DOCSLIB.ORG

EDMUND BLUNDEN and IVOR GURNEY J Edmund Blunden Enli.Sted in 1914

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
EDMUND BLUNDEN and IVOR GURNEY J Edmund Blunden Enli.Sted in 1914 CHAPTER SIX EDMUND BLUNDEN AND IVOR GURNEY J Edmund Blunden enli.sted in 1914. His war poetry is hard to characterize in that like his poetry as a whole it does not have c0- hering themes, in the strict sense, so much as contexts and specific experiences. He writes of nature and war I or rather, of events within a rural pattern. Nature is made to contain war, as best it can, as the sanative framework of a:J. otherwise disrupting experience. War impinges on him in a more specific way than nature does and, to this extent, it is more deliberately examined. He sees it as a dis­ rupting force, not merely because it is so intrinsically, but because it interferes with his fruitful contact with nature. Nature provides that kind of assuring context that religion provides for some. In answer to Faustus's question IHow comes it, then, that thou art out of hell?' Mephistophilis replies, 'Why, this is hell, nor am lout of it.' Absence from 'the race of God' is hell and only an experience such as war could exile the poet from nature as Mephistophilis is exiled from God. Siegfried Sassoon maintained in conversation that Blunden is the surviving poet of the war most lastingly obsessed by it; a fact perhaps anticipated by Blunden himself in his epigraph to Undertones of War (1928). He quotes Bunyan: 'Yea, how they set themselves in battle-array I shall remember to my dying day.' On the other hand, Blunden had seen even before the war a haunted and fearful aspect in nature. The war intensified this awareness and made more complex the relation between war and malign nature. Leavis, in the chapter of NefP Bearing! (1932) entitled 'The Situation at the End of the First World War" writes that Tile ShepAerti, Mr BlundeR's first mature book of verse, marked him out from the crowd as a poet who, though he wrote about the country. drew neither upon The Shropshire uti nor upon the common stock of Georgian country sentiment. There was also in his poems, for all their rich rusticity, the homc-spun texture that is their warrant, a frank literary quality .... out of the traditional life of the English countryside, J. Silkin, Out of Battle © Jon Silkin’s estate 1998 Edmund Blu""," 103 especially as relived in memories of childhood, Mr Blunden was creating a world-a world in which to find refuge from adult distresses; above aU, one guessed, from memories of the war.•.• There [is] something satis­ fying about the dense richness of his pastoral world .... He was able to be, to some purpose, conservative in technique, and to draw upon the eighteenth century, because the immemorial rural order that is doomed was real to him. Leavis of course brings to sight not merely the relation between rurality and war. as Blunden used it, but [he relation of the rural order to urban civilization. To assess accurately the war's impact upon him and his poems, we must first establish what the country meant to him. Blunden's 'country' was the South. He was born in London in 1896, but the family moved subsequently to Yalding in Kent. Kent and Sussex are his counties, an area of few dramatic contours and a . quietness matched by that of his poems. The 'frank literary quality' that Leavis detects in his poems is perhaps related to the encroach­ ing urbanization, more advanced in the South than in the North. Despite the industrialization of the last hundred and fifty years, the North retains a stronger hold on the doomed rural order. Poets without Blunden's solidity tend to draw a false antithesis between urban evil and rural innocence-hath distonions-adopting a crude version of Darwinism which they invert by assening that, despite the claims of utilitarianism, the more society becomes industrialized the further it regresses. Clearly, neither this 'golden age' syndrome nor its opposite is true, since progress, if we can at all speak of it, consists in our development in human relations which technology mayor may not serve, but which in any case has no absolute or necessary connection with them. I do not mean to imply that all we associate with the rise of capitalism has not a fundamental connection with social relationships; but I do mean that our formularization of social relations, our moral beliefs, are not dependent on our technological eX'pertise. The millennium, however, is always elsewhere. Such debased and materialistic Darwinism is essentially prospective, pastoralism retrospective. And pastoralism is an earlier ruralism peopled with deities and pietistic shepherds j the society itself innocent of evil. The pre-Iapsarian state is reset to pre-date the Industrial Revolution, which pastoralism, at its most extreme, sees as both the fruit of its own evil and a punishment of future societies. Of course, neither Out of Battle pastoralism nor utilitarianism