Showing posts with label war poets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label war poets. Show all posts

Sunday

Acquisitions (77): Wilfred Owen


Jon Stallworthy: Wilfred Owen (1974)

•

Jon Stallworthy (1935-2014)


Jon Stallworthy: Wilfred Owen (1974)
[BookMark, Devonport - 11/10/22]:

Jon Stallworthy. Wilfred Owen. 1974. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.


Jon Stallworthy: Wilfred Owen. Rev. ed. (2013)

British World War I Poets


The other day Bronwyn and I went to see the Terence Davies film Benediction, about the English war poet Siegfried Sassoon. It's a very odd piece, which focusses mainly on Sassoon's post-war struggles, and - in particular - a succession of unhappy love affairs and other seemingly trivial matters.

There's clearly nothing accidental about this. The idea must have been to show the long aftermath of that extraordinary period of intensity and suffering which was his war experience, and the many ways it undermined him throughout his long life. Which is interesting, certainly, though not always easy to watch.

In the end, we felt as if half an hour or so could have been cut from the movie without significant loss. Perhaps the idea was to make the audience suffer through rather than enjoy the show.


Terence Davies, dir.: Benediction (2021)


Mind you, there's always been something a bit dubious lurking behind the vicarious fascination we find in contemplating the horrors endured by First World War soldiers in the trenches. There may not be anything wrong with this per se, but it's probably just as well not to get too obsessed with the subject without carefully examining your own motives.

As with sporting competitions, the exploits of great athletes are not really your achievements, however loudly you cheer them from the bleachers - let alone your own comfy armchair.

I remember once being accused of voyeurism when I mentioned having collected (and read) a number of books about the tragic histories of various Native American tribes: the Cherokee trail of tears principal among them. I do see the point. But is maintaining your ignorance of all these 'old, unhappy, far-off things' really a preferable approach?


Jack Ross: To Terezín (2007)


When I published a book of poems about a visit to the Nazi model ghetto Theresienstadt some years ago now, I wrote on the back cover:
If the survivors
told me
not to go

I’d stay away
The right to make such decisions, it seems to me, must remain with them. And so I continue to read about the First World War. Both my grandfathers were, after all, servicemen - one in Minesweepers in the North Sea, the other as an Australian infantryman in France.

It's the classic British war poets I'd like to focus on here, though. Wilfred Owen is probably the one who's had the greatest overall influence - but Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, David Jones, and even Ivor Gurney are attracting nearly as much attention these days.


Jon Stallworthy, ed.: Anthem for Doomed Youth (2002)


Here, then, is my selection of authors to chronicle and discuss. You'll note that it's the same line-up chosen by Jon Stallworthy for his Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War (2002), but with one exception: I've replaced Julian Grenfell with C. S. Lewis (or, rather, with 'Clive Hamilton' - an early pen-name of his):
  1. Edmund Blunden (1896-1974)
  2. Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
  3. Robert Graves (1895-1985)
  4. Ivor Gurney (1890-1937)
  5. David Jones (1895-1974)
  6. Francis Ledwidge (1887–1917)
  7. C. S. Lewis (1898–1963)
  8. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)
  9. Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)
  10. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)
  11. Charles Sorley (1895-1915)
  12. Edward Thomas (1878-1917)
I've also added, as a coda, a few other significant poetic voices - if not canonical war poets - from this period, and afterwards, including Jon Stallworthy himself:
  1. Richard Aldington (1892-1962)
  2. T. E. Hulme (1883-1917)
  3. Herbert Read (1893-1968)
  4. Jon Stallworthy (1935-2014)
  5. Anthologies & Secondary Literature

Books I own are marked in bold:


Tired with dull grief, grown old before my day,
I sit in solitude and only hear
Long silent laughters, murmurings of dismay,
The lost intensities of hope and fear;
In those old marshes yet the rifles lie,
On the thin breastwork flutter the grey rags,
The very books I read are there — and I
Dead as the men I loved, wait while life drags

Its wounded length from those sad streets of war
Into green places here, that were my own;
But now what once was mine is mine no more,
I seek such neighbours here and I find none.
With such strong gentleness and tireless will
Those ruined houses seared themselves in me,
Passionate I look for their dumb story still,
And the charred stub outspeaks the living tree.

I rise up at the singing of a bird
And scarcely knowing slink along the lane,
I dare not give a soul a look or word
Where all have homes and none’s at home in vain:
Deep red the rose burned in the grim redoubt,
The self-sown wheat around was like a flood,
In the hot path the lizard lolled time out,
The saints in broken shrines were bright as blood.

Sweet Mary’s shrine between the sycamores!
There we would go, my friend of friends and I,
And snatch long moments from the grudging wars,
Whose dark made light intense to see them by.
Shrewd bit the morning fog, the whining shots
Spun from the wrangling wire: then in warm swoon
The sun hushed all but the cool orchard plots,
We crept in the tall grass and slept till noon.
As you can see, Blunden as a writer takes a rather distant approach to his war experiences. It's unclear, even, if the speaker is supposed to be a mask for the poet or an entirely independent character. One clue might be found in the last line of his memoir Undertones of War, where he describes himself as "a harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat." Certainly it's thus that he likes to depict himself in his prose. And this poem might be seen to embody the same attitude.

There's a rather amusing chapter in Dylan Thomas and John Davenport's novel The Death of the King's Canary, written in 1949 but not published until 1976, where the Prime Minister sits down to choose a Poet Laureate from the various verse samples provided to him - all expertly pastiched by Thomas. One of these, entitled 'The Wayfaring Tree', by Edmund Bell, concludes as follows:
Here, sitting beside the seasonable fire
I watch the smoke curl blue from my last pipe,
Whose stem is fashioned from thy year-old shoot,
Severed ere ripe.
Is this Bell supposed to be Blunden? The PM concludes that 'although abstractions were welcome by their absence, a Poet Laureate should surely be able to leave the ground now and then. This chap was positively buried in it, a veritable mole' [8]. Compared to the treatment received by most of the other candidates - based on such contemporary luminaries as Auden, Eliot, Lowell, Spender and Allen Tate - this qualifies as a rave review. He does, after all, appreciate 'the authenticity of the poem', not to mention 'a certain mellowness in the writing not altogether unpleasing.'

I did at first wonder if 'Sir Frank Knight', author of 'All Honour and Glory' might not be Blunden, but he seems much more likely to be Sir John Squire, though there are various other suspects who may have strayed into the authors' crosshairs. His poem concludes with an encomium:
Of English dawns, plashy with English dew,
And English water-wagtails on English lawns,
And Englishmen walking in the English way
In England ... [18]
'No, no, no. This was too much. Really appalling. And how the brute would love the job!' the PM shudders.

    Poetry:

  1. Poems 1913 and 1914 (1914)
  2. Poems Translated from the French (1914)
  3. Three Poems (1916)
  4. The Barn (1916)
  5. The Silver Bird of Herndyke Mill (1916)
  6. Stane Street (1916)
  7. The Gods of the World Beneath (1916)
  8. The Harbingers (1916)
  9. Pastorals (1916)
  10. The Waggoner and Other Poems (1920)
  11. The Shepherd, and Other Poems of Peace and War (1922)
  12. Old Homes (1922)
  13. To Nature: New Poems (1923)
  14. Dead Letters (1923)
  15. Masks of Time: A New Collection of Poems Principally Meditative (1925)
  16. Japanese Garland (1928)
  17. Retreat (1928)
  18. Winter Nights: A Reminiscence (1928)
  19. Near and Far: New Poems (1929)
  20. A Summer's Fancy (1930)
  21. The Poems: 1914-30 (1930)
    • The Poems: 1914-30. London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1930.
  22. To Themis: Poems on Famous Trials (1931)
  23. Constantia and Francis: An Autumn Evening (1931)
  24. Halfway House: A Miscellany of New Poems (1932)
  25. Choice or Chance: New Poems (1934)
  26. Verses: To H. R. H. The Duke of Windsor (1936)
  27. An Elegy and Other Poems (1937)
  28. On Several Occasions (1938)
  29. Poems, 1930–1940 (1940)
  30. Shells by a Stream (1944)
  31. After the Bombing, and Other Short Poems (1949)
  32. Eastward: A Selection of Verses Original and Translated (1950)
  33. Records of Friendship (1950)
  34. A Hong Kong House (1959)
  35. Poems on Japan (1967)
  36. Overtones of War: Poems of the First World War (1996)
    • Overtones of War: Poems of the First World War. Ed. Martin Taylor. London: Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd., 1996.

