News of War: Civilian Poetry, 1936–1945 by Rachel Galvin

Abstract

Reviewed by: News of War: Civilian Poetry, 1936–1945 by Rachel Galvin Thomas Gould News of War: Civilian Poetry, 1936–1945. By Rachel Galvin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. News of War appears to take its title from Wallace Stevens’s “The Noble Rider and the Sound of Words,” where Stevens refers to “an extraordinary pressure of news . . . of a new world . . . and finally news of a war” (CPP 655). Stevens’s metaphor in that essay of a variable “pressure of reality,” of which war is a particularly intense modality, offers a neat figure for one of the basic undergirding premises of this excellent book: that neither war nor the act of bearing witness to it are absolute states, that both take place on continua. It thereby redresses a cultural or critical tendency to neglect what is not derived from the empirical or the firsthand—a tendency notably prescribed by Ralph Waldo Emerson in “The Poet,” where he writes that the poet “is the only teller of news, for he was present and privy to the appearance which he describes” (Essays and Lectures, Library of America, 1983, p. 450). What unites the civilian poets that Galvin considers, all writing in the time of the Spanish Civil War and World War II, is that none of them fulfilled Emerson’s precept with regard to war; none was the firsthand teller of news, and none was present and privy. Or not, at least, present and privy as “flesh-witnesses,” a somatic substitute for “eyewitnesses,” and the term Galvin prefers for the privileged authority of those, such as the famous and oft-anthologized soldier poets, who have seen and been in war. What else unites the poets here—including Stevens, the onetime newspaperman—is their immersion in reading and writing journalism, and an epistemological reliance upon it. The central argument of News of War is thus that, being well-attuned to the mediations and mendacities of journalistic discourse, civilian poets developed a poetics of what Galvin calls “meta-rhetoric” or “meta-rhetorical self-interference” (9)—that is, a self-reflexive and critical [End Page 281] deployment of language that stages the political, ethical, and aesthetic concerns faced by writers of poetry in a time of such great crisis and suffering. Resting on this premise is the novel claim for an underexamined pedagogic or cautionary function, with Galvin arguing that these poets wrote to “encourage readers to take critical distance from official war culture” (7). Perhaps more could be done to evaluate the social utility or efficacy of this belief in its various applications—or perhaps this ought to be a task left for readers. It is a function, though, that allows Galvin to defend some poems from the critical accusation of political disengagement or aestheticist withdrawal (particularly in the case of Marianne Moore, but this is relevant for Stevens, too). As this all implies, Galvin’s discussions have considerable relevance beyond the historical bounds of the book’s title, ranging from contemporary debates on the role of the news media in public life to the fundamental subject of the limits of poetry in the articulation and representation of lived experience. With the exception of an epilogue that considers a handful of contemporary, post-9/11 meta-rhetoricians, this is a focused comparative study of six poets: César Vallejo, W. H. Auden, Raymond Queneau, Moore, Gertrude Stein, and, of course, Stevens, in a chapter which expands upon Galvin’s essay “‘Less Neatly Measured Common-Places’: Stevens’ Wartime Poetics,” previously published in this journal (Vol. 37, No. 1, Spring 2013). Each poet is discussed discretely, and Galvin favors judicious, infrequent cross-references and comparisons over any totalizing or eliding critical gestures; for instance, she offers a suggestive discussion of the ways in which Vallejo, a Peruvian in Chile, and Auden, an Englishman in New York, continued to develop rhetorical strategies of displacement (92). Galvin does not just afford due respect to the singularity of each of the poets, but to the singularity of the poems as well. Each chapter focuses closely on a small number of poems, with insightful, attentive, and, in some cases, persuasively dissentient readings that tend to chart the interactions...