apprehends the present except as corroborative evidence for its own case, and such prejudices drastically limit a serious understanding of the present and its relation to rural life. Blunden himself identifies the problem of ruraltife in its relations with an urban society in his essay 'Country Poets) (1954): 'But to many of us the ultimate question is whether or not the tradition (of country poets) is dead .... The verse is the thing, not the circumstances of its production.) Not quite so, surely) for the circumstances of its production would be bound up with the kind of relations a man has with rural life. Seamus Heaney's first book, Death of a Naturalist (1966), makes precisely the right point in that, whereas his father's generation was connected with the land because they farmed it, he has a naturalist's concern; he is an observer of, and perhaps an inquirer into, nature, but he does not depend on it for his livelihood. His connection with it is less intimate. Blunden's difficulty as a poet, inasmuch as he is a poet of nature or uses nature as the propulsion for his feelings, lies precisely here. And this may provide an even more profound reason for the literary quality in some of his perceptions of nature. The difficulty works in two directions. It is not merely his con­ nection that is not vital, as a farmer's is. The audience he could count on to read his poetry was also either urban or composed mainly of people who had a 'natunlJist's' connection with nature. Even in his own youth rural society was in decay, and urban society could at best only 'see' nature. If Edward Thomas's remarks about contemporary nature verse are taken in conjunction with the verse itself, it may more clearly be seen that the customary response to nature was one of civilized euphoria, in that the pleasures of nature confirmed the agreeable notion that here at Jeast was something that gave man innocent pleasure. It was not until the middle classes and working classes had been thoroughly urbanized that the 'stripes on the tulip' were once again 'numbered'. Although the meticulous detail in Thomas's poems and some of Blunden's is perhaps in pan a result of the urbanizing process. The subject cannot even be left rhere, for one aspect ofBiunden's rurality employs not the observer but the eye of the distant urban society, as it derived its rural joy through the filter of a taste that edited its sensuous responses into some form of decorative painting before these responses could be more freshly and directly made. Thus, in 'The Gods of the Earth Beneath', written when Blunden Edmund Blunden 105 was already on the Western Front, the nature of observed detail co--exists with this stylized and partly even eighteenth...c;entury version of nature: Emmets and lizards, hollow-haunting wads, Adders and tffets, ground wasps ravenous .. •. Blunden has here woven the 'agreeable' and the melancholic grotesque together into a complex structure. And even if it is nature selected into a particular kind of picture, 'groundwasps ravenous' feels observed-despite the inversion. The creatures are not described merely. for what they can contribute to pictorial artifice, but lend verisimilitude to an image of nature, here, one djvided and ruled by seven deities, This kind of conjunction, where folklore and concrete detail fuse, occurs when a poet is thinking carefully. But the frequent appearance (in this quite early poem) of stylized passages shows how Blunden could be drawn aside by the taste of the sophisticated eye; He thins frail gold for crowns of daffodil, And inlays silver leaves for ladysmocks. With rubies in his palace underground Windowed, to let the cavern's twilight in; Of alabaster are his buttresses, Of pallid mica are his little doors •••• 'Of alabaster are ...' has the tone of a Shakespearian song articu­ lated, in this instance, for the purpose of inducing a belief or re­ sponse to the fanciful; nature has here become the ornament of the wealthy collector. On the other hand, only a sophisticated mind could take the fancy but drop the factual basis of 'Of his bones are coral made'. Blunden's fines are inlaid with a Pre-Raphaelite liking for simple colours and a decorative strangeness. The se<::tion in Blunden's Poems 1914-30 called 'War: Impacts and Delayed Actions', which is perhaps a reference to delayed shock from the experience, contains most of his war poems. Yet, describing them as 'war poems', one thinks of them as different from Sassoon's. Blunden seems to need to keep nature present, which inevitably produces some distortions. But the war is equally omnipresent, and we may see how he evaluates it by seeing how he evaluates the­ for him---contrasting context of nature, in three extracts from Untkrtones of War: J06 Out of Battk Was it on this visit to Etaples that some of us explored the church-a fishing-village church-and took tea comfortably in an inn? Those tendemesses ought not to come, however dimly, in my notion of Etaplcs.