    37. Prose:

  37. Undertones of War (1928)
    • Undertones of War. 1928. London: Penguin, 1937.
  38. Leigh Hunt's 'Examiner' Examined (1928)
  39. Leigh Hunt: A Biography (1930)
  40. Charles Lamb and his Contemporaries (1933)
  41. Edward Gibbon and his Age (1935)
  42. Keat's Publisher: A Memoir (1936)
  43. Thomas Hardy (1941)
  44. Cricket Country (1944)
  45. Shelley: A Life Story (1946)
    • Shelley: A Life Story. 1946. London: Collins / Readers Union Ltd., 1948.

    46. Edited:

  46. [with Alan Porter] John Clare: Poems Chiefly from Manuscript (1920)
  47. [with Alan Porter] Madrigals and Chronicles, Being Newly Found Poems Written by John Clare (1924)
  48. On the Poems of Henry Vaughan, Characteristics and Intimations, with his principal Latin poems carefully translated into English verse (1927)


Edmund Blunden: The Poems: 1914-30 (1930)



Now, God be thanked who has matched us with his hour,
And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping!
With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,
To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,
Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary;
Leave the sick hearts that honor could not move,
And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,
And all the little emptiness of love!
Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release there,
Where there’s no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,
Naught broken save this body, lost but breath;
Nothing to shake the laughing heart’s long peace there,
But only agony, and that has ending;
And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

- 'Peace'
I've tried to avoid the poem about that corner of a foreign field that is forever ... I think you know the rest. That phrase about 'swimmers into cleanness leaping' is almost as egregious, though. But then, Brooke was not alone in fantasising about some miraculous rebirth which was going to be achieved by breaking the long Victorian swoon with the short, sharp shock of battle.

Rilke himself, to his subsequent shame, wrote some laudatory 'war hymns' in 1914 before he realised just what it was that European civilisation (so-called) was plunging into. Only a few prescient figures such as Henry James understood that this was the end of the illusion of progress: that from now on the abyss was going to be staring into everyone twenty-four hours a day.

    Poetry:

  1. The Pyramids (1904)
  2. The Bastille (1905)
  3. Poems (1911)
  4. The Old Vicarage, Grantchester (1912)
  5. 1914 and Other Poems (1915)
    • 1914 and Other Poems. London: Faber, 1941.
  6. The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (1915)
  7. Selected Poems (1917)
  8. The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke (1918)
    • The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke: With a Memoir. Ed. Edward Marsh. 1918. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, Ltd., 1920.
    • The Collected Poems. Memoir by Edward Marsh. 1918. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1942.
  9. Complete Poems (1932)
    • The Complete Poems. 1932. London: Sidgwick & Jackson Limited / Melbourne: Hicks, Smith & Wright, 1944.
  10. Twenty Poems (1935)
  11. The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke (1946)
    • The Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. 1946. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1974.
  12. The Poetical Works (1949)
  13. Poems of Rupert Brooke (1952)
  14. Rupert Brooke: A Reappraisal and Selection from His Writings (1971)
  15. The Poems of Rupert Brooke (1987)
  16. If I Should Die (1996)
  17. The Irregular Verses of Rupert Brooke (1997)
  18. [with Wilfred Owen] Selected Poems. Ed. Jon Stallworthy (2003)

    19. Prose:

  19. Puritanism in the Early English Drama (1910)
  20. The Authorship of the Latter Apius and Virginia (1913)
  21. John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama (1915)
  22. Democracy and the Arts (1946)
  23. The Prose of Rupert Brooke (1956)

    24. Plays:

  24. Lithuania: A Drama in One Act (1915)
  25. Two Plays (1999)

    26. Letters:

  26. Letters from America (1916)
  27. The Letters of Rupert Brooke (1968)
    • The Letters of Rupert Brooke. Ed. Geoffrey Keynes. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968.
  28. Letters from Rupert Brooke to His Publisher, 1911-1914 (1975)
  29. Rupert Brooke in Canada. Ed. Sandra Martin & Roger Hall (1978)
  30. Song of Love: The Letters of Rupert Brooke and Noel Olivier (1991)
  31. Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914 (1998)

    32. Secondary:

  32. Hassall, Christopher. Rupert Brooke: A Biography. 1964. Faber Paper Covered Editions. London: Faber, 1972.


Rupert Brooke: 1914 and Other Poems (1915)



To you who'd read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I'll say (you've heard it said before)
'War's Hell! ' and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:

Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

This is definitely Robert Graves's most famous war poem. With the recent appearance of Charles Mundye's collection of his work from the period, it's easier now to evaluate him as a 'war poet'. He did his best to purge that strain from the successive editions of his collected poems, but it can now be seen that he produced a lot of very fine poems in a style quite distinct from those of his friends Sassoon and Owen.

In another sense, of course, Graves was never able to get over the terrible things he'd witnessed and done during the war. His subsequent exercises in historical - and mythic - reconstruction all drew much of their power from his need to get away from the age of machine slaughter we've all been living in ever since. He didn't succeed, of course, but it would be rash to see the attempt as anything but a valid and worthwhile one.

    Poetry:

  1. Over the Brazier. 1916. Poetry Reprint Series, 1. London: St. James Press / New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1975.
  2. Poems: Abridged for Dolls and Princes. 1922. London: Cassell & Company Ltd., 1971.
  3. Collected Poems 1975. London: Cassell, 1975.
  4. Complete Poems, Volume 1. Ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward. Manchester & Paris: Carcanet & Alyscamp Press, 1995.
  5. Complete Poems, Volume 2. Ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1997.
  6. Complete Poems, Volume 3. Ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1999.
  7. The Complete Poems in One Volume. Ed. Beryl Graves & Dunstan Ward. 2000. Penguin Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2003.
  8. War Poems. Ed. Charles Mundye. Seren. Bridgend, Wales: Poetry Wales Press Ltd., 2016.

    9. Prose:

  9. Lawrence and the Arabs. Illustrations ed. Eric Kennington. Maps by Herry Perry. London: Jonathan Cape Ltd., 1927.
  10. Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography (1929)
    • Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography. 1929. London: Jonathan Cape, 1929.
    • Goodbye to All That: New edition, revised, with a prologue and epilogue. 1929. London: Cassell & Company Ltd, 1957.
    • Good-bye to All That. 1929. Rev. ed. 1957. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973.
    • Good-bye to All That: An Autobiography. 1929. Ed. Richard Perceval Graves. Providence, RI & Oxford, UK: Berghahn Books, 1995.

    11. Edited:

  11. Richards, Frank. Old Soldiers Never Die. 1933. Uckfield, East Sussex: The Naval & Military Press, Ltd., n.d. [c.2009].
  12. Richards, Frank. Old Soldier Sahib. Introduction by Robert Graves. 1936. Uckfield, East Sussex: The Naval & Military Press, Ltd., n.d. [c.2009].

    13. Letters:

  13. In Broken Images: Selected Letters 1914-1946. Ed. Paul O'Prey. London: Hutchinson, 1982.
  14. Between Moon and Moon: Selected Letters 1946-1972. Ed. Paul O'Prey. London: Hutchinson, 1984.

    15. Secondary:

  15. Seymour-Smith, Martin. Robert Graves: His Life and Work. 1982. Abacus. London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1983.
  16. Graves, Richard Perceval. Robert Graves: The Assault Heroic, 1895-1926. London: George Weidenfeld and Nicolson Limited, 1986.
  17. Graves, Richard Perceval. Robert Graves: The Years with Laura, 1926-1940. Viking. New York: Penguin Books USA Inc., 1990.
  18. Graves, Richard Perceval. Robert Graves and the White Goddess, 1940-1985. 1995. Phoenix Giant. London: Orion Books Ltd., 1998.
  19. Seymour, Miranda. Robert Graves: Life on the Edge. 1995. Doubleday. London: Transworld Publishers Ltd., 1996.
  20. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Robert Graves: From Great War Poet to Good-bye to All That (1895-1929) (2018)


Robert Graves: War Poems (2016)



One would remember still
Meadows and low hill
Laventie was, as to the line and elm row
Growing through green strength wounded, as home elms grow.
Shimmer of summer there and blue autumn mists
Seen from trench-ditch winding in mazy twists.
The Australian gunners in close flowery hiding
Cunning found out at last, and smashed in the unspeakable lists.
And the guns in the smashed wood thumping and grinding.

