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Poetic Versus: Conflicting Great War Poems

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Poetic Versus: Conflicting Great War Poems Poetic Versus: Conflicting Great War Poems By Jonathan Robert Larner-Lewis A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Kent Puckett, Chair Professor Charles Blanton Professor James Vernon Fall 2017 1 Abstract Poetic Versus: Conflicting Great War Poems by Jonathan Robert Larner-Lewis Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Kent Puckett, Chair This dissertation is a close look at poems written during the Great War by Thomas Hardy, Edward Thomas, and Wilfred Owen. I describe how each deploys poetry’s formal resources to engage the affective, cognitive, spiritual, and political problems the war produces for them. I argue that strategies of poetic doubling allow them to address—if not quite assuage—the effects of the war that trouble them the most. Each poem manifests this doubling in different ways, but the tactic of doubling is pervasive. Ultimately, I argue that this doubling is equally an effect of the war’s incessant production of antagonistic cultural forms, and of lyric poetry’s fundamental ability to accommodate internal opposition at the formal level. The intrinsic ambivalence of poetic form makes it a particularly effective discourse for examining war’s social and political contradictions. This unifying theme of formal doubling or what I call the “poetic versus”—double timeframes in Hardy, double identities and locations in Thomas, and two or more opposing verbal registers in Owen—is a careful instantiation of Isobel Armstrong’s influential figure of the “double poem.” I track examples of how poems formally enact the kind of doubleness Armstrong describes—how they enact a second-order commentary on their own primary expression. Doubling is a broad but apt name for the strategies by which the war’s disturbances and antagonisms are transferred between the poem’s double levels of engagement, whether conceived as formal/social (Raymond Williams), literary/political (Caroline Levine) or expressive/epistemological (Isobel Armstrong). The prominent forms of doubling I identify line up with tenets of liberal political thought threatened by the war: Hardy’s trouble with time is tied to a belief in rational human progress that the war renders increasingly difficult to maintain. Thomas’s dual identities, in light of the economic forces that ultimately forced him to abandon writing for a soldier’s salary, are traceable to a crisis of alienation underlying liberalism’s basis in the individual. Owen’s project of incorporating voices of inherited cultural tradition and authority, only to expose them as the very origins of the war’s depredations is a critique of liberalism cast as a personal betrayal. Drawing on critical work by William Empson and Paul Fussell, I identify a complex form of irony as the crucial intellectual and affective stance which poetic doubling enables, a stance that becomes an increasingly important cultural survival strategy as the war persists. 1 Poetic Versus: Conflicting Great War Poems Introduction The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves. —Oscar Wilde I. War on Christmas Let’s begin with a hymn: Christmas: 1924 ‘Peace upon earth!’ was said. We sing it, And pay a million priests to bring it. After two thousand years of mass We’ve got as far as poison-gas. 1924 The first feeling one gets from reading this acerbic little lyric by Thomas Hardy is that nothing more needs to be said. It’s brutal, perfect. It utterly gibbets the Anglican pulpit, the gullible singers in the pews (us!), and that fatuous modern faith in technology and scientific progress. Rhyming “mass” with “gas” is the coup de grace. We’re all dead. And yet… right behind that is a feeling is that Hardy is not quite done with us. Here he has crafted a neat modern hymn in traditional long meter (iambic tetrameter); the setting perfectly fits the setting, as it were. But instead of opening us up to grace, it snaps shut like a nasty limerick. Clearly offense was meant, given and taken. And yet again, it is unlike Hardy to be merely blasphemous for no reason; he’s ironical, fatalistic, sure, but rarely so plainly bitter. There must be something else going on. I look to the interesting redundancy in the first line of “said” and “sing.” Why the shift immediately from the passive- voiced past tense to the first-person plural—who “said” and who “sing[s]”? I also look to the poem’s bad math. Even accounting for Jesus’s own ministries, we’re half a century short of 2000, give or take. There is, then, a vaguely millenarian tendency here, which undermines the firm historicity of the poem’s redundant dating in its title and postscript, and which is perhaps kin to the more explicit prophetic mode that we see in other