Load more

Recommended publications
  • U DX45 Letters to Frank Noble Wood 1913-1945
    Hull History Centre: Letters to Frank Noble Wood U DX45 Letters to Frank Noble Wood 1913-1945 Biographical Background: Frank Noble Wood was a poet and member of the Hull Literary Club for fifty years, acting as President between 1918 and 1931. He published two books of verse: Songs and Strife: A Selection of poems written during the Great War (1917) and Lines written on a visit to Wilberforce House, Hull and other verses (1912). He died on 11 November 1962, aged 84. Edmund Charles Blunden, born on 1 November 1896, was an English poet, author and critic. Blunden was educated at Queen's College, Oxford and entered the army as a second lieutenant of the Royal Sussex Regiment in August 1915. He saw action in Ypres and the Somme and was awarded the Military Cross. Blunden wrote about his experiences during the First World War in both his poetry and his prose. In 1919, he left the army and began studying at Oxford until he left in 1920 to pursue a literary career. His first book of poems was published in 1920 to be followed by many other books. In 1920 he also helped edit the poems of John Clare, mostly from Clare's manuscripts. Blunden was a prolific writer and he published numerous works between 1914 and 1967. Initially unable to support himself as a full-time writer, in 1924 he accepted the post of Professor of English at the University of Tokyo. In 1931, he became a Fellow of Merton College, Oxford and in 1944 became assistant editor of The Times Literary Supplement.
    [Show full text]
  • Edmund Blunden
    Edmund Blunden: An Inventory of His Papers at the Harry Ransom Center Descriptive Summary Creator: Blunden, Edmund, 1896-1974 Title: Edmund Blunden Papers Dates: 1909-1970, undated Extent: 95 boxes (39.90 linear feet), 10 galley folders (gf), 7 oversize folders (osf) Abstract: World War I British poet and English professor Edmund Blunden’s papers consist almost entirely of materials acquired from him during his lifetime. Nearly all of Blunden’s poetry, fiction, and nonfiction is represented in the Works series. Among the most extensive correspondences are those of fellow poet Siegfried Sassoon, publisher Rupert Hart-Davis, second wife Sylva Norman, and literary agent A. D. Peters. Four indexes (for Works, Letters, Recipients, and Miscellaneous) follow the Container List and provide more detailed access to the contents of these papers. Call Number: Manuscript Collection MS-0426 Language: The bulk of the collection is in English , with some materials in Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Spanish, and Welsh. Access: Open for research. Researchers must create an online Research Account and agree to the Materials Use Policy before using archival materials. Use Policies: Ransom Center collections may contain material with sensitive or confidential information that is protected under federal or state right to privacy laws and regulations. Researchers are advised that the disclosure of certain information pertaining to identifiable living individuals represented in the collections without the consent of those individuals may have legal ramifications (e.g., a cause of action under common law for invasion of privacy may arise if facts concerning an individual's private life are published that would be deemed highly offensive to a reasonable person) for which the Ransom Center and The University of Texas at Austin assume no responsibility.
    [Show full text]
  • EARLY HISTORY, ANNUALS, PERIODICALS Early History, Annuals, Periodicals
    EARLY HISTORY, ANNUALS, PERIODICALS Early History, Annuals, Periodicals 166. ALCOCK, C W (Compiler) 171. [ANON] The Cricket Calendar for 1888, a The Cricket Calendar for 1909 pocket diary . The Cricket Press. Original limp cloth, very The Office of “Cricket”, 1888. Original limp good. Wynyard’s copy with annotations cloth, very good. Interesting, hand-written throughout. Includes his hand-written itiner- notes by the original owner. £90 ary for the 1909/10 MCC Tour to SA. Also reports on the 1909 MCC Team to Egypt, of 167. ALCOCK, C W (Compiler) which Wynyard was a member, introduction The Cricket Calendar for 1889, a to the 1909 Australians, death of the Earl of pocket diary . Sheffield etc. (illustrated below) £80 The Office of “Cricket”, 1888. Original limp cloth, very good. Interesting, hand-written notes by the original owner. £90 168. PENTELOW, J N (Compiler) The Cricket Calendar for 1899, being a pocket diary, containing all the chief county and club fixtures of the season, arranged in chronological order etc. The Cricket Press. Original limp cloth, very good. E G Wynyard’s copy with his hand- written notes throughout and his detailed match scores and performances written in. Includes club matches, MCC, Hampshire and other first-class games. Portrait of NF Druce. 175. TROWSDALE, T B This was the only year that Pentelow edited 172. LEWIS, W J the Calendar which ran from 1869 to 1914. The Language of Cricket; with The Cricketer’s Autograph Birthday £80 illustrative extracts from the Book W Scott, 1906. 342pp, illus, contains 130 literature of the game 169.