The letters written there, and received there,
Books, cakes, cigarettes in a parish of famine,
And leaks in rainy times with general all-damning.
The crater, and carrying of gas cylinders on two sticks
(Pain past comparison and far past right agony gone)
Strained hopelessly of heart and frame at first fix.

Café-au-lait in dug-outs on Tommies' cookers,
Cursed minniewerfs, thirst in eighteen-hour summer.
The Australian miners clayed, and the being afraid
Before strafes, sultry August dusk time than Death dumber —
And the cooler hush after the strafe, and the long night wait —
The relief of first dawn, the crawling out to look at it,
Wonder divine of Dawn, man hesitating before Heaven's gate.
(Though not on Coopers where music fire took at it,
Though not as at Framilode beauty where body did shake at it)
Yet the dawn with aeroplanes crawling high at Heaven's gate
Lovely aerial beetles of wonderful scintillate
Strangest interest, and puffs of soft purest white —
Soaking light, dispersing colouring for fancy's delight.

Of Maconachie, Paxton, Tickler, and Gloucester's Stephens;
Fray Bentos, Spiller and Baker, odds and evens
Of trench food, but the everlasting clean craving
For bread, the pure thing, blessed beyond saving.
Canteen disappointments, and the keen boy braving
Bullets or such for grouse roused surprisingly through (Halfway) Stand-to.
And the shell nearly blunted my razor at shaving;
Tilleloy, Pauquissart, Neuve Chapelle, and mud like glue.

But Laventie, most of all, I think is to soldiers
The Town itself with plane trees, and small-spa air;
And vin, rouge-blanc, chocolat, citron, grenadine:
One might buy in small delectable cafés there.
The broken church, and vegetable fields bare;
Neat French market town look so clean,
And the clarity, amiability of North French air.

Like water flowing beneath the dark plough and high Heaven,
Music's delight to please the poet pack-marching there.

Gurney's poems have a special flavour of their own which comes from tiny felicities of phrasing and their gradual revelation of his natural sweetness of disposition. This poem in particular, drafted in the early 1920s, illustrates the point perfectly. 'The clarity, amiability of North French air' is a wonderfully precise evocation, and yet there's a slight strangeness about it which makes it arresting and memorable. His poems unfold more the more they are reread.

He never got over the war which affected him so much. He died in an asylum in 1937, still writing war poems, still believing that the conflict was going on. He's probably the closest analogue to John Clare in twentieth century English poetry - and he wrote on a comparable scale. Only now have his many, many poems begun to be collected and published systematically.

    Poetry:

  1. Severn and Somme (1917)
  2. War's Embers (1919)
  3. Gloucester Play (1926)
  4. The Tewkesbury Trial (1926)
  5. Poems. Ed. Edmund Blunden (1954)
  6. Collected Poems. Ed. P. J. Kavanagh (1982)
    • Collected Poems. Ed. P. J. Kavanagh. 1982. Manchester: Carcanet, 2004.
  7. Best Poems & The Book of Five Makings. Ed. R. K. R. Thornton (1995)
  8. Severn and Somme & War's Embers. Ed. R. K. R. Thornton (1997)
  9. 80 Poems or So. Ed. George Walter & R. K. R. Thornton (1997)
  10. Rewards of Wonder: Poems of London, Cotswold and France. Ed. George Walter (2000)
  11. The Complete Poetical Works. Ed. Philip Lancaster & Tim Kendall. 5 vols. Oxford English Texts (2020- )
    1. March 1907-December 1918 (2020)

    12. Letters:

  12. Stars in a Dark Night: The Letters from Ivor Gurney to the Chapman Family. Ed. Anthony Boden (2004)

    13. Secondary:

  13. Hurd, Michael. The Ordeal of Ivor Gurney (1978)
  14. Blevins, Pamela. Ivor Gurney and Marion Scott: Song of Pain and Beauty (2008)
  15. Kennedy, Kate. Dweller in Shadows: A Life of Ivor Gurney (2021)


Ivor Gurney: Ludlow and Teme: Song-Cycle (1923)



•

David Jones

David Jones
(1895-1974)

It’s difficult with the weight of the rifle.
Leave it – under the oak.
Leave it for a salvage-bloke
let it lie bruised for a monument
dispense the authenticated fragments to the faithful.
It’s the thunder-besom for us
it’s the bright bough borne
it’s the tensioned yew for a Genoese jammed arbalest and a scarlet square for a mounted mareschal, it’s that county-mob back to back. Majuba mountain and Mons Cherubim and spreaded mats for Sydney Street East, and come to Bisley for a Silver Dish. It’s R.S.M. O’Grady says, it’s the soldier’s best friend if you care for the working parts and let us be ‘av- ing those springs released smartly in Company billets on wet forenoons and clickerty-click and one up the spout and you men must really cultivate the habit of treating this weapon with the very greatest care and there should be a healthy rivalry among you – it should be a matter of very proper pride and
Marry it man! Marry it!
Cherish her, she’s your very own.
Coax it man coax it – it’s delicately and ingeniously made – it’s an instrument of precision – it costs us tax-payers, money – I want you men to remember that.
Fondle it like a granny – talk to it – consider it as you would a friend – and when you ground these arms she’s not a rooky’s gas-pipe for greenhorns to tarnish.
You’ve known her hot and cold.
You would choose her from among many.
You know her by her bias, and by her exact error at 300, and by the deep scar at the small, by the fair flaw in the grain, above the lower sling-swivel –
but leave it under the oak.

There's no doubt about it, David Jones is a touchstone. His fragmentary, modernist approach to constructing long poems laced with Welsh mythology and Latin inscriptions is a step too far for many readers. When Robert Graves first read In Parenthesis, he feared that the immense accumulation of minute detail and obscure allusions would only make sense to those who, like himself, were there and could understand. The two belonged to the same regiment, The Royal Welch Fusiliers, Graves as an office, Jones as a private.

However, Kenneth Clark hailed him as the best living British painter, while both T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden put his poetry among the best written in their century, so he certainly managed to communicate to some of his contemporaries. He's well worth the effort, imho.

    Poetry:

  1. In Parenthesis: seinnyessit e gledyf ym penn mameu (1937)
    • In Parenthesis: seinnyessit e gledyf ym penn mameu. 1937. London: Faber, 1963.
  2. The Anathémata: fragments of an attempted writing (1952)
    • The Anathémata: fragments of an attempted writing. 1952. London: Faber, 1979.
  3. The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (1974)
    • The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments. 1974. London: Faber, 1975.
  4. Introducing David Jones: A Selection of His Writings. Ed. John Matthias (1980)
    • Introducing David Jones: A Selection of His Writings. Ed. John Matthias. Preface by Stephen Spender. London: Faber, 1980.
  5. The Roman Quarry and Other Sequences. Ed. Harman Grisewood and René Hague (1981)
  6. Wedding Poems. Ed. Thomas Dilworth (2002)
  7. The Grail Mass. Ed. Thomas Goldpaugh & Jamie Callison (2018)

    8. Prose:

  8. Epoch and Artist (1959)
    • Epoch and Artist: Selected Writings. Ed. Harman Grisewood. 1959. London: Faber, 1973.
  9. The Dying Gaul (1978)
    • The Dying Gaul and Other Writings. Ed. Harman Grisewood. 1978. London: Faber, 2017.
  10. David Jones on Religion, Politics, and Culture: Unpublished Prose (Bloomsbury, 2018).

    11. Letters:

  11. Dai Greatcoat: A Self-portrait of David Jones in his Letters. Ed. René Hague (1980)
    • Hague, René, ed. Dai Greatcoat: A Self-portrait of David Jones in his Letters. Ed. René Hague. London: Faber, 1980.

    12. Secondary:

  12. Blissett, William. The Long Conversation: A Memoir of David Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.


David Jones: In Parenthesis (1937)



I heard the Poor Old Woman say:
"At break of day the fowler came,
And took my blackbirds from their songs
Who loved me well thro' shame and blame

No more from lovely distances
Their songs shall bless me mile by mile,
Nor to white Ashbourne call me down
To wear my crown another while.

With bended flowers the angels mark
For the skylark the place they lie,
From there its little family
Shall dip their wings first in the sky.

And when the first suprise of flight
Sweet songs excite, from the far dawn
Shall there come blackbirds loud with love,
Sweet echoes of the singers gone.

