson, Geoffrey Thurlow, Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge, eds. (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1999). Bishop and Bostridge record that Edward who was awarded the Victoria Cross and died a hero’s death on the Italian front in 1918, was, immediately before his death, facing a near certain courtmartial for homosexual behavior (5–6).
37. Maud Allan Bell, “From a Trench,” TLS, 22 March 1917, 142. Bell’s dating of the correspondence is incorrect. The correspondence headed “Crocuses at Nottingham” ran from Thursday, 8 February 1917 until Thursday, 22 February 1917 in response to “Midland Byways,” a review of J. B. Firth, “Highways and Byways in Nottinghamshire,” which appeared on Thursday, 1 February 1917, 53. Nothing appeared under this heading on 1 March 1917.
38. May O’Rourke, “In England,” TLS, 29 March 1917, 154.
39. “Midland Byways,” 53.
40. “From a Trench,” 142.
41. Reilly, Scars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the First World War, 10; Siegfried Sassoon, “Glory of Woman,” Selected Poems (Faber and Faber: London, 1970), 28.
42. “From a Trench,” 142.
43. Reilly did not include O’Rourke’s answering poem in her anthology, and to my knowledge the poem has never been reprinted.
44. “In England,” 154.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid.
47. Since the poem was reprinted under Bell’s own name immediately after the war in G. H. Clarke’s 1919 Treasury of War Poetry, it is clear that the editors of the TLS knew the author’s gender.
48. “Patriotic Poetry,” TLS, 3 September 1914, 405–406; “War and Poetry,” TLS, 8 October 1914, 448.
49. Ibid.
50. “The Poetry of War,” TLS, 21 October 1915, 361.
51. Ibid.
52. “War and Poetry,” 448.
53. “The Poetry of War,” 361.
54. “The Soldier Patriot,” TLS, 3 May 1917, 205–206.
55. “Poetry, War, and a Young Poet,” a review of Robert Nichols, “Ardours and Endurances,” TLS, 12 July 1917, 330.
56. “War and Poetry,” 448.
57. “Two Soldier-Poets,” TLS, 11 July 1918, 323.
58. “The Poetry of War,” 361.
59. “Into Battle,” Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914–1918, Brian Gardner, ed. (London: Methuen, 1964), 34–36. It was first published in The Times in 1915 and was in 1964, according to Gardner, the most anthologized poem of the century.
60. Testament of Youth: An Autobiography, 1913–1925, Moira Armstrong (Director), BBC Television production in association with London Film Productions, 1979. [End Page 450]