    [Show full text]
  • Selected Letters of Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, 1919-1967
    THE PICKERING MASTERS SELECTED LETTERS OF SIEGFRIED SASSOON AND EDMUND BLUNDEN, 1919–1967 Contents of the Edition Volume 1 Letters 1919–1931 Volume 2 Letters 1932–1947 Volume 3 Letters 1951–1967 SELECTED LETTERS OF SIEGFRIED SASSOON AND EDMUND BLUNDEN, 1919–1967 Edited by Carol Z. Rothkopf Volume 2 Letters 1932–1947 First published 2012 by Pickering & Chatto (Publishers) Limited Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © Taylor & Francis 2012 © Editorial material Carol Z. Rothkopf 2012 Th e letters of Siegfried Sassoon, his poem ‘Blunden’s Beech’, as well as short extracts from of his other works are copyright © by Siegfried Sassoon and published by the kind permission of Th e Estate of George Sassoon. Th e letters of Edmund Blunden and extracts from some of his other works are copyright © and published by the kind permission of Th e Estate of Edmund Blunden. To the best of the Publisher’s knowledge every eff ort has been made to contact relevant copyright holders and to clear any relevant copyright issues. Any omissions that come to their attention will be remedied in future editions. All rights reserved, including those of translation into foreign languages. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
    [Show full text]
  • ENG 5006-001: Studies in 20Th Century British Lit John Moore Eastern Illinois University
    Eastern Illinois University The Keep Fall 2015 2015 Fall 8-15-2015 ENG 5006-001: Studies in 20th Century British Lit John Moore Eastern Illinois University Follow this and additional works at: http://thekeep.eiu.edu/english_syllabi_fall2015 Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation Moore, John, "ENG 5006-001: Studies in 20th Century British Lit" (2015). Fall 2015. 89. http://thekeep.eiu.edu/english_syllabi_fall2015/89 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the 2015 at The Keep. It has been accepted for inclusion in Fall 2015 by an authorized administrator of The Keep. For more information, please contact [email protected]. English 5006-001 Studies in Twentieth-Century British Literature: Literature of the Great War. 1914-1918 and Beyond Coleman Hall 3159 Thursday 3:30-6:00 Professor: John David Moore ([email protected]) Office: Coleman Hall 3771 Office Hours: TTR 9:30-11:00; 12:30-2:00 & by appointment A century ago, what was known as the Great War was about to enter its second year, its devastation already encompassing most of Europe, the Balkans, the Middle East, Africa, and parts of the Asian Pacific. Paul Fussell, in his The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), dwells extensively on the perhaps unrivaled role of literature in this “war that will end war” (H.G. Wells). The British soldier, whether the officer out of Sandhurst or Cambridge, or the common soldier from the laboring classes, brought to the trenches of France and Belgium a literary background born of the liberal belief in the powers of education both in the classics and in the canon of English literature.
    [Show full text]
  • Introduction
    1 Introduction JAN MONTEFIORE Cities and Th rones and Powers Stand in Time’s eye Almost as long as fl owers 1 Which daily die. ipling’s brief elegy for the vanity of human deeds brings together three K themes of this collection of essays: the subjection of his own work and reputation to those processes of time and change of which his poem warns; his relationship to historical institutions of rule and dominance named as ‘Th rones and Powers’; and his many-sided artistry, manifested in this ironic vision of the fall of ancient empires mediated through echoes of Milton and Herrick.2 An account of Kipling ‘in Time’s eye’ necessarily begins with the changes in his reception, here represented in capsule form by the fi rst three essays from G.K. Chesterton (1905), George Orwell (1942) and Randall Jarrell (1961). His reputation has been notoriously changeable since he arrived in London in 1890 as the young genius from India who in one year had had ‘more said about his work, over a wider extent of the world’s surface, than some of the greatest of England’s writers in their whole lives’,3 in 1895 was sounded out as a possible successor to Tennyson as Poet Laureate,4 and whose near-death from pneumonia in 1899 was headline news in three continents. Praise was never undiluted: his ‘vulgarity’ was mocked by Oscar Wilde and attacked by Robert Buchanan and, more devastatingly, Max Beerbohm;5 and as Kipling’s imperialist opinions became more strident after the Boer War he lost the 9780719090172_C01.indd 1 11/10/13 12:02 PM 2 In Time’s eye esteem of British literary intellectuals, whom he in turn despised (his close friends included no fellow writer except Rider Haggard, author of thrillingly mythopoeic imperialist fantasy novels).