But in the lovely hush of eve
Weeping I grieve the silent bills"
I heard the Poor Old Woman say
In Derry of the little hills.

Francis Ledwidge was a protégé of Lord Dunsany, which helped him to get into print in the first place, but had a rather deleterious influence on his reputation subsequently. It wasn't really till Seamus Heaney and other poets of his generation started to depict him as an important and valid Irish voice in his own right that he really came into his own:
Francis Ledwidge, you courted at the seaside
Beyond Drogheda one Sunday afternoon.
Literary, sweet-talking, countrified,
You pedalled out the leafy road from Slane.

...
I think of you in your Tommy’s uniform,
A haunted Catholic face, pallid and brave,
Ghosting the trenches with a bloom of hawthorn
Or silence cored from a Boyne passage-grave.

...
‘To be called a British soldier while my country
Has no place among nations …’ You were rent
By shrapnel six weeks later. ‘I am sorry
That party politics should divide our tents.’

- Seamus Heaney, from 'In Memoriam Francis Ledwidge' (1980)
    Poetry:

  1. Songs of the Fields (1915)
  2. Songs of Peace (1917)
  3. Last Songs (1918)
  4. The Complete Poems of Francis Ledwidge. Introduction by Lord Dunsany (1919)
    • The Complete Poems. Introduction by Lord Dunsany. 1919. London: Herbert Jenkins Limited, 1955.
  5. The Complete Poems of Francis Ledwidge. Ed. Alice Curtayne (1974)
  6. Selected Poems of Francis Ledwidge. Ed. Dermot Bolger [aka 'The Ledwidge Treasury'. Introduction by Seamus Heaney, 2007] (1992)
  7. The Poems Complete. Ed. Liam O'Meara (1997)
  8. The Best of Francis Ledwidge. Ed. Liam O'Meara. Introduction by Ulick O'Connor (2004)
  9. The Minstrel Boy: Selected Poems. Ed. Hubert Dunn (2006)
  10. The Dead Men's Dreams: Francis Ledwidge and the Easter Rising. Ed. Liam O'Meara (2016)
  11. Poems. Ed. Peter Fallon (2022)

    12. Prose:

  12. Legends of the Boyne and Selected Prose. Ed. Liam O'Meara (2006)
  13. Legends and Stories of the Boyne Side (2017)


Francis Ledwidge: Poems (2022)



But a moment agone,
Among men cursing in fight and toiling, blinded I fought,
But the labour passed on a sudden even as a passing thought,
And now - alone!
Ah, to be ever alone,
In flowery valleys among the mountains and silent wastes untrod,
In the dewy upland places, in the garden of God,
This would atone!
I shall not see
The brutal, crowded faces around me, that in their toil have grown
Into the faces of devils - yea, even as my own -
When I find thee,
O Country of Dreams!
Beyond the tide of the ocean, hidden and sunk away,
Out of the sound of battles, near to the end of day,
Full of dim woods and streams.

Clive Hamilton's first book of poems came out at the fag-end of the craze for war poetry. This was the only one of them which could even remotely be construed as a reference to the subject, and the book as a whole fell, accordingly, rather flat. In retrospect, its actual subject, the struggles of a single spirit (not 'spirits') in bondage was something he would treat far better in prose, later, in his 'Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism', The Pilgrim's Regress (1933).

Like so many other writers of the time - his friend Tolkien among them - he successfully avoided the subject of the war in almost all of his subsequent writing. However, just as it seems to have inspired certain aspects of the landscape of Mordor in Tolkien's writing, it's hard to ignore its influence on such scenes as the brutal hand-to-hand conflict between Ransom and the Unman in Lewis's SF novel Perelandra (1943).
    Poetry:

  1. Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics (1919)
    • Included in: C. S. Lewis. Collected Poems. Ed. Walter Hooper. 1919, 1964. London: Fount Paperbacks, 1994.
    • Included in: The Collected Poems of C. S Lewis: A Critical Edition. Ed. Don W. King. Kent, Ohio: The Kent State University Press, 2015.

    2. Prose:

  2. The Pilgrim’s Regress: An Allegorical Apology for Christianity, Reason and Romanticism. 1933. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1956.
  3. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1955.

    4. Diary & Letters:

  4. Lewis, W. H., ed. Letters of C. S. Lewis. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1966.
  5. Letters. Ed. W. H. Lewis. 1966. Rev. ed. ed. Walter Hooper. 1988. London: Collins / Fount Paperbacks, 1991.
  6. Letters to an American Lady. Ed. Clyde S. Kilby. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1967.
  7. Hooper, Walter, ed. They Stand Together: The Letters of C. S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves (1914-1963). London: Collins, 1979.
  8. All My Road Before Me: The Diary of C. S. Lewis, 1922-1927. Ed. Walter Hooper. Foreword by Owen Barfield. 1991. London: Collins / Fount Paperbacks, 1993.
  9. Collected Letters. 3 vols. Ed. Walter Hooper. 3 vols. London & New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000-2007.
    1. Family Letters, 1905-1931. London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000.
    2. Books, Broadcasts and the War, 1931-1949. Harper San Francisco. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 2004.
    3. Narnia, Cambridge and Joy, 1950-1963. Harper San Francisco. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2007.

    10. Secondary:

  10. Como, James T., ed. C. S. Lewis at the Breakfast Table and Other Reminiscences. London: Collins, 1980.
  11. Gilbert, Douglas, & Clyde S. Kilby. C. S. Lewis: Images of His World. 1973. Grand Rapids, Michigan: William B. Eerdmans, 1979.
  12. Green, Roger Lancelyn, & Walter Hooper. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. 1974. London: Collins / Fount Paperbacks, 1980.
  13. Hooper, Walter.C. S. Lewis: A Complete Guide to His Life and Works. [aka 'C. S. Lewis: A Companion and Guide', 1996]. Harper San Francisco. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1996.
  14. Wilson, A. N. C. S. Lewis: A Biography. 1990. London: Flamingo, 1991.




If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, —
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

There are two long, well-researched, substantive biographies of Owen, by two of his principal editors, Jon Stallworthy and Dominic Hibberd. There's also a massive, three-volume autobiographical memoir by his younger brother Harold Owen. His work has never really been out of print since 1920, when the first small collection of his war poems appeared.

Has too much been written about him already? He was, after all, only twenty-five when he was killed, just a few days before the Armistice. Pat Barker's Booker prize-winning novel The Ghost Road (1995) gives perhaps the most poignant portrait of all, but there are many other portrayals in films and plays.

What would have become of him had he survived the war? Some, at least, of the power of his work must stem from the reader's knowledge that he didn't live to see it in print. Not much, though. Poems such as the one I quote from above do seem to speak for themselves regardless of what we may think we know about him going in.

    Poetry:

  1. Poems. Ed. Siegfried Sassoon, with Edith Sitwell (1920)
  2. The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Ed. Edmund Blunden (1931)
    • The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Ed. with a Memoir and Notes by Edmund Blunden. 1931. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1963.
  3. The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (1963)
    • The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen. Ed. Cecil Day Lewis. 1963. Memoir by Edmund Blunden. 1931. A Chatto & Windus Paperback CWP 18. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1977.
  4. War Poems and Others. Ed. Dominic Hibberd (1973)
    • War Poems and Others. Ed. Dominic Hibberd. 1973. A Chatto & Windus Paperback CWP 46. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1975.
  5. The Complete Poems and Fragments. 2 vols. Ed. Jon Stallworthy (1983)
    • The Complete Poems and Fragments. 2 vols. Ed. Jon Stallworthy. 1983. Rev. ed. Chatto & Windus. London: Random House, 2013.
      1. The Poems
      2. The Manuscripts of the Poems and the Fragments
  6. The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Ed. Jon Stallworthy (1985)
    • The Poems of Wilfred Owen. Ed. Jon Stallworthy. 1985. London: The Hogarth Press, 1988.

    7. Letters:

  7. Collected Letters. Ed. Harold Owen & John Bell (1967)
    • Collected Letters. Ed. Harold Owen & John Bell. London: Oxford University Press, 1967.


