OUT OF BATTLE Also by Jon Silkin Selected P~m5 The Lens-Breakers Gurney, a play in verse The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (tditor) The Penguin Book of First World War Prose ((o -tdilor with J on Glovtr) The Life of Metrical and Free Verse in Twentieth-Century Poetry Shaping a R epublic Out of Battle The Poetry of the Great War Jon Silkin Second Edition palgrave Published in Great Britain by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmill~, Basingsloke. Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughOUt the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-0-333-65399-9 ISBN 978-0-230-37480-5 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230374805 Published in the United States of America by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC •• Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-()..312-21404-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Sirkin, Jon. OUt of battle : the poetry of the Great War I by Jon Silkin.- 2nded. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and indeJ(. ISBN 978-O-J12-21404-J (cloth) I. English IXlCtry-2Oth century-History and criticism. 2. World War, 1914--1918-Lilera\ure and the war. 3. War poetry, English­ - Hislory and criticism. I. Title. PR60S. W6SS5 1998 821' .91209358-----dc21 97-52925 CIP CJonSilkin'sestate 1972, 1987,1998 Appendbo:: Wilfred Owen's MissinR Folio C Robert A, Christoforides 1997 First edilion O)(ford University Press 1972 -Published in paperback by Ark 1987 Second edition Macmillan 1998 Offset from the O)lford University Press edition of 1972 by pennission of the publishers. All rights reserved, No reproduction, copy or transmission of Ihis publication may be made without written pennission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with wrinen pennission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W! P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in au:ordance with the Copyright. Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book. is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Transferred to digital printing 2001 CONTENTS Preface VI Preface [0 the Second Edition vii Acknowledgments XVIll CHAPTER I Introduction 2 Thomas Hardy 32 3 Rudyard Kipling and Rupert Brooke 56 4 Charles Sorley and others 70 5 Edward Thomas 85 6 Edmund Blunden and Ivor Gurney 102 7 Siegfried Sassoon 130 8 Herbert Read, Richard Aldington and Ford Madox Ford 168 9 Wilfred Owen 197 to Isaac Rosenberg 249 11 David Jones 315 12 Conclusion 341 Appendix: Wilfred Owen's Missing Folio 351 Select Bibliography 355 Index 365 PREFACE I should like [0 thank the many people who have helped with this book since it was begun in I959, the year of the Rosenberg Ex­ hibition held at the University of Leeds, then under the Vice­ Chancellorship of Charles Morris. The exhibition was opened by the late Herbert Read, and prepared jointly hy the late Maurice de Sausmarez and myself. I should like to thank the University libraries of Leeds and Newcastle, and also the library of the Newcastle Liter­ ary and Philosophical Society, for all their help and kindness during the writing of this book. I am especially grateful to Geoffrey Matthews, who worked with me on the initial stages of the book; and Catherine Lamb, who read and fe-read the early draft and co­ operated on some of the research. At a later stage, John Press gave the text a close reading and made valuable suggestions for its re­ duction and improvement. Jon Stall worthy further assisted with the work of condensation; his constant questioning and sympathy helped it over the last lap on its way to the printer. I am grateful to Mrs. Phyllis McDougall, who prepared the index. I have also to thank John Smith for his patience with the book, and Ken Smith, who at all times encouraged me to persist with those insights which have shaped it. I am equally grateful to Geoffrey Hill for discussing Rosen­ berg and Owen with me over a long period, and to those other critics and friends who have helped me towards an understanding of the poets and the poetry here discussed. The section on Rosenberg's God first appeared in European Judaism (1970); brief versions of work on Owen, Rosenberg, and Sassoon first appeared in Stand (1960, 1965). ).s. PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION Some objections have been made against anthologies devoted to war poetry, one of which was made recently (1996) by Edna Longley in Podry R w ;t:1P : War poeu y should not be half-delegated to specialist anthologies I'm not SUfe about 'delegated' (or its printer's devil 'relegated'), but in the main disapproval seems to centre on the notion that to divide ofT war poetry from other verse creates an artificial category, distorting the work and misleading the reader. The division into centuries, or into Irish and English verse, is perhaps as 'misleading'. or arbitrary; but in any case one answer to her objection is found in Clausewitz's dictum, 'War is a continuation of State policy by other means'. Here are two understandings. One is that peace and war exist in the same political continuum, which is true if in the peace there is an implied aggression; but the other is that war is qualitatively different from peace as an activity. Only those who have not been in war may feel able to reject that latter idea. Sorley Maclean in a poem from the Second World War makes this point: Word came to him in the bullet shower that he should be a h ero briskly, and he was that while he lasted but it wasn't much time he got. I saw a great warrior of England, a poor manikin on whom no eye would rest; no Alasdair of Glen Garry; and he took a little weeping to my eyes. (,Heroes') The problem with an objection to the classification 'war poetry' is that it treats such poeuy as though its supreme and supervening category were poetry; whereas I suggest that this is arguable, for war is both a supreme pressure as well as a distinct one. War kills, poets amongst others. For some poets war is their dleme, or a recognizably distinct portion of their preoccupations. Consider Rosenberg'S comments on Vlll Prejil(~ to the Second Eilition Whitman and his war poetry. These questions do not contradict the requirement that all poetry aspire to the conditions of excellence, but they do ask that we consider war poetry as creation arising from a particular experience, even if other experiences, not directly concerned with war, may partly undertone it. To say this differently, the activity of war (it is not an 'art') is not different in degree but in kind from other experience. War is not part of say a genus containing trade and banking. War intends conquest or defeat through death. It rouses many emotions, these responses actuated, perhaps, simultaneously, but their totality and aim will be different from those deriving directly from war. 'The pity of war, the pity war distilled.' In Paradise Lost Milton registers this difference when he causes Lucifer and his angels to rebel against God with the result that the parties go to war. The account of the Satanic artillery of trajected trees, which tactic temporarily dismays the angelic host, is a poetry wrinen within an emotional understanding of war. If the hosts on either side had been killable, Milton would, at this juncture in his epic, have been writing a poetry as much classifiable as war poetry as Rosenberg's. Yeats's exclusion of Owen from his Th( Oxford Book of Modern Verse (1936) was probably not only the result of philosophk:al and aesthetic antipathies but also, perhaps, because Owen was writing a poetry direcdy to do with combat, what ever else -'He (Owen) is all blood and sugar-sucked candy' wrote Yeats. On the other hand Yeats's airman seems not to be concerned with combat. Owen's poetry, arising out of involvement with war, may be contrasted with the very best of that underrated poet, Herbert Read. His 'The End of a War' (1933) was a work much more to Yeats's {aste, and it was the only war poem, a long one, that Yeats included in his anthology. If we allow that Sassoon's best poetry is probably that directly to do with the war; and that Gurney's most haunting and in certain senses mesmerized poetry comes from or through his experience of war, we should admit the taxonomy that speaks of 'war poetry' to be justifiable and valid. On the edge of this area of war poetry as I have briefly characterized it exist two poems of contrasting lengths: Eliot's Th~ Wo!k Land and Gurney's 'April Gale'. I have wrinen e1sewhe~e at some length on Eliot's poem but I include a response to Gurney's four-line poem near the end of this Preface. Although there are signs of a change, a number of critics have Preface to the Second Edition nevertheless postulated or assumed that language must be the principal touchslOne with respect to evaluating a poem.