    [Show full text]
  • Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War1
    War, literature and the arts 20th anniversary commentary by THOMAS G. BOWIe, Jr. “Haunted ever by war’s agony”: Edmund Blunden, Undertones of War 1 ’ve been thinking a lot about the agony of war lately. Are you haunted by it as well? After over 30 years in uniform, I’ve donned the tweed of academe and settled into a teaching position in a small liberal arts college. But Iwar’s agony has followed me even here. For the past several years I’ve been working with the Regis Center for the Study of War Experience, teaching a course each spring called “Stories from Wartime” to 50 or 60 undergraduates. But the students are only the official reason we teach such a course—one that’s open to the public, one taught in the largest classroom on our northwest Denver campus, one filled to capacity every Tuesday evening, one overflowing week after week, one that we’ve begun streaming via the internet to a worldwide audience. Why such interest? Each week we invite a small panel of veterans to tell their stories, to share their experiences, to give our students and our guests a glimpse of the personal agonies associated with their wartime experiences. Phil Antonelli might be sharing his trek across Europe with Patton’s 3rd Army, and then end of with the haunting tale of what it was like to liberate one of Hitler’s death camps. Or perhaps Joe Sakato is telling his story, a second-generation Japanese American who enlisted in the Army from just outside an internment camp in Arizona (need I add that they lost the family store and home in California?) so that he too could fight his way across Europe with the 442nd “Go For Broke” Regimental Combat Team, so that he could prove he was a “real” American.
    [Show full text]
  • Talking About John Clare
    TALKING ABOUT JOHN CLARE RONALD BLYTHE TRENT BOOKS 1 TALKING ABOUT JOHN CLARE 2 3 Ronald Blythe Talking About John Clare Trent Editions 1999 4 By the same author A Treasonable Growth Immediate Possession The Age of Illusion Akenfield The View in Winter From the Headlands Divine Landscapes The Stories of Ronald Blythe Private Words: Letters and Diaries from the Second World War Word from Wormingford Published by Trent Editions 1999 Trent Editions Department of English and Media Studies The Nottingham Trent University Clifton Lane Nottingham NG11 8NS Copyright (c) Ronald Blythe The cover illustration is a hand-tinted pen and ink drawing of Selborne, by John Nash, by kind permission of the John Nash Estate. The back cover portrait of Ronald Blythe is by Richard Tilbrook. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, except by a newspaper or magazine reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review. Printed in Great Britain by Goaters Limited, Nottingham ISBN 0 905 488 44 X 5 CONTENTS PREFACE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ABBREVIATIONS AND PRINCIPAL SOURCES I. AN INHERITED PERSPECTIVE II. ‘SOLVITUR AMBULANDO’: CLARE AND FOOTPATH WALKING III.CLARE IN HIDING IV. CLARE IN POET’S CORNER, WESTMINSTER ABBEY V.CLARE’S TWO HUNDREDTH BIRTHDAY VI. THE DANGEROUS IDYLL VII.THE HELPSTON BOYS VIII. THOMAS HARDY AND JOHN CLARE IX.‘NOT VERSE NOW, ONLY PROSE!’ X.RIDER HAGGARD AND THE DISINTEGRATION OF CLARE’S WORLD XI. EDMUND BLUNDEN AND JOHN CLARE XII.PRESIDENTIAL FRAGMENTS XIII. KINDRED SPIRITS XIV. COMMON PLEASURES INDEX OF NAMES 6 For R.S.
    [Show full text]
  • EAST INDIA CLUB ROLL of HONOUR Regiments the EAST INDIA CLUB WORLD WAR ONE: 1914–1919
    THE EAST INDIA CLUB SOME ACCOUNT OF THOSE MEMBERS OF THE CLUB & STAFF WHO LOST THEIR LIVES IN WORLD WAR ONE 1914-1919 & WORLD WAR TWO 1939-1945 THE NAMES LISTED ON THE CLUB MEMORIALS IN THE HALL DEDICATION The independent ambition of both Chairman Iain Wolsey and member David Keating to research the members and staff honoured on the Club’s memorials has resulted in this book of Remembrance. Mr Keating’s immense capacity for the necessary research along with the Chairman’s endorsement and encouragement for the project was realised through the generosity of member Nicholas and Lynne Gould. The book was received in to the Club on the occasion of a commemorative service at St James’s Church, Piccadilly in September 2014 to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War. Second World War members were researched and added in 2016 along with the appendices, which highlights some of the episodes and influences that involved our members in both conflicts. In October 2016, along with over 190 other organisations representing clubs, livery companies and the military, the club contributed a flagstone of our crest to the gardens of remembrance at the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. First published in 2014 by the East India Club. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing, from the East India Club.