    8. Harold Owen: Journey from Obscurity / Aftermath (1963-65 / 1970)


    Secondary:

  8. Welland, Dennis. Wilfred Owen: A Critical Study. Revised and Enlarged Edition. 1960. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd., 1978.
  9. Owen, Harold. Journey From Obscurity: Wilfred Owen, 1893-1918. Memoirs of the Owen Family. 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963-5:
    1. Childhood
    2. Youth
    3. War
  10. Owen, Harold. Aftermath. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970.
  11. Stallworthy, Jon. Wilfred Owen. 1974. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
    • Stallworthy, Jon. Wilfred Owen. 1974. Rev. ed. Pimlico. London: Random House, 2013.
  12. Hibberd, Dominic. Wilfred Owen: A New Biography. 2002. A Phoenix Paperback. London: Orion Books Ltd, 2003.


Wilfred Owen: The Complete Poems and Fragments (1983 / 2013)



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.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies.
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,
Less chanced than you for life,
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver — what heart aghast?
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.

Unlike Graves, Owen and Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg was a private soldier, not an officer, and was therefore denied the luxury of a nervous breakdown. His few, great war poems were written in the trenches, not in the comparative comfort of a hospital for mental cases.

His talent as a painter was at least as great as his ability as a poet, and he's one of the few writers who died in the war whom one can easily imagine going on to reinvent himself in the post-war world. Unfortunately it was not to be, but at least we have these few magnificent fragments.

    Poetry:

  1. Night and Day (1912)
  2. Youth (1915)
  3. Poems by Isaac Rosenberg. Ed. Laurence Binyon (1922)
  4. The Collected Poems of Isaac Rosenberg. Ed. Gordon Bottomley & Denys Harding (1949)
    • The Collected Poems of Isaac Rosenberg. Ed. Gordon Bottomley & Denys Harding. Foreword by Siegfried Sassoon. London: Chatto & Windus, 1949.

    5. Works:

  5. The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg. Ed. Ian Parsons (1979)
    • The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg: Poetry, Prose, Letters, Paintings and Drawings. Ed. Ian Parsons. Introduction by Siegfried Sassoon. London: Chatto & Windus, 1979.

    6. Secondary:

  6. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet. A New Life. Weidenfeld & Nicolson. London: The Orion Publishing Group Ltd., 2007.
  7. Rosenberg, Isaac, Jean Liddiard, Sarah MacDougall, Jean Moorcroft Wilson, & Dominic Williams. Whitechapel at War: Isaac Rosenberg and his Circle (2009)


Ian Parsons, ed.: The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg (1979)



I’d timed my death in action to the minute
(The Nation with my deathly verses in it).
The day told off – 13 – (the month July) –
The picture planned – O Threshold of the dark!
And then, the quivering songster failed to die
Because the bloody Bullet missed its mark.

Here I am; they would send me back –
Kind M.O. at Base; Sassoon’s morale grown slack;
Swallowed all his proud high thoughts and acquiesced.
O Gate of Lancaster, O Blightyland the Blessed.

No visitors allowed
Since Friends arrived in crowd –
Jabber – Gesture – Jabber – Gesture – Nerves went phut and failed
After the first afternoon when MarshMoonStreetMeiklejohn
ArdoursandenduranSitwellitis prevailed,
Caused complications and set my brain a-hop;
Sleeplessexasperuicide, O Jesu make it stop!.

This verse letter, dated 24th July 1918, caused a lot of fuss when Graves tried to include it in full in his own war memoir Goodbye to All That without first asking formal permission. The publishers were forced to excise the pages it was on, which has made copies of the first impression of Graves's book particularly valuable to collectors. It's particularly sad, in retrospect, to see in his postscript to the letter Sassoon asking his then friend: "Does this break your heart? What do I care?"

The intimacy the two shared was probably doomed from the outset, given their very different temperaments. Given how close both of them came to death, though, it seemed at the time quite likely to be the last strong emotion either of them would feel.

As I mentioned above, Sassoon's post-war life was a bit of a disappointment. He made many friendships, wrote a wonderful trilogy of autobiographical novels about the war, but he could never really escape it. As a poet he peaked in 1918, although he continued to publish new collections for many decades to come.

    Poetry:

  1. Collected Poems. London: Faber, 1947.
  2. Collected Poems 1908-1956. 1961. London: Faber, 1984.
  3. The War Poems. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1983.

    4. Prose:

  4. Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man. 1928. The Faber Library, 1. London: Faber, 1932.
  5. Memoirs of an Infantry Officer. 1930. The Faber Library, 2. London: Faber, 1932.
  6. Sherston’s Progress. 1936. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1948.
  7. The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston: Memoirs of a Fox-hunting Man / Memoirs of an Infantry Officer / Sherston’s Progress. 1928, 1930, 1936, 1937. Published by the Reprint Society Ltd. by Arrangement with Faber and Faber. London: World Books, 1940.
  8. The Old Century, and Seven More Years. London: Faber, 1938.
  9. The Weald of Youth. London: Faber, 1942.
  10. Siegfried’s Journey, 1916-1920. London: Faber, 1945.
  11. Meredith. 1948. A Grey Arrow. London: Arrow Books Ltd., 1959.
  12. Sassoon's Long Journey: An Illustrated Selection from Siegfried Sassoon's The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston. Ed. Paul Fussell. 1928, 1930, 1936, 1937. A Giniger Book Published in association with Faber & Faber. London: Faber / New York: K. S. Giniger Co. Inc., 1983.

    13. Diaries & Letters:

  13. Diaries 1915-1918. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Book Club Associates, 1983.
  14. Diaries 1920-1922. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1981.
  15. Diaries 1923-1925. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1985.
  16. Letters to Max Beerbohm: with a few answers. Ed. Rupert Hart-Davis. London: Faber, 1986.

    17. Secondary:

  17. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Siegfried Sassoon: The Making of a War Poet. A Biography 1886-1918. 1998. New York: Routledge, 1999.
  18. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Siegfried Sassoon: The Journey from the Trenches. A Biography 1918-1967. London: Gerald Duckworth and Co. Ltd., 2003.
  19. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Siegfried Sassoon: Soldier, Poet, Lover, Friend (2014)


Siegfried Sassoon: The War Poems (1983)



When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
Say only this, “They are dead.” Then add thereto,
“Yet many a better one has died before.”
Then, scanning all the o'ercrowded mass, should you
Perceive one face that you loved heretofore,
It is a spook. None wears the face you knew.
Great death has made all his for evermore.

This poem, found in Charles Sorley's kitbag after his death in the battle of Loos, has become his last word on the war - whether he wanted it to be or not. Robert Graves called him "one of the three poets of importance killed during the war" (the others were Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen). Most of us would probably add Edward Thomas to that list, but of course the latter's claim to be considered as a war poet is certainly far more equivocal.

There are certain apparent awkwardnesses in Sorley's phrasing at times which mark him clearly as a Scot - 'bigly planned' in 'To Germany', for instance, seems to me to be good educated Scots, but somewhat unconventional if you try to read it as standard English.

Given another year, or even another six months, Sorley might well have proved one of the finest of the British war poets. Even as it is, he certainly helped to pioneer the route to a post-Rupert Brooke aesthetic for other writers.

    Poetry:

  1. Marlborough and Other Poems (1916)
    • Marlborough and Other Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1916.
  2. The Poems and Selected Letters of Charles Hamilton Sorley. Ed. Hilda D. Spear (1978)
  3. The Collected Poems of Charles Hamilton Sorley. Ed. Jean Moorcroft Wilson (1985)

    4. Letters:

  4. The Letters of Charles Sorley with a chapter of biography (1919)
  5. The Collected Letters of Charles Hamilton Sorley. Ed. Jean Moorcroft Wilson (1990)

    6. Letters:

  6. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Charles Hamilton Sorley: A Biography (1985)


Jean Wilson Moorcroft, ed.: The Collected Poems of Charles Sorley (1985)



As the team’s head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed an angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.
The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker’s round hole,
The ploughman said. “When will they take it away?”
“When the war’s over.” So the talk began —
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
“Have you been out?” “No.” “And don’t want to, perhaps?”
“If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm. I shouldn’t want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more. . . . Have many gone
From here?” “Yes.” “Many lost?” “Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.”
“And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.” “Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.” Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

This seems to me one of Thomas's most profound statements on the war. In style it seems to echo some of Robert Frost's long narrative poems from North of Boston (1914), but the concision and flavour of the dialogue is all Thomas. It is certainly not a conventional 'war poem' in the mode of Sassoon or Owen. Instead it looks back to Thomas Hardy and other pastoralists in its almost desperate search for an adequate response to such horrors.

