WILFRED OWEN AND THE GEORGIANS

In 2003, Harvey Shapiro edited an anthology called Poets of World War II as part of the American Poets Project published by The Library of America. In his introduction he expresses his regret that “common wisdom has it that the poets of World War I - Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg - left us a monument and the poets of World War II did not” (p. xx). Given America's late entry into the war in 1917, little of the monumental poetry of the Great War was written by Americans. Shapiro writes, “The American poets of World War I - John Peale Bishop, E. E. Cummings, Archibald MacLeish, Alan Seeger - were too few to constitute a group” (p. xx). This imbalance in the poetic production of war poetry should have been redressed in World War II, although here a different set of impediments intervened. Paul Fussell suggests two reasons why the war produced more silence than poetic expression. The first was the sheer magnitude of violence and the level of cruelty produced by the war. “Faced with events so unprecedented and so inaccessible to normal models of humane understanding, literature spent a lot of time standing silent and aghast.” The second was that redemptive notions of patriotism, heroism, and even elegiac sentiment had been effectively exhausted by World War I. “It is demoralizing to be called on to fight the same enemy twice in the space of twenty-one years, and what is there to say except what has been said the first time?” Fussell writes. And yet poetry was produced in response to World War II, including a wide range of American poetry, as Shapiro's anthology demonstrates. Taken as a whole, these poems exemplify another reason why their response to World War II has not achieved the same public visibility and cultural significance as the poetry of the Great War.

Reviews John Lehmann, The Strange Destiny of Rupert Brooke. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1981. 178 pp. $12.95. In the wake of Rupert Brooke's death in 1915, a commemoration appeared in the Times of London which praised, in the high-flown phrases of funeral rhetoric, the self-sacrifice and noble expression of the young poet who had died of acute blood poisoning on the Dardanelles expedition of World War I. "A voice had become audible," it read, "a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth engaged in this present war, than any other . . . The voice has been swiftly stilled. Only the echoes and memory remain; but they will linger." The eulogy was unsigned, but it carried the initials of the First Lord of the Admiralty, who at the time was none other than Winston Churchill. Churchill's sentiments triggered a wave of public lamentation for the poet whom W. B. Yeats had called "the most beautiful young man in England." Henry James wept at the news, and in a letter to Lady Ottoline, D. H. Lawrence apotheosized: "I first heard of him as a Greek god . . . Bright Phoebus smote him down. It is all in the saga. O God, O God; it is all too much of a piece: it is like madness." Edward Marsh, the inspiration behind Georgian Poetry 1911-1912 and Brooke's literary executor, concluded his Memoir with the words of Denis Browne in a letter of consolation to Brooke's mother: "the loss is not only yours and ours, but the world's." Rupert Brooke had died, and taken with him the hearts and minds of an entire generation. But by all accounts, Brooke must be considered a minor poet. Per- REVIEWS 351 haps most widely known as a "war poet," his work pales beside that of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg, and seems curiously old-fashioned a decade before the publication of The Waste Land. Yet the Easter preceding his death, Brooke was nearly canonized in St. Paul's Cathedral when Dean Inge compared his sonnet, "The Soldier," to the vision of Isaiah, and ventured to think Brooke would "take rank with our great poets." The spirit Rupert Brooke came to represent overshadowed the man and his work. As a result, Gwen Raverat, a long-time friend, was to complain that one never got the feeling "of his being a human being at all." Drawing on previously unpublished letters, either unavailable at the time of Christopher Hassall's official biography of Brooke or deleted at the discretion of Sir Geoffrey Keynes in his selection of letters, John Lehmann, in The Strange Destiny of Rupert Brooke, sets out to dispel "the magnetic effect" Brooke's charm and good looks had on his contemporaries , "which blinded them so often, not merely to the imperfections of his poetry, but also to the darker side of his character." Lehmann begins his story with the episode he believes to have been the key turning point in Brooke's life, "The Crisis at Lulworth." What follows is a profile, at times sentimental, at others sensational, but always informative, of the man behind the myth of the poet-soldier-hero. "The life of the poet," Brooke prophesied in a manuscript note of 1906, "is made up of tragedies: they begin with an infatuation and end with a sonnet sequence." Born Rupert Chawner Brooke on August 3, 1887, Brooke was the son of a public schoolmaster and a self-contained , independently minded woman who had wished for a daughter instead. Of delicate health and prone to infection, he was noted for his feminine, almost androgynous beauty, and bore a striking resemblance, both in physical constitution and psychological make-up, to his mother . At age nine he discovered poetry while on a visit to his relations, and by ten he was writing verses of his own. Soon after beginning school at Rugby, he became friends with a cousin, James Strachey, and subsequently acquainted with James' elder brother, Lytton. "The markings of glamour," Strachey admitted, "were already there." But to others, Brooke remained strangely aloof. His Rugby friends...

