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118 LEITERS IN CANADA 1987 gives the poignancy of bloodshed to the 'gold-vermilion' of martyrdom and sacrifice. What Sprung Rhythm Really Is, manages to be both essential and stimulating. Lest the book seem expensive, attention must be brought to the extreme typographical complexity of prosodic analysis, especially of Hopkins. And this superbly produced volume contains not one single misprint. Of the author, who died last year, this book is the best of memorials, for it will not soon exhaust its usefulness. (CHARLES LOCK) Peter Buitenhuis. The Great War ofWords: British, American and Canadian Propaganda and Fiction, 1914-1933 University of British Columbia Press. xviii, 199, illus. $27.00 'I am going out when they make me a Field Marshal,' A.E. Housman wrote to a friend in November 1914, four months after the outbreak of war. Housman's ironic offer was not taken up, and his contributions to the war effort were confined to finance on the one hand and romance on the other: in August, 1914 he had donated the bulk of his savings to the government, and throughout the war he remained hopeful that a copy of A Shropshire Lad in a British soldier's breast pocket might turn aside a German bullet. This did not happen; but it was not until after Housman's own death, in 1936, that the reading public learned of his compassionate poetic response to the spate of youthful deaths in World War I, through the publicationin More Poems of 'Here dead liewe ...' (Poem XXXVI), which poignantly juxtaposes the brute fact of young lives lost and the notion of willing self-sacrifice in a noble cause. Ironic, patriotic, or compassionate, Housman's responses to the Great War were alike private. He figures nowhere in Peter Buitenhuis's study, which covers much the same period (1914 to 1933) and is concerned with the work of writers who, more obviously public-spirited but perhaps less wise than the poet and classicist, wished to place their literary talents at the service of the state, and thus mobilize opinion, as well as enlistment, against a Germany seen not merely as the enemy of the Allied powers but of civilization itself. One of these writers was HenryJames, and it was the discovery of a number of his wartime pamphlets, lacking his 'famous detachment and objectivity,' that led Buitenhuis to the ever-expanding range of material, propagandist and fictional; which he organizes with skill and presents with great verve and readability in The Great War of Words. A war, however, even of words, needs more than the allies -Canadian and American writers as well as British - who appear in this book. It requires an enemy. A title which seems more than an accidental echo of Paul Fussell (whose The Great War and Modern Memory is referred to a HUMANITIES 119 number of times) would be more justified had its author dealt with German propaganda and fiction as well as Allied, and thus incidentally established a fair yardstick for comparison and judgment. But apart from an early, unsupported statement (chapter 2) that 'most German propaganda [in the United States] was crude and inept,' this important area is left as no-man's-land. It is not the book's title but its subtitle which truly describes it. Such a field is quite large and complex enough, however, and Buitenhuis moves to and fro across its aggregated materiel, and forward through it, with confidence and dexterity - ambidexterity, one might more accurately say, since his subject necessitates the alternating and sometimes overlapping techniques of historical commentary and literary criticism. The central thread leading through the greater part of the book is the wartime evolution of Britain's propaganda machine, from the official, but highly secret, operations of the War Propaganda Bureau of 1914, directed in England by C.F.G. Masterman and in America by Sir Gilbert Parker, to the creation by Lloyd George, in February 1917, of the Department of Information withJohn Buchan as its director, and finally, a year later, to the formation of a full-fledged but short-lived Ministry C?f Information under Lord Beaverbrook (and after him, briefly, Arnold Bennett). Throughout this period a whole host...

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