Despite the small number of poems he was able to finish before his untimely death, Thomas continues to loom large over English poetry. The precision and integrity of his writing is anything but facile, and whereas more popular contemporaries such as Walter de la Mare have now faded considerably, Thomas has become a poet who's loved, not simply admired.

    Poetry:

  1. Collected Poems. Foreword by Walter de la Mare. 1920. London & Boston: Faber, 1979.
  2. The Green Roads. Ed. Eleanor Farjeon. Illustrated by Bernard Brett. Poems for Young Readers. London: The Bodley Head Ltd., 1965.
  3. Poems and Last Poems (Arranged in Chronological Order of Composition). Ed. Edna Longley. 1917 & 1918. Collins Annotated Student Texts. London & Glasgow: Collins Publishers, 1973.
  4. The Collected Poems. Ed. R. George Thomas. 1978. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981.
  5. Selected Poems and Prose. Ed. David Wright. Penguin English Library. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981.
  6. The Annotated Collected Poems. Ed. Edna Longley. 2008. Highgreen, Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe Books Ltd., 2011.

    7. Prose:

  7. The Heart of England. 1906. Foreword and Wood-Engravings by Eric Fitch Daglish. The Open-Air Library. London & Toronto: J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., 1932.
  8. Richard Jefferies: His Life and Work. 1909. London: Hutchinson & Co., n.d.
  9. A Literary Pilgrim in England. 1917. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980.
  10. The Prose of Edward Thomas. Ed. Roland Gant. Introduction by Helen Thomas. London: The Falcon Press Limited, 1948.

    11. Secondary:

  11. Thomas, Helen, with Myfanwy Thomas. Under Storm’s Wing: As It Was, World without End &c. 1926, 1931 & 1988. Paladin Grafton Books. London: Collins Publishing Group, 1990.
  12. Farjeon, Eleanor. Edward Thomas: The Last Four Years. 1958. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.
  13. Hollis, Matthew. Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas. 2011. London: Faber, 2012.
  14. Wilson, Jean Moorcroft. Edward Thomas: from Adlestrop to Arras: A Biography (2015)


Edward Thomas: The Green Roads (1965)



•

Richard Aldington: Death of a Hero (1929)


There are a number of other writers I'd like to include: Richard Aldington, for instance, author of the searing prose classic Death of a Hero (1929). His fellow Imagist T. E. Hulme, too; not to mention Hulme's first editor, poet and art critic Herbert Read. All three were front-line soldiers, but only two of them survived the war.

In none of these cases, though, did I feel that war poetry as a genre was really a central part of their literary legacy. Hulme died in Flanders in 1917, but the other two went on to develop complex careers which didn't really primarily concern the war. Here, for what it's worth, are a few of their books from my collection:


What has life done for him?
He stands alone in the darkness
Like a sentry never relieved,
Looking over a barren space,
Awaiting the tardy finish.

- from 'Le Maudit'
This 1920 poem by Aldington seems to refer back to his war experience, perhaps more tellingly than much of his work published at the time. Douglas Bush's Mythology and the Romantic Tradition in English Poetry says of his post-war writing that he "made a career of disillusioned bitterness." Critic Kay Dick calls Death of a Hero a “very angry” and “virulent” work that demonstrates Aldington's “near paranoic hatred of his fellow man.” Despite this, Aldington's account of the horrors of trench warfare seems accurate, Dick concludes; “the mud, the rats, the gas.... It is gruesome and shocking, but it is true.”
    Poetry:

  1. Images (1910–1915) (1915)
  2. Images Old and New (1916)
  3. Images of Desire (1919)
  4. Images of War, A Book of Poems (1919)
  5. War and Love: Poems 1915–1918 (1919)
  6. [with H. D.] Hymen (1921)
  7. Medallions in Clay (1921)
  8. Exile and Other Poems (1923)
  9. A Fool i' the Forest: A Phantasmagoria (1924)
  10. The Love of Myrrhine and Konallis: and other prose poems (1926)
  11. Collected Poems (1928)
  12. Hark the Herald (1928)
  13. The Eaten Heart (1929)
  14. A Dream in the Luxembourg: A Poem (1930)
  15. Last Straws (Hours Press, 1930)
  16. Poems of Richard Aldington (1934)
  17. Life Quest (1935)
  18. The Crystal World (1937)
  19. Complete Poems (1948)
    • The Complete Poems. London: Allan Wingate (Publishers) Limited, 1948.
  20. In Winter: A Poem (1987)

    21. Fiction:

  21. Death of a Hero: A Novel (1929)
    • Death of a Hero: A Novel. 1929. The Phoenix Library. London: Chatto and Windus, 1932.
  22. At All Costs (1930)
  23. Roads to Glory: Stories (1930)
  24. Two Stories: "Deserter" and "The Lads of the Village" (1930)
  25. The Colonel's Daughter: A Novel (1931)
    • The Colonel's Daughter: A Novel. 1931. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1939.
  26. Stepping Heavenward: A Record (1931)
  27. Soft Answers: Five Short Novels (1932)
    • Soft Answers. 1932. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1949.
  28. All Men Are Enemies: A Romance (1933)
  29. Women Must Work: A Novel (1934)
  30. Very Heaven (1937)
  31. Seven Against Reeves: A Comedy-Farce (1938)
  32. Rejected Guest (1939)
  33. The Romance of Casanova: A Novel (1946)

    34. Drama:

  34. [with Derek Patmore] Life of a Lady: A Play in Three Acts (1936)

    35. Non-fiction:

  35. Literary Studies and Reviews (1924)
  36. Voltaire (1925)
  37. French Studies and Reviews (1926)
  38. D. H. Lawrence: An Indiscretion [aka 'D. H. Lawrence', 1930] (1927)
  39. Remy de Gourmont: A Modern Man of Letters (1928)
  40. Balls and Another Book for Suppression (1931)
  41. Artifex: Sketches and Ideas (1935)
  42. D. H. Lawrence: A complete list of his works, together with a critical appreciation (1935)
  43. W. Somerset Maugham: An Appreciation (1939)
  44. Life for Life's Sake: A Book of Reminiscences (1941)
  45. The Duke: Being an account of the life & achievements of Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington (1943)
  46. Four English Portraits, 1801–1851 (1948)
  47. Jane Austen (1948)
  48. The Strange Life of Charles Waterton, 1782–1865 (1949)
  49. Portrait of a Genius, But . . . The Life of D. H. Lawrence, 1885–1930 (1950)
  50. D. H. Lawrence: An Appreciation (1950)
  51. Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot: A Lecture (Peacocks Press, 1954)
  52. Lawrence L'imposteur: T. E. Lawrence, the legend and the man [aka 'Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry', 1955] (1954)
    • Lawrence of Arabia: A Biographical Enquiry. London: Collins, 1955.
  53. Pinorman: Personal Recollections of Norman Douglas, Pino Orioli and Charles Prentice (1954)
  54. A. E. Housman and W. B. Yeats: Two Lectures (Hurst Press, 1955)
  55. Introduction to Mistral (1956)
  56. Frauds (1957)
  57. Portrait of a Rebel: The Life and Work of Robert Louis Stevenson (1957)
  58. Switzerland (1960)
  59. Famous Cities of the World: Rome (1960)
  60. A Tourist's Rome (1961)
  61. Selected Critical Writing, 1928–1960. Ed. Alister Kershaw (1970)

    62. Translation:

  62. The Poems of Anyte of Tegea (1916)
  63. Greek Songs in the Manner of Anacreon (1919)
  64. [with Arthur Symons] The Good-Humoured Ladies: A Comedy by Carlo Goldoni (1922)
  65. Pierre Custot: Sturly (1924)
  66. The Mystery of the Nativity: Translated from the Liegeois of the XVth Century (1924)
  67. A Book of 'Characters' from Theophrastus, Joseph Hall, Sir Thomas Overbury, Nicolas Breton, John Earle, Thomas Fuller, and Other English Authors; Jean de La Bruyère, Vauvenargues, and Other French Authors (1924)
  68. Cyrano De Bergerac: Voyages to the Moon and the Sun (1927)
  69. Letters of Madame de Sévigné to Her Daughter and Her Friends (1927)
  70. Letters of Voltaire and Frederick the Great (1927)
  71. [with Norman Tealby] Candide and Other Romances by Voltaire (1928)
  72. Fifty Romance Lyric Poems (1928)
  73. Remy de Gourmont: Selections From All His Works Chosen and Translated by Richard Aldington (1928)
  74. Julien Benda: The Treason of the Intellectuals ['La Trahison des Clercs'] (1928)
  75. Euripides' Alcestis (1930)
  76. Medallions from Anyte of Tegea, Meleager of Gadara, the Anacreontea, Latin Poets of the Renaissance (1930)
  77. Tales from the Decameron (1930)
  78. Remy de Gourmont: Letters to the Amazon (1931)
  79. Gérard de Nerval: Aurelia (1932)
  80. A Wreath for San Gemignano: with illustrations by Netta Aldington and sonnets of Folgóre da San Gimignano titled The Garland of Months and translated by Richard Aldington (1945)
  81. Choderlos De Laclos: Dangerous Liaisons. In Great French Romances, ed. Richard Aldington (1946)
  82. Decameron of Giovanni Boccaccio. 2 vols (1949)
  83. [with Delano Ames] Larousse Encyclopedia of Mythology (1960)