The poets of the First World War performed a posthumous disservice to the poets of the Second World War. Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, Herbert Asquith, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon and others less well known had created public expectations of what war poets should be. Immediately upon the outbreak of war in August 1914, Rupert Brooke had issued a 'trumpet call' — soon followed by the productions of other young writers — declaring that a new spirit of heroism could now replace the 'sickness' of the 'pre-1914 world'.1 No such outburst of spirit was evident by the time of the Dunkirk evacuation in May 1940. Still, the British public steadfastly continued to associate poetry with war. An article entitled 'To the Poets of 1940', appended to a review of the year's poetry in the TLS of 30 December 1939, called upon poets in wartime to rise to the occasion once again: 'Here we are faced with an undeniable repetition of history, with nothing original, nothing unique about it. Clearly wars and revolutions are destroying the old social order of the world. But we need not despair of the birth of a new and finer order. It is for the poets to sound the trumpet call'.2KeywordsBritish PoetryYoung WriterLimited EditionTank DriverScottish HomeThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

MLR, Io3.3, 2oo8 839 reversal of the conventional view of poetry and patriotism as antitheses and a broad ening of the canon such that disparate responses towar might be admitted. David Goldie's 'Was There a Scottish War Literature?' examines thework of Scottish First World War poets in terms of a number of uneasy formal and cultural alliances. In a later section, Roderick Watson asks how class and national allegiances mingle with the exigencies ofwar in thework of Scottish poets of the Second World War. Peter McDonald's essay on Louis MacNeice brings to the foreconcerns about nationality and responsibility and about public and private commitment. Brendan Corcoran's essay and others in the final section of thebook on Heaney, Muldoon, and thepoetry of theTroubles return to this theme. Some of thebest essays here are thosewhich invite the reader to rethinkpreviously held convictions. Fran Brearton's 'A War of Friendship: Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon' provides a useful corrective to tendencies to view war poetry as always 'ex periential' and 'anti-war' (p. 209). Similarly, John Lyon and Jon Stallworthy revisit W H. Auden's andWilfred Owen's assertions that 'poetrymakes nothing happen' and that 'the Poetry is in the pity', offering thought-provoking assessments of the nuances of both. Claire M. Tylee's well-argued 'BritishHolocaust Poetry: Songs of Experience' restores toprominence a range ofBritish-Jewish poets. The collection stops just short of a full consideration of poetry from and about current conflicts. This may be because, as earlier contributors note of the establish ment of a canon of First World War poetry, it isnecessary for time to pass before a significant body ofwork can emerge. Nevertheless, The Oxford Handbook ofBritish and IrishWar Poetry offers a thorough, inclusive, and invaluable guide to the field, combining accessible and informativeoverviews with original and insightfulresearch. UNIVERSITY OF EXETER Jo GILL Original Copy: Plagiarism and Originality inNineteenth-Century Literature. By ROBERT MACFARLANE. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2007. xii+244 pp. ?30. ISBN 978-O-I9-929650-7. This perceptive study investigates a 'reappraisal of literaryoriginality and plagia rism' between I859 and I900' (p. 6). Macfarlane argues that in the firsthalf of the nineteenth century 'a crisis of authenticity in literature [. . .]was brought about by the advent of techniques ofmass production' (p. 24) but a change came from the late i850s onwards as 'the inventive reuse of thewords ofothers [. . .]came increasingly to be discerned as an authentic formof creativity' (p. 8). The readings that Macfarlane produces to support his claims are provocative and fruitful,offeringnew insights into links among theworks ofDickens, Eliot, Pater,Wilde, and thenow less-read Charles Reade and Lionel Johnson. I do, nevertheless, have a reservation about this study. Macfarlane argues that in thisperiod 'inheritance' came to 'replace the image of debt' (p. 48) as the defining characteristic of literarypilfering.He also writes of Shelley's 'anxiety at influence' (p. 30) and notes that the textshe examines here do not 'conceal' or 'deny' thenotion of 'aprecursor or precursors' (p. I3). Strange thatsuch tropes are used in a book thatmakes only one (rather dismissive) reference (p. I85 n.) toHarold Bloom and The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, I973). Not that Macfarlane copies Bloom, far from it. While Bloom reads literary inheritance as a burden that must be concealed and negotiated even to thedeath,Macfarlane's study neatly argues theopen and collaborative response of authors toworks of thepast. So why the concealment of Bloom? Iwish I knew.Macfarlane's otherwise convincing arguments begin with two theories of originality: creatio, an ex nihilomaking, versus inventio, a creation that relies on an encounter with thatwhich already exists. As 840 Reviews Macfarlane explains, creatio posits art as 'an addition towhat exists', inventio as 'an edition of it' (p. I), and he reads this split in thewriting of several finde siecle authors as evidence of awider social debate about origins and originality.Macfarlane begins with Edward Young (I 759) and theRomantic poets who answered his call fora genius which 'grows' and 'isnotmade' (p. i8).Macfarlane then traces a swing away from this perception firstin theworks ofBrowning, whose poetry envisions God as theonly au tonomous creator.He argues that a growing sense of the...

