‘O, Damn the Shibboleth of Sex!’

*Women’s Poetry and the First World War (1914–1918) is currently unavailable for purchase from UK retailers, but can be ordered from Atlantic Publishers (New Delhi) at <http://www.atlanticbooks.com>.

It is a familiar conceit in criticism of women’s First World War poetry that the vast majority of this body of work is neglected. The conceit has become familiar, of course, because it is – or has been – true: when Catherine Reilly published Scars Upon My Heart (a collection of poems from seventy-nine female war writers) in 1981, popular contemporary anthologies of war poetry, including the first edition of The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (1978), Up the Line to Death (1964), and 1914–1918 in Poetry (1970), omitted verse written by women entirely.¹ Other collections contained sparse reference to female poets and their work, often including single poems by single authors as evidence of the tangential experience of men and women during those years. Charlotte Mew and Alice Meynell were afforded this honour, by I. M. Parsons (Men Who March Away, 1965), and Maurice Hussey (Poetry of the First World War, 1967) respectively.² Both editors sought to justify the necessity of including poems written by women in their collections; Mew’s work is described as ‘disturbingly original’ by Parsons, while Hussey looks to Meynell’s social position and her broader experience of the war before considering her poetry.³ She is cast as a ‘bystander…whose obtuseness reflected no credit upon [her] society’: her writing is not valued as poetry but rather as a lens through which the purportedly greater issues of the war can be brought into focus, albeit indirectly.⁴ The inclusion of these female poets is reluctant, and the description of the woman as ‘bystander’ clearly articulates the prevailing view of editors compiling such mid-twentieth-century anthologies. In these collections, women are able to offer reflections on English society and its responses to death as observers of the machinations of war at home, but their inevitable distance from the infantry at the front line deprives them of a central role in contributing to the greater narrative of the war. Thus the focus remained very firmly upon the writing of combatants: men who had fought, and who had in all likelihood been injured, on the sprawling battlefields of northern France and Belgium.

However, the trend of seeing women as onlookers was reversed some time ago. The first major critical study of female poetic response to the war was Nosheen Khan’s Women’s Poetry of the First World War (1988), which made a concerted effort to consider the diversity and breadth of female war experience.⁵ Khan’s work – and a substantial body of books, articles, and chapters written subsequently – have successfully confronted the notion that poetry about war is only ‘war poetry’ when it is written by those who have fought. This effort has created a context for both evaluating and understanding poetry written by women during the First World War. Within this now established framework, a plethora of different war experiences (both male and female) are not seen necessarily to undermine one another, nor to jostle for attention and space, but rather to contribute to a vast tableau of writing on the first recognisably ‘modern’ conflict. Argha Banerjee’s sensitive and encyclopedic Women’s Poetry and the First World War (1914–1918) engages intimately but carefully with this history. That the title of his work and Khan’s are differentiated by only one word might appear a trivial observation, but it is significant; Banerjee’s ‘and’ clearly signifies his intention to consider the engagement of women’s writing with the war, without seeing it as a purely derivative form of art. His conjunction introduces the book’s approach, within which he ‘makes the effort to assimilate female voices in the critical discussion of key poetic themes’ (p. 40). This process of assimilation is orchestrated as a series of...