    84. Edited:

  84. [with Brigit Patmore] The Memoirs of Marmontel (1930)
  85. [with Giuseppe Orioli] Last Poems of D.H. Lawrence (1933)
  86. The Spirit of Place: A D. H. Lawrence Prose Anthology (1935)
  87. Poetry of the English-Speaking World (1941)
  88. Oscar Wilde: Selected Works (1946)
  89. Selected Works of Walter Pater (1948)
  90. [with Alister Kershaw] A Bibliography of the Works of Richard Aldington from 1915 to 1948 (1950)
  91. Selected Letters of D.H. Lawrence (1950)
  92. The Indispensable Oscar Wilde (1950)
  93. The Religion of Beauty: Selections from the Aesthetes (1950)
  94. The Viking Book of Poetry of the English-Speaking World, Volume II (1958)

    95. Letters:

  95. A Passionate Prodigality: Letters to Alan Bird from Richard Aldington, 1949–1962. Ed. Miriam J. Benkovitz (1975)
  96. Literary Lifelines: The Richard Aldington and Lawrence Durrell Correspondence (1981)
    • Literary Lifelines: The Richard Aldington–Lawrence Durrell Correspondence. Ed. Ian S. MacNiven & Harry T. Moore. London: Faber, 1981.


Richard Aldington: Images of War (1919)



Over the flat slopes of St Eloi
A wide wall of sand bags.
Night,
In the silence desultory men
Pottering over small fires, cleaning their mess-tins:
To and fro, from the lines,
Men walk as on Piccadilly,
Making paths in the dark,
Through scattered dead horses,
Over a dead Belgian’s belly.

The Germans have rockets. The English have no rockets.
Behind the line, cannon, hidden, lying back miles.
Beyond the line, chaos:

My mind is a corridor. The minds about me are corridors.
Nothing suggests itself. There is nothing to do but keep on.

Hulme is probably the English poet who approaches closest to the tone of Guillaume Apollinaire's matter-of-fact poems from the trenches. This particular piece was reconstructed by Ezra Pound from a conversation the two had before Hulme's untimely death during the Passchendaele campaign.
    Poetry:

  1. Ezra Pound. Ripostes of Ezra Pound: whereto are appended the complete poetical works of T.E. Hulme, with prefatory note (1915)
    • Ezra Pound. Collected Shorter Poems. 1949. Faber Paperbacks. London: Faber, 1984. 251-53.
  2. The Collected Writings of T. E. Hulme. Ed. Karen Csengeri (1996)
  3. Selected Writings of T. E. Hulme. Ed. Patrick McGuinness (1998)
    • Selected Writings. Ed. Patrick McGuinness. Fyfield Books. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 1998.

    4. Poems:

    [R = Included in: Ezra Pound. Ripostes of Ezra Pound: whereto are appended the complete poetical works of T.E. Hulme, with prefatory note (1915)
    S = Included in: Selected Writings of T. E. Hulme. Ed. Patrick McGuinness (2003)]

    1. A City Sunset [S]
    2. Autumn [R] [S]
    3. Mana Aboda [R] [S]
    4. Above the Dock [R] [S]
    5. The Embankment [R] [S]
    6. Conversion [R] [S]
    7. The Man in the Crow's Nest [S]
    8. Susan Ann and Immortality [S]
    9. The Poet [S]
    10. A Tall Woman [S]
    11. A Sudden Secret [S]
    12. In the Quiet Land [S]
    13. At Night! [S]
    14. Town Sky-line [S]
    15. In the City Square [S]
    16. Madman [S]
    17. As a Fowl [S]
    18. Far Back There [S]
    19. Musié [S]
    20. The Sunset [S]
    21. A Prayer to the Moon to Smile [S]
    22. Autumn (II) [S]
    23. Sunset (II) [S]
    24. Sunset [S]
    25. [Oh Lady - full of mystery] [S]
    26. [Now though the skirt be fallen] [S]
    27. Trenches: St Eloi [S]
    28. Fragments [S]

    Prose:

  4. Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Herbert Read (1924)
  5. Notes on Language and Style. Ed. Herbert Read [In The Criterion, Vol. 3, No. 12 (1925)] (1929)
  6. Further Speculations of T. E. Hulme. Ed. Samuel Hynes (1955)

    7. Translation:

  7. Henri Bergson: An Introduction to Metaphysics (1912)
  8. Georges Sorel: Reflections on Violence (1915)


T. E. Hulme: Selected Writings (1998)



His wild heart beats with painful sobs,
His strain'd hands clench an ice-cold rifle,
His aching jaws grip a hot parch'd tongue,
His wide eyes search unconsciously.

He cannot shriek.

Bloody saliva
Dribbles down his shapeless jacket.

I saw him stab
And stab again
A well-killed Boche.

This is the happy warrior,
This is he …

The reference here is to Wordworth's rather sententious poem on the Character of the Happy Warrior: "Who is the happy Warrior? Who is he / That every man in arms should wish to be?" Read, who won the DSO and the Military Cross in 1918 for his courage under fire, takes a rather different approach to the subject. Most radically of all, he implies that no-one who hasn't actually been in that situation ought really to venture an opinion.
    Poetry:

  1. Songs of Chaos (1915)
  2. Naked Warriors (1919)
  3. Collected Poems (1966)
    • Collected Poems. 1946. London: Faber, 1966.

    4. Fiction:

  4. The Green Child (1935)
    • The Green Child. 1935. Illustrated by Felix Kelly. London: The Grey Walls Press, 1945.
    • The Green Child. 1935. Introduction by Graham Greene. Penguin Modern Classics. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969.

    5. Non-fiction:

  5. Education Through Art (1925)
  6. In Retreat (1925)
  7. What is a Poem? (1926)
  8. Phases of English Poetry (1928)
  9. Ambush (1930)
  10. Ambush (1931)
  11. Arp. The World of Art Library (1931)
  12. The Meaning of Art (1931)
  13. Art and Alienation (1932)
  14. Form in Modern Poetry (1932)
  15. Art Now (1933)
  16. Innocent Eye: A Childhood Autobiography (1933)
  17. The Redemption of the Robot – My Encounter with Education through Art (1933)
  18. Art and Industry (1934)
  19. My Anarchism (1934)
  20. To Hell With Culture (1937)
  21. Eric Gill (1938)
  22. The Contrary Experience: Autobiographies (1938)
  23. The Tenth Muse (1941)
  24. Icon and Idea (1943)
  25. Revolution & Reason (1945)
  26. A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays (1945)
    • A Coat of Many Colours: Occasional Essays. 1945. London: George Routledge & Sons, Ltd., 1947.
  27. The Art of Sculpture (1949)
  28. Education for Peace (1950)
  29. Existentialism, Marxism and Anarchism, Chains of Freedom (1951)
  30. Art and Society (1953)
  31. The True Voice of Feeling (1953)
  32. The Paradox of Anarchism (1955)
  33. Philosophy of Anarchism (1957)
  34. Anarchy & Order: Poetry & Anarchism (1959)
  35. A Concise History of Modern Painting. The World of Art Library (1959)
  36. Collected Essays in Literary Criticism (1960)
  37. Art Now (1963)
  38. The Grass Roots of Art (1963)
  39. English Prose Style (1966)
  40. Wordsworth (1966)
  41. Naked Warriors (1967)
  42. Essays in Literary Criticism (1969)

    43. Edited:

  43. T. E. Hulme: Speculations: Essays on Humanism and the Philosophy of Art (1924)
  44. T. E. Hulme: Notes on Language and Style. Ed. Herbert Read (1929)
  45. Unit One (1935)
  46. Introduction to Pierre Stephen Robert Payne: Hubris: A Study of Pride (1940)


Herbert Read: Collected Poems (1946)



... low-voiced, the headmaster called the roll
Of those who could not answer; every name
Suffixed with honour - ‘double first’, ‘kept goal
For Cambridge’ - and a death - in Spitfires, tanks,
And ships torpedoed. At his call there came
Through the mist blond heroes in broad ranks
With rainbows struggling on their chests. Ahead
Of us, in strict step, as we idled home
Marched the formations of the towering dead.

November again, and the bugles blown
In a tropical Holy Trinity,
The heroes today stand further off, grown
Smaller but distinct. They flash no medals, keep
No ranks: through Last Post and Reveille
Their chins loll on their chests, like birds asleep.
Only when the long, last note ascends
Upon the wings of kites, some two or three
Look up: and have the faces of my friends.

I've decided to conclude with this, one of Jon Stallworthy's most anthologised poems. It shows the profound effect that the two great wars of the twentieth century had on his generation, born too late to take part in either one. Korea and Vietnam, the wars which concerned his contemporaries, were far more equivocal affairs - equally brutal, but distant in a way that the earlier wars had not been.

It's interesting that Stallworthy's very last collection of poems, published just before his death, should have been entitled War Poet. It's hard not to see him, too, as a kind of belated victim of war, given his lifetime of empathetic scholarship devoted to the subject: a kind of attempted exorcism, perhaps?
    Poetry:

  1. The Astronomy of Love (1961)
  2. Out of Bounds (1963)
  3. Root and Branch (1969)
  4. Positives (1969)
  5. Hand in Hand (1974)
  6. The Apple Barrel: Selected Poems 1955-63 (1974)
  7. A Familiar Tree. Drawings by David Gentleman (1978)
    • A Familiar Tree. Illustrated by David Gentleman. London: Chatto & Windus Ltd. / Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
  8. The Anzac Sonata: New and Selected Poems (1986)
  9. The Guest from the Future (1995)
  10. Rounding the Horn: Collected Poems (1998)
  11. Body Language (2004)
  12. War Poet (2014)

    13. Prose:

  13. Between the Lines: Yeats's Poetry in the Making (1963)
    • Between the Lines: Yeats’s Poetry in the Making. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.
  14. Vision and Revision in Yeats's Last Poems (1969)
  15. Wilfred Owen (1974)
    • Wilfred Owen. 1974. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977.
    • Wilfred Owen. 1974. Rev. ed. Pimlico. London: Random House, 2013.
  16. Louis MacNeice (1995)
    • Louis MacNiece. 1995. London: Faber, 1996.
  17. Singing School: The Making of a Poet (1998)
  18. Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War [aka Great Poets of World War I: Poetry from the Great War] (2002)
    • Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War. 2002. London: Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2003.
  19. War and Poetry. The Laurie Lee Memorial Lectures, 6 (2005)
  20. Survivors' Songs: From Maldon to the Somme (2008)

    21. Translated:

  21. [with Jerzy Peterkiewicz & Burns Singer] Five Centuries of Polish Poetry, 1450–1970 (1970)
  22. [with Peter France] Alexander Blok. Selected Poems [aka The Twelve, and Other Poems] (1970)
    • Blok, Alexander. Selected Poems. Trans. Jon Stallworthy & Peter France. 1970. Penguin Modern European Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974.
  23. [with Peter France] Boris Pasternak. Selected Poems (1983)
    • Pasternak, Boris. Selected Poems. Trans. Jon Stallworthy & Peter France. 1983. The Penguin Poets. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984.

    24. Edited:

  24. Yeats: Last Poems. A Casebook (1968)
  25. A Book of Love Poetry (1974)
  26. Wilfred Owen. The Complete Poems and Fragments. 2 vols (1983)
    • The Complete Poems and Fragments. 2 vols. Ed. Jon Stallworthy. 1983. Rev. ed. Chatto & Windus. London: Random House, 2013.
  27. The Oxford Book of War Poetry (1984)
    • The Oxford Book of War Poetry. 1984. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
  28. The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1985)
    • The Poems of Wilfred Owen. 1985. London: The Hogarth Press, 1988.
  29. First Lines: Poems Written in Youth from Herbert to Heaney (1987)
  30. Henry Reed. Collected Poems (1991)
  31. [with Margaret Ferguson & Mary Jo Salter] The Norton Anthology of Poetry (1996)
  32. [with M. H. Abrams & Stephen Greenblatt] The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume 2C, The Twentieth Century (2000)
  33. Wilfred Owen. Selected Poems (2004)


Jon Stallworthy: War Poet (2014)


Both of Jon Stallworthy's parents were New Zealanders, though they moved to Britain in 1934, and it's there that he himself was born. It would probably be a mistake to stress the connection too much, but his 1978 book A Familiar Tree (which I own a copy of) charts a number of events in his family history - particularly the experiences of his great-great-grandfather, George Stallworthy (1809–1859) as a missionary in the Marquesas.

His great-grandfather, John Stallworthy, was M.P. for the Kaipara electorate from 1905–1911; his grandfather, Arthur Stallworthy, M.P. for the Eden electorate from 1928–1935. His father, Sir John Arthur Stallworthy (1906–1993) was a New Zealand-born and educated surgeon who was Professor of Obstetrics and Gynaecology at the University of Oxford from 1967 to 1973. They were, by any standards, a distinguished family.

It's hard to think of very many New Zealand war poets. In the Second World War, yes: Rowley Habib and Dan Davin both spring to mind. It's interesting, in the Stallworthy poem above, that it's in a distant, "tropical" Holy Trinity , on Remembrance Day, that some two or three heroes "Look up: and have the faces of my friends." That double-focus, being here and not-here at the same time, seems to be an important theme for Stallworthy. Perhaps that's another reason why he became so obsessed with a war he didn't fight in and was, in fact, far too young to witness.


  1. Barker, Pat. The Regeneration Trilogy: Regeneration; The Eye in the Door; The Ghost Road. 1991, 1993, 1995. London: Viking, 1996.
  2. Bergonzi, Bernard. Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War. London: Constable and Company Ltd., 1965.
  3. Cross, Tim, ed. The Lost Voices of World War I: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets & Playwrights. 1988. London: Bloomsbury, 1989.
  4. Dunn, Captain J. C. The War the Infantry Knew, 1914-1919: A Chronicle of Service in France and Belgium with the Second Battalion, His Majesty's Twenty-Third Foot, The Royal Welch Fusiliers: founded on personal records, recollections and reflections, assembled, edited and partially written by One of their Medical Officers. 1938. An Abacus Book. London: Little, Brown and Company (UK), 1998.
  5. Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. 1975. Oxford Paperbacks, 385. London: Oxford University Press, 1977.
  6. Fussell, Paul, ed. The Bloody Game: An Anthology of Modern War. A Scribners Book. London: Macdonald & Co (Publishers) Ltd., 1991.
  7. Hayward, James. Myths and Legends of the First World War. 2002. Stroud, Gloucestershire: The History Press, 2010.
  8. Hynes, Samuel. A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture. 1990. London: Pimlico, 1992.
  9. Hynes, Samuel. The Soldier's Tale: Bearing Witness to Modern War. 1997. Pimlico. London: Random House, 1998.
  10. Kendall, Tim, ed. Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology. Oxford World's Classics (2014)
  11. Macdonald, Lyn. 1914-1918: Voices and Images of the Great War. 1988. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991.
  12. Nichols, Robert, ed. Anthology of War Poetry 1914-1918. London: Nicholson & Watson, 1943.
  13. Ricketts, Harry. Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War. 2010. Pimlico 860. London: Random House, 2012.
  14. Silkin, Jon. Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War. Oxford Paperbacks 395. 1972. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
  15. Silkin, Jon, ed. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. The Penguin Poets. London: Penguin, 1979.
  16. Stallworthy, Jon, ed. The Oxford Book of War Poetry. 1984. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003.
  17. Stallworthy, Jon. Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War. 2002. London: Constable & Robinson Ltd., 2003.
  18. Waters, Fiona. A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Illustrated Poetry of the First World War. 2007. Croxley Green, Hertfordshire: Atlantic Publishing, 2007.
  19. Winter, Denis. Death’s Men: Soldiers of the Great War. 1978. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985.


Fiona Waters: A Corner of a Foreign Field (2007)



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