    [Show full text]
  • William Force Stead Papers Finding Aid Prepared by Finding Aid Written by Megan Dwyre
    William Force Stead Papers Finding aid prepared by Finding aid written by Megan Dwyre. This finding aid was produced using the Archivists' Toolkit June 29, 2015 Describing Archives: A Content Standard Enoch Pratt Free Library Special Collections November 2006 http://www.prattlibrary.org/ 400 Cathedral Street Baltimore, MD, 21201 443-984-2451 [email protected] William Force Stead Papers Table of Contents Summary Information ................................................................................................................................. 3 Biographical/Historical note.......................................................................................................................... 4 Scope and Contents note............................................................................................................................... 4 Arrangement note...........................................................................................................................................5 Administrative Information .........................................................................................................................5 Controlled Access Headings..........................................................................................................................6 Collection Inventory...................................................................................................................................... 8 Series I: William Force Stead Collection and Biographical Material, 1944-1967..................................8
    [Show full text]
  • "A Harmless Young Shepherd in a Soldier's Coat" a Consideration Of
    Faculteit Letteren & Wijsbegeerte Matthias Leliaert "A Harmless Young Shepherd in a Soldier's Coat" A Consideration of Pastoralism and Modernism in Edmund Blunden's War Memoir Undertones of War and a Selection of his War Poetry Masterproef voorgelegd tot het behalen van de graad van Master in de taal- en letterkunde Engels - Duits 2015 Supervisor Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor Vakgroep Letterkunde II Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to thank my promotor, Prof. Dr. Marysa Demoor, for her guidance throughout the writing process of not only this master dissertation, but of the writing process of my bachelor paper as well. Whenever I had questions, she did not hesitate to answer hem. It is thanks to her that I was able to finish this dissertation in the form that it has today. Secondly, I want to thank my parents for their enduring support throughout the year. The writing process has not always progressed easily, but thanks to the mental support with which they provided me, I managed to keep my focus on the work and get the job done. Thank you. Also, I want to thank my fellow students, who were in the same predicament as I was, and to whom I could complain or ask questions unscrupulously. Researching, studying, or writing together: it has all been a great pleasure. I thank you all very much. III IV What is it through the battle smoke the valiant soldier sees? The little garden far way, the budding apple trees. Edgar A. Guest: The Things that Make a Soldier Great (1918). V VI Table of Contents Introduction ....................................................................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • “Not Flowers for Poets' Tearful Foolings
    SARAH MONTIN “Not Flowers for Poets’ tearful foolings” First World War Poetry, flowers and the Pastoral Failure. “In wilderness I forgot Gardens immaculate.”1 ere, there are no flowers to love2” mourned Richard Aldington during his service in the trenches in 1917, contradicting contemporary images we have of the Great War, rife with flowers sprouting on “Hbattlefields, lapels, memorials and, now, on most books covering the war. Today the mythical red poppy, popularized by John McRae’s famous poem “In Flanders’ Fields”, is the official symbol of public memory, worn in remembrance of the dead on the 11th November. For the hundreds of self-appointed patriotic poets who rose from anonymity with the declaration of war in 1914, flowers readily emblematized Englishness and sacrifice, immortalized by Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” (“England… gave, once, her flowers to love3”). Conversely, for the protest- poets such as Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon, flowers became the symbol of all that war negated: the “gardens immaculate” of an idyllic pre-war England as well as a form of poetic innocence. War, that “roaring night that wrecked our flower” in Edmund Blunden’s evocative words, is the great corrupter, deflowering young men of their ideals and clouding their poetry with irony and self-doubt. As an archetypal example of locus horribilis, the barren and deadly no man’s land of World War I is indeed radically opposed to the pastoral connotations of the flower (eminent consolatory feature of the locus amoenus), just as their traditional literary vehicles, the epic and the pastoral elegy, have seemingly opposite functions.
    [Show full text]