‘Fit for heroes’: Bliss, Britten and requiems

Abstract

Poets of the Great War drew constantly on the poetry of earlier centuries. Very little of it was written by soldier poets – Homer may have been a warrior but Shakespeare, for example, or Wordsworth, Keats, and Whitman certainly were not. When Arthur Bliss, himself a serving officer in the Great War, came to commemorate his brother and friends who had been killed, he did so in Morning Heroes (1930), a ‘symphony for chorus, orator and orchestra’. Although he included one poem by Owen and another by Robert Nichols, pride of place went to the Iliad and to Whitman. For the next generation, however, the Great War had become the definition of war itself, just as the work of its soldier poets had become the definition of war poetry. When, after the Second World War, Britten, himself a non-combatant, came to write his War Requiem, it was almost inevitably to the words of Wilfred Owen that he turned. This piece will explore some of the meanings and consequences of that shift.