Hardy poems. So maybe we still have a little time left. Which brings me to that last line again: “We’ve got as far as…” Yes, this is a straightforward travesty of the liturgy, which conveys clearly enough that we’ve gone in the wrong direction, that those who would argue “poison-gas” and the war itself were necessary steps towards global harmony are wicked, stupid or both. But there is also buried there, beneath that hard top crust of irony, a sense that we must keep going. Keep singing “Peace upon earth” together, even though our own recent history makes us look stupid doing it. The surface irony of this poem is ever so slightly undermined. We’re faced with a double negative: Priests and their peace talk are mocked, but industrial warfare is repudiated, even more strongly. There is literally no more 2 urgent call for peace on earth than poison-gas (until nukes). The poem has no faith in Anglican authority, yet it retains some small faith in having faith. Besides, it’s Christmas! It is that special time each year when we step out of the flow of our daily lives, sing songs together, try to be charitable and kind, and pledge to do better next year, in hope that the world may do the same. This hymn begins by excoriating empty rituals and traditions, yet somehow, despite itself, ends up reinforcing their necessity. The poem’s antagonist is not the priest, but the poem itself. Here I’ve expended almost 500 words on these four lines and haven’t even touched on Hardy’s intimate life-long relationship to church music, or to his late literary friendship with Siegfried Sassoon, whose influence seems all over this poem—not just in its particularly pointy brand of irony, but also its slide into self-contradiction—indeed, “Christmas: 1924” could be read as Hardy trying out a “Sassoon Poem” and productively failing. And I’d like to connect this poem to the rest of Winter Words, the threnodic posthumous volume that is underrepresented in Hardy criticism; or to Hardy’s counterintuitive optimism, aka “evolutionary meliorism”—famously if awkwardly set forth in the “Apology” to Late Lyrics —which urgently calls for poetry to provide an “alliance between religion” and scientific “rationality” (this poem sets itself against both, but that’s interesting too). But I’ll stop there, because we must move on. But this poem, like Christmas, will come back soon enough. This dissertation is a very close look at some poems written during the Great War by Hardy, Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen. I describe the ways each deployed poetry’s formal resources to engage some of the affective, cognitive, spiritual, and political problems the war produced for them. Ultimately, I argue that strategies of poetic doubling allowed them to address—if not quite assuage—the effects of the war that troubled them the most. Each poet—indeed, each poem—manifests this idea of doubling in different ways, but the tactic of doubling is pervasive. Ultimately, I argue that this doubling is equally an effect of the war’s incessant production of antagonistic cultural forms, and of lyric poetry’s fundamental ability to accommodate internal opposition at the formal level. The intrinsic ambivalence of poetic form makes it a particularly effective discourse for examining war’s overwhelming contradictions. This introduction will proceed first with a descriptive and contextual account of my formalist critical method. Then I briefly lay out a more detailed account of the concept of poetic doubling, and why it is not reducible to mere irony or ambiguity. I then cite two recent literary-critical exemplars that help situate my archive and argument between the major disciplinary lines of Victorian and modernist literatures and the problematic minor classifications of “Georgian Poetry” and “War Poets.” Finally, I briefly summarize my chapters, touching on each poet’s central concerns in regards to the war, and the poetic strategies they use to address them. II. Formalist Versus This is an unabashedly formalist project. It is formalist, though, in two senses of the word, which differ but do not conflict. Raymond Williams usefully accounts for a basic duality built in to the very term in Keywords, first by tracking a split in the development of the root “form” which in English comes to mean two nearly opposite things: “(i) a visible outward 3 shape”; and/or “(ii) an essential shaping principle.” The first sense, as in “mere forms,” and the inexorable “form versus content,” leads to the derisive tone of “formalist” when used to describe the early 20th century Russian school of that name,1 along with the midcentury New Critics, and other critical schools which allegedly attempted to cordon off the individual artwork from its historical context, and the aesthetic generally from the social and political.
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