Gelibolu Campaign (1915) is an inspiration for fiction writers as they delve into the ancient and present history of the campaign in their fictional constructions. Although in different ways the novels pay tribute to the memories and heroes of the campaign while connecting the carnage of 1915 to the classical times, of Homer’s Troy. References to Iliad and Odyssey appear in fictional stories representing Gelibolu battlefield as a mythical land. T.S. Eliot’s anti-war poem The Wasteland (1922) is echoed in novels lamenting the loss. Besides classical examples British war poets Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon are also remembered in fictional representations of the campaign. Yet, the representations offer an alternative discourse sought by New Historicism replacing the romantic and heroic representations of war with bitter and traumatic ones. This study aims to analyse the tributes to Brooke and Sassoon in Stanton Hope’s Richer Dust (1925), Bruce Scates’s On Dangerous Ground (2012), Rachel Billington’s Glory (2015), and Peter Yeldham’s Barbed Wire and Roses (2007) as they try to unearth the voices of First World War poets and discuss new perspectives offered by novelists in their understanding of the poets. Although wars consume poets besides the intellectual and educated mass, the power of poetry is still heard and remembered thanks to fictional representations creating a dialogue between voices of past and present.

Defining any literary canon is a complex process, subject to multiple strains of influence. Cultural authorities perpetually identify potential electees, and as such any canon is disputed. Yet conversely its reputed distinction is what defines its existence. In some ways representatives of the First World War canon of poets and writers in England are easier to identify than in other nations, with the help of the National Curriculum and the subsequent GCSE and A-level focus on war poets and writers, namely, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. The University of Oxford’s First World War Poetry Digital Archive, which was developed in consultation with and as a tool for educators based at public and state schools in the United Kingdom, also includes Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, David Jones and Vera Brittain.1 Modern anthologies tend to focus on this group as well, and they also appear in widely referenced collections, including Jon Stallworthy’s Oxford Book of War Poetry (2008).

The War Poets wrenched the emotion of anger from its place behind the arras in English lyric poetry and placed it front and centre as a legitimate and, indeed, necessary emotion. This chapter begins by illustrating how earlier generations of poets, from Shakespeare to Masefield, distanced themselves from anger and intellectualised it in terms of religious binaries, gender, degeneracy, socioeconomic class, and other forms of social liminality. The later section explores how that traditional practice was disrupted by a subgroup of War Poets—represented here by Robert Graves, Robert Nicholas, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon—who wrote poems in which the display of anger was of primary importance both as a response to the horrors of war and as a means of sharpening a critique of the social and cultural values that condoned and prolonged the Great War. The paper concludes by identifying some characteristic “anger” influences in selected poems by three Movement Poets—D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, and Philip Larkin.

The War Poets: The Lives and Writings of Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owens, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunde, and the Other Great Poets of the 1914-1918 War.

