Perspectives on World War I Poetry

Abstract

Robert C. Evans, Perspectives on World War I Poetry (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014)A timely contribution to studies of the poetry of the First World War, Perspectives on World War I Poetry is part of Bloomsbury's multiple-genre 'Great War' collection, whose aim, in the centenary year of the outbreak of the First World War, is to provide a 'one-stop resource for those seeking to understand the Great War and its impact' (see: www.bloomsbury.com/thegreatwar).As the book's preface set out, its aims are primarily pedagogical and equalizing: to bring to the foreground of the study of the poetry of the First World War numerous relevant literary theories, while also dispelling the notion that literary theory is difficult or daunting. Many so-called 'simple' introductions to the study of literature through literary theory confuse rather than clarify through their attempts at simplification or accessibility, but Evans's study, perhaps because he chooses a specific literary focus for the theoretical exposition, is not one of these.It is unfortunate that there still should be an apparent need to dispel the myth of theory as the preserve of the over-complicating academic critic. And yet, in the average high school or even undergraduate classroom, the fear of 'theory' that this book seeks to address, is still all too apparent, manifesting as a disparagement of anything remotely abstract, and a resort to close-textual, biographical, or thematic readings. The pressures on teachers of literature by national or institutional bodies to take a 'bit of everything' approach to pedagogy (in the UK, the English A-Level 'Assessment Objectives' which each student must hit in order to get a high mark, springs to mind), coupled with the resistance of the student to read anything outside the text at hand, perhaps also contributes to the fact that the 'theory myth' is often only debunked once the reader in question has reached advanced undergraduate level or beyond.As Evans writes in his introduction, 'any reader of a literary text inevitably uses literary theory of some sort' (1), and it is with this in mind that Evans uses the springboard of a selection of First World War poems to introduce the complexities of various theoretical approaches to his reader. In order to provide a framework through which the interested 'lay' reader can begin to engage with literary theory, Evans takes as a starting point M.H. Abrams's schematic of writer-text-audience- 'reality critic (2), which is expanded and tabulated in terms of the different literary theories the book later introduces in Table 12.1 (218-19). And in the chapters that ensue, the author looks at poems from a wide, international range of poets of the First World War, elucidating their various complexities from the most appropriate literary-critical angles.To the academic reader who will likely take as a given that it is now impossible to 'do' literary criticism without a strong literary theoretical knowledge, Evans's use of Abrams's framework may seem outdated, as may his use of a chronological theoretical trajectory, from the Classical literary criticism of Aristotle and Plato to those theoretical standpoints more popular in present-day criticism (such as ecocriticism and postmodernism). …