‘At no other time in the twentieth century has verse formed the dominant literary form’ as it did in World War I (at least in the English language), and there are those, such as Bernard Bergonzi, whose words these are, who argue that English poetry ‘never got over the Great War.’ To quote Francis Hope, ‘In a not altogether rhetorical sense, all poetry written since 1918 is war poetry.’48 In retrospect it is not difficult to see why this should have been so. Many of the young men who went to the front were well educated, which in those days included being familiar with English literature. Life at the front, being intense and uncertain, lent itself to the shorter, sharper, more compact structure of verse, war providing unusual and vivid images in abundance. And in the unhappy event of the poet’s death, the elegiac nature of a slim volume had an undeniable romantic appeal. Many boys who went straight from the cricket field to the Somme or Passchendaele made poor poets, and the bookshops were crammed with verse that, in other circumstances, would never have been published. But amid these a few stood out, and of those a number are now household names.49
The poets writing during World War I can be divided into two groups. There were those early poets who wrote about the glory of war and were then killed. And there were those who, killed or not, lived long enough to witness the carnage and horror, the awful waste and stupidity that characterised so much of the 1914–18 war.50 Rupert Brooke is the best known of the former group. It has been said of Brooke that he was prepared all his short life for the role of war poet/martyr. He was handsome, with striking blond hair; he was clever, somewhat theatrical, a product of the Cambridge milieu that, had he lived, would surely have drawn him to Bloomsbury. Frances Cornford wrote a short stanza about him while he was still at Cambridge:
A young Apollo, golden-haired,
Stands dreaming on the verge of strife,
Magnificently unprepared
For the long littleness of life.51
Before the war Brooke was one of the Georgian Poets who celebrated rural England; their favoured techniques were unpretentious and blunt, if somewhat complacent.52 In 1914 there had been no major war for a hundred years, since Waterloo in 1815; reacting to the unknown was therefore not easy. Many of Brooke’s poems were written in the early weeks of the war when many people, on both sides, assumed that hostilities would be over very quickly. He saw brief action outside Antwerp in the autumn of 1914 but was never really in any danger. A number of his poems were published in an anthology called New Numbers. Little notice was taken of them until on Easter Sunday, 1915, the dean of St Paul’s Cathedral quoted Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’ in his sermon. As a result The Times of London reprinted the poem, which gave Brooke a much wider audience. A week later his death was reported. It wasn’t a ‘glamorous’ death, for he had died from blood poisoning in the Aegean; he had not been killed in the fighting, but he had been on active service, on his way to Gallipoli, and the news turned him into a hero.53
Several people, including his fellow poet Ivor Gurney, have remarked that Brooke’s poetry is less about war than about what the English felt – or wanted to feel – about the events of the early months of the war.54 In other words, they tell us more about the popular state of mind in England than about Brooke’s own experience of fighting in the war at the front. His most famous is ‘The Soldier’ (1914):
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
Robert Graves, born in Wimbledon in 1895, was the son of the Irish poet Alfred Perceval Graves. While serving in France, he was wounded, lay unconscious on a stretcher in a converted German dressing station, and was given up for dead.55 Graves was always interested in mythology, and his verse was curiously distant and uncomfortable. One of his poems describes the first corpse he had seen – a German dead on the trench wire whom, therefore, Graves couldn’t bury. This was hardly propaganda poetry, and indeed many of Graves’s stanzas rail against the stupidity and bureaucratic futility of the conflict. Most powerful perhaps is his reversal of many familiar myths:
One cruel backhand sabre-cut –
‘I’m hit! I’m killed!’ young David cries,
Throws blindly forward, chokes … and dies.
Steel-helmeted and grey and grim
Goliath straddles over him.56
This is antiheroic, deflating and bitter. Goliath isn’t supposed to win. Graves himself suppressed his poetry of war, though Poems about War was reissued after his death in 1985.57
Unlike Brooke and Graves, Isaac Rosenberg did not come from a middle-class, public school background, nor had he grown up in the country. He was born into a poor Jewish family in Bristol and spent his childhood in London’s East End, suffering indifferent health.58 He left school at fourteen, and some wealthy friends who recognised his talents paid for him to attend the Slade School to learn painting, where he met David Bomberg, C. R. W. Nevinson, and Stanley Spencer.59 He joined the army, he said, not for patriotic reasons but because his mother would benefit from the separation allowance. He found army life irksome and never rose above private. But never having been schooled in any poetic tradition, he approached the war in a particular way. He kept art and life separate and did not try to turn the war into metaphor; rather he grappled with the unusual images it offered to re-create the experience of war, which is a part of life and yet not part of most people’s lives:
The darkness crumbles away–
It is the same old druid Time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps my hand–
A queer sardonic rat –
As I pull the parapet’s poppy
To stick behind my ear.
And later,
Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.
–‘Break of Day in the Trenches,’ 1916
Above all, you are with Rosenberg. The rat, skittering through no-man’s-land with a freedom no man enjoys, the poppies, drawing life from the blood-sodden ground, are powerful as images, but it is the immediacy of the situation that is conveyed. As he said in a letter, his style was ‘surely as simple as ordinary talk.’60 Rosenberg’s is an unflinching gaze, but it is also understated. The horror speaks for itself. This is perhaps why Rosenberg’s verse has lost less of its power than other war poems as the years have gone by. He was killed on April Fool’s Day, 1918.
Wilfred Owen is generally regarded as Rosenberg’s only equal, and maybe even his superior. Born in Oswestry in Shropshire in 1893, into a religious, traditional family, Owen was twenty-one when war was declared.61 After matriculating at London University, he became the pupil and lay assistant to a vicar in an Oxfordshire village, then obtained a post as a tutor in English at the Berlitz School of Languages in Bordeaux. In 1914, after war broke out, he witnessed the first French casualties arriving at the hospital in Bordeaux and wrote home to his mother vividly describing their wounds and his pity. In October 1915 he was accepted for the Artists’ Rifles (imagine a regiment with that name now) but was commissioned in the Manchester Regiment. He sailed to France on active service at the end of December 1916, attached to the Lancashire Fusiliers. By then, the situation at the front was in strong contrast to the image of the front being kept alive by government propaganda back home.