Siegfried Sassoon and Edmund Blunden both saw action and survived into the late twentieth century as successful men of letters whose styles were quite different. This chapter looks at their literary friendship and compares their work, clarifying where they stand in relation to the Georgians and other war poets, while putting them in a broader cultural perspective. It shows how experience of the trenches led them to twist traditional forms, and examines the stylistic and personal challenges they faced as survivors, their writings ever more retrospective. It argues that Blunden’s complex poetry may feel archaic but has Modernist elements and has been unjustly neglected by comparison with Sassoon’s more accessible but less subtle verse. With close analysis and comparison, and some redefining of key texts, the chapter emphasises their contrasting approaches: Blunden the troubled pastoralist, exploring profounder shades of meaning; Sassoon deliberately ‘anti-poetic’, but with satirical designs on us.

Contrasting the fractured point of view of combatant writers like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Ford Madox Ford to the heroic prospects projected by official War Artists like Muirhead Bone and war poets like Rupert Brooke, this chapter argues that most urgent task confronting the military authorities was to bridge the gulf between the commanding strategic perspective and the collapses of vision in the trench labyrinth of the Western Front. It explores how despite its notorious failures the war machine used propaganda, censorship, military discipline, camouflage and other new technologies to recapture the oversight of battle, turning the imperial sovereign gaze on the minds and bodies of the mass army in the trenches. Despite antimodernism on the home front, the military authorities covertly cannibalized modernist culture in their struggle to modernize. But the camouflaged modernism of Rosenberg, Vera Brittain, or Ford's Parade's End demonstrates a more sceptical response to the dominant perspective of war.

War poetry offers a very deep and personal perspective on the cruelty and destruction of war. Despite technological advancements in modern warfare since the World Wars, the fundamental miseries of armed conflict still exist. This essay examines the relevance of classic war poets like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rupert Brooke in the modern context post WW I. Their evocative and authentic portrayal of life and death in the trenches and battlefields of WW I emphasize the necessity of peace and offer long lasting insights into the real consequences of conflict. Even though the vivid experiences of these poets were chronicled decades ago, their writings are still very relevant even today.

Although Ruth Pitter (1897–1992) is not well known, her credentials as a poet are extensive, and in England from the mid-1930s to the mid-1970s she maintained a modest yet loyal readership. In total she produced eighteen volumes of new and collected verse. Her A Trophy of Arms (1936) won the Hawthornden Prize for Poetry in 1937, and in 1954 she was awarded the William E. Heinemann Award for The Ermine (1953). Most notably, perhaps, she became the first woman to receive the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry in 1955. Furthermore, from 1946 to 1972 she was often a guest on BBC radio and television programs, In 1974 The Royal Society of Literature elected her to its highest honor, a Companion of Literature, and in 1979 she received her last national award when she was appointed a Commander of the British Empire. Pitter was a voluminous letter writer. Her friends and correspondents read like a “Who’s Who” of twentieth-century British literary luminaries, including AE (George Russell), A. R. Orage, Hiliare Belloc, Walter de la Mare, Julian Huxley, John Masefield, Phillip and Ottoline Morrell, George Orwell, Dylan Thomas, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, James Stephens, Dorothy L. Sayers, Siegfried Sassoon, Virginia Sackville-West, Dorothy Wellesley, Lord David Cecil,John Betjeman, Evelyn Waugh, John Wain, Kathleen Raine, and May Sarton. Stylistically Pitter’s letters are marked by crisp prose, precise imagery, and elegant simplicity reflecting a well-read and vigorous mind—lithe, curious, penetrating, analytical, and perceptive. Of her more than one thousand letters covering the years 1908–1988, published here is a generous selection. These selected letters go a long way toward illustrating Pitter’s desire to reach a public interested in her as both a poet and personal commentator. These letters offer an understanding of “the silent music, the dance in stillness, the hints and echoes and messages of which everything is full” reflected in her life and poetry. In total they provide an essential introduction to the work of this neglected twentieth-century poet.

This chapter examines the part played by writers in wartime. Reference is made to the involvement of several in the Boer War, but the chief concern here is the First World War, when many writers lent their pens for propaganda — either independently or surreptitiously co-ordinated by the government department at Wellington House led by C. F. G. Masterman — in which Sir Gilbert Parker and Anthony Hope were prominent. Arnold Bennett and John Buchan held other official appointments; but a good deal of writing arose from spontaneous patriotism, a conviction that Germany was foremost responsible for the war, and a belief in the overall justice of the Allied cause, although reservations were expressed by more than one. Writers whose positions are analysed include William Archer, J. M. Barrie, Hilaire Belloc, Robert Bridges, G. K. Chesterton, Conan Doyle, Ford Madox Ford, John Galsworthy, Elinor Glyn, Thomas Hardy, Keble Howard, Henry James, Jerome K. Jerome, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence, John Masefield, A. E. W. Mason, Somerset Maugham, Siegfried Sassoon, George Bernard Shaw, Mrs Humphry Ward, and H. G. Wells.

In this article, I consider three influential poets of the Great War: Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Hamilton Sorley and Rupert Brooke. Since the birth of the modernist movement, the historical legacy of Great War poetry has tended to focus on the differing levels of “disenchantment” expressed in the works of these three poets when considered separately, applauding Sassoon and Sorley and criticizing Brooke. While I recognize a separation of the works of Brooke from those of Sorley and Sassoon in terms of modernist disillusionment, I argue that analysing instead the literary elements which unify the works of all three poets offers a comprehensive understanding of the experience of trench warfare experience, unavailable through traditional methods of evaluating Great War poetry.

8 8 Y S Y L V I A P L A T H ’ S M Y S T E R I O U S L O V E R J E F F R E Y M E Y E R S Sylvia Plath’s short life and intensely emotional poems have been extensively studied, but at least one major gap remains. Ever since her death in 1963 many journalists and scholars have tried to track down Richard Sassoon. But none of her biographers has found or talked to this mysterious and elusive figure in her life, her first great love, the subject of ecstatic entries in her journals. Like the late J. D. Salinger, he is reclusive and proud of evading his pursuers . No one has ever interviewed him; none of the five biographies of Plath has reproduced his photograph. I have always been curious about Sassoon’s character, the nature of their liaison, why it ended and what became of him afterward. I did finally find him, but in a roundabout way. Though he refused to respond to my letters, I managed to discover – by interviews and by examining his writing – some interesting details about his background, life, and work, material which illuminates his relationship with Plath and explains why he was important to her. Plath’s first biographer, Edward Butscher (1976), cautiously hid Sassoon’s identity and inaccurately called him ‘‘Richard S— —, French grandson of a British poet.’’ One of the leading poets of the Great War, Siegfried Sassoon came from a Jewish family, was 8 9 R brought up as a Protestant, and converted to Catholicism. Linda Wagner-Martin (1987) said Richard was related to Siegfried; Anne Stevenson (1989) described him as distantly related; Ronald Hayman (1991) did not mention his connection to the poet; Paul Alexander (1991) said that Richard’s father was Siegfried’s cousin. Butscher provided some basic information, Wagner-Martin and Hayman added nothing new, and Stevenson filled in some background from Plath’s point of view. Alexander published some of Richard’s letters to Plath, now in the Lilly Library at Indiana University. Richard Sassoon has never published the letters Plath wrote to him. All the known facts about him can be listed in one paragraph. Richard Laurence Sassoon was born in Paris in 1934 and brought up in Tryon, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of western North Carolina . He met Plath at Yale in April 1954, during their junior years, when she was a student at Smith College. In May, after they’d spent the first of many weekends in New York, he became Plath’s lover and was passionately involved with her for the next two years. He graduated from Yale in 1955, attended the Sorbonne during 1955–56, and during that Christmas holiday, when she was a Fulbright scholar at Cambridge University, they spent a week in Paris and then traveled to the south of France. She was particularly impressed by the chapel in Vence, decorated by Henri Matisse. In February 1956 she met Ted Hughes in Cambridge, marked him as her prey, and began as she ended: passionately and violently. She famously wrote of their first encounter: ‘‘When he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face. . . . The one man since I’ve lived who could blast Richard.’’ Plath liked to have several competing suitors at one time. Though instantly besotted with Hughes she was still involved with Sassoon. On 25 March she spent the night with Hughes in London on the way to meet Sassoon in Paris, a trip that became one of the great turning points of her life. Though Plath did not find Sassoon attractive, she was drawn to his mind and could not imagine a sexual relationship without a powerful intellectual bond. He gave her a taste of the good life: cosmopolitan, sophisticated, and committed to high art. At ease in France, he introduced the provincial New Englander (who could 9 0 M E Y E R S Y read but not speak French) to French food and wine, literature and culture; he showed...