Battle Lines: Canadian Poetry in English and the First World War by Joel Baetz (review)

Joel Baetz has tackled an important subject in his book Battle Lines: Canadian Poetry in English and the First World War by casting a literary eye on Canadian poetry, overlooked and yet plentiful, of World War I. He indicates that, while poetry was quite abundant in that era, it was rather quickly disparaged for being too patriotic and simplistic. This dismissal is a significant gap in Canada's cultural history, and a new examination of this literature enables a more complex understanding of the multiplicity of viewpoints held during and immediately after the war. This analysis calls into question the unified version of World War I purportedly held by the Canadian public and often promulgated by scholars – namely, the patriotic belief that the war created our nationhood, our sense of community. Moreover, Baetz's exploration also debunks myths about Canadian literature at the time, particularly the notion that Canadian wartime poetry was not modernist. To identify the modernist propensities of this poetry, or at least some of it, is to create a more complex and fulsome literary history.

Baetz organizes the volume by poets, moving from those who write poetry more closely aligned with the patriotism we have come to expect from poetry of this era (Douglas Leader Durkin, Helena Coleman, Rupert Brooke), to those who are more ambivalent about the war (John McCrae, Robert Service), to those who are more deeply critical (Frank Prewett) and flat-out anti-war (W.W.E. Ross). In each section, however, Baetz is careful to read all of the poems afresh, always keeping a focus on each poet's representation of the soldier. Therefore, his reading of John McCrae, for example, presents a poet who occupies a very uncomfortable relationship with the brutality of war, "a poetic guilt trip," in Baetz's words, despite the more positive readings that his famous "In Flanders Fields" have yielded over the decades. He argues that writers felt a need to self-censor unpatriotic or anti-war sentiment. While the poetry of the time "is overwhelmingly determined to create and sustain a powerful and encompassing 'we,' one that uplifts, absolves, and renews the Canadian soldier," Baetz demonstrates that this dominant and positive message rests alongside an equally powerful jarring and complex ambivalence or fractured response to war, one that is consistent with modernism.

The strengths of this monograph include the revisiting of poetry that has been long abandoned in the face of a modernist sensibility that disparaged what preceded it (even poetry that laid the groundwork for modernism) as well as Baetz's analysis of the gender of war, which importantly emphasizes how the figure of the feminine was necessary to the masculinizing of wartime men. I found the cultural history around modernism very relevant to my own work on Lucy Maud Montgomery, who was arguably similarly denigrated and isolated by the Canadian modernist movement that emerged after the war. Unfortunately, some of the material that Baetz draws upon is not readily available, much of it being archival. In some places, I wished that I could have seen more of the poetry or prose, so perhaps longer quotations or appendices would have been helpful. The upshot is that people may seek these materials out after reading this book.

Most importantly, in lively prose and with convincing arguments, Baetz reassesses and revalues unsung Canadian poets of the war era and demonstrates the complexity of writers who have often been regarded by the public and scholars in only one light, such as Service and Ross. Battle Lines is a significant contribution to Canadian literary and cultural history through intelligent and clear-sighted rereadings of Canadian war poets, war history, and modernism.