Not Without Glory

The Poets of the Second World War

Vernon Scannell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN:
  9781138977297
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136223006
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

First published in 1976. Poets from Homer and Virgil to Tennyson and Hardy have written much about armed conflict on land and sea but it was not until the end of the First World War that the term War Poetry was used to describe not merely that verse which took war as its subject but a kind of poetry which had not been written before, a literature which did not celebrate the martial virtues but one which was created by those who had endured battle and described in exact and often brutal terms just what it was like to be a fighting man in the first Great War of the twentieth century. This is a collection of essays on the following poets: Keith Douglas; Alun Lewis; Sidney Keyes; Roy Fuller; Alan Ross and Charles Causley; Henry Reed and others and American Poets of the Second World War.

American Poets of the Second World War

On December 4, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbour and struck simultaneous blows on the Philippines and Malaya and, on the following day, the United States declared war on the aggressors. Three days later Germany and Italy joined Japan in war against the United States and the Americans were plunged into the maelstrom in which for almost two years the British and Commonwealth forces had been struggling, virtually alone, against the Axis Forces. The American poets who either volunteered for, or were drafted into one or other of the armed services found themselves, as writers, in a quite different situation from that which their British counterparts had known in 1939, for, in the literature of the United States there was no substantial tradition of poetry from the trenches, nor had the British poets of the 1914-1918 war exercised any significant influence on American writing between the wars.

The United States forces in the First World War did not effectively enter the arena until well into 1918, six months before the armistice and, although a handful of poets, among them E. E. Cummings and John Peale Bishop, did write a few poems directly inspired by their experiences on active service, these works were exiguous and not essentially different from the other writings of the authors concerned. In other words there was not a genre of 'war poetry', nothing to compare with the work of Sassoon, Sorley, Owen, Blunden and Rosenberg which, by 193 9, had become part of the literary consciousness of all young British poets, presenting a starting-point from which to continue and develop or against which to react and seek new modes of expression appropriate to the altered subjective and objective conditions of the second Great War. Some of the most promising of the young American poets writing at the time of Pearl Harbour who were yet to reach creative maturity-that is to say poets of a suitable age for military service such as Randall Jarrell, Karl Shapiro, Howard Nemerov and Richard Wilbur­ were influenced strongly by the New Criticism's conservatism with its emphasis on formal orthodoxy, good manners, elegance and wit, and they aimed at producing a poetry that was primarily metaphysical and aesthetic rather than concerned with exploring an historical reality for the purpose of discovering psychological or moral truths. They had not suffered, as their British coevals had, the vicarious experience of four years of monstrous suffering and waste in the trenches of Flanders-or, to put it another way, the First World War had not become for them a powerful tragic myth but was, rather, a national triumph, one episode in a saga of success-nor had they ever known enemy attacks on their own cities, as had Britain in both wars, with the Zeppelin raids on London in the First and, of course, the savage holocausts of the Blitz in the Second. It is noticeable that some of the best American poetry of the Second World War was written after the poets had returned to civilian life. Howard Nemerov, Louis Simpson and Anthony Hecht all wrote good poems whose roots lay in their experience of war, but these were retrospective works and it seems that the nature of the poets' training and talents, the entire approach to their craft, required a distancing from events before they were able to transmute the raw material provided by their wartime lives into the permanence of art.

There were a few exceptions to these generalizations, notably Randall Jarrell and Karl Shapiro, both of whom were published and highly regarded during or immediately after the war, but there is one American author who, to my mind, wrote some of the most extraordinary war poetry to come from either side of the Atlantic in the Second World War and this poet has, even now, gained little more than a coterie reputation in the United States and is almost unknown in Britain. I refer to Lincoln Kirstein who, before the war, as a Harvard undergraduate, founded and edited the remarkable literary magazine, Hound & Horn and, after serving as a private soldier in various theatres of war, returned to peacetime civilian life to become famous as an impresario and General Director of the New Yark City Ballet. His collection of war poems, Rhymes and More Rhymes of a P.F.C, could lay serious claim to being the most original volume to be inspired by the Second World War.

Rhymesof a P.F.C. is a substantial book, containing eighty five poems which are divided into five main sections- Stateside, U.K., France, Germafy, andPeace, with an opening trio of poems under the general heading, World War I, and a Postscript of four pieces. The originality of Kirstein's collection does not reside in formal experimentation in the usual sense of the term; on the contrary, every poem in the book is written to a strict pattern of orthodox metre and rhyme, collectively suggesting a variety of mainly British models, a most unlikely group which would include Thomas Hardy, W. S. Gilbert, Rudyard Kipling, A. E. Housman, John Betjeman, and-unless I am much mistaken­ Gerard Manley Hopkins; these curiously unfashionable and­ one would have thought-unserviceable influences are drawn together to weave a style which, despite the echoes, is strangely and completely his own, and-paradoxically in view of the Englishness of his exemplars-speaks with an unequivocally American voice.

An inattentive reader might be deceived by the superficial conventionality of the forms employed, the regularity of metrical patterns, the invariable use of rhyme, the lightness of touch, the wit and the frequent use of phonetic spelling, into regarding Kirstein's work as mere light verse. It is not light verse, but poetry of some depth and feeling which explores aspects of war and the military life at various levels which were of perennial interest to those who were involved in the situation, aspects, however, which are rarely, if ever, dealt with by other war poets though they will be more familiar to readers of the best prose fiction of the Second World War. He writes of homosexual relationships in service life, both satirically and more tenderly; he is much concerned with the injustices and absurdities of the hierarchical caste system on which military discipline and good order is founded, with racial conflict between black and white serving in the same army against a common enemy, the importance of the role played by whores in a soldier's life, with the black market and, perhaps most percep­ tively, with physical fear and its sexual connotations and the tragi-comic predicament of the sensitive, fastidious, timid­ perhaps effeminate-man in the brutal, dangerous and deaden­ ing environment of military life.

Louis Simpson, whose retrospective war poems are among the best by American ex-service writers, has written about his own work dealing with war:³²

What, in these poems, was I trying to do that had not already been done? I did not wish to protest against war. Any true description of modern warfare is a protest, but many have written against war with satire or indignation, and it still goes on. My object was to remember. I wished to show the war exactly, as though I were painting a landscape or a face. I wanted people to find in my poems the truth of what it had been like to be an American infantry soldier. Now I see that I was writing a memorial of those years, for the me I had known, who were silent. I was trying to write poems that I would not be ashamed to have them read-poems that would be, in their laconic and simple manner, tolerable to men who had seen a good deal of combat and had no illu­ sions.

But Simpson's poems of war, excellent though they are, direct, honest and carefully made, would not, I feel, command the interest and affections of an ordinary non-literary-perhaps scarcely literate-soldier, because their quality-and this is not to belittle them in any way-owes as much to a sophisticated literary tradition as to the experiences "o/ith which they deal, a tradition which is essentially aristocratic and metaphysical. 'Laconic and simple' these poems may be to the educated, practised reader of modern verse, but I doubt if many working­ class enlisted men would find them so. Kirstein's achievement is to produce poems many of which, if read to a heterogenous audience of soldiers, from buck private to General, would, I am sure, provide instant and deep pleasure to everyone present; he has created a genuinely popular art but his work not only stands up to examination on the page, it discloses subtleties which demand the most serious critical appraisal.

The first poem in Rhymes of a P.F.C. does not deal directly with war but it does sound a thematic chord which is to be repeated with variations through the book: this theme is a deep concern with the contradictions and paradoxes that abound in manifestations of human fear and courage and with the predica­ ment of the timid man compelled to adopt a martial role and face appalling demands which he is ill-equipped to meet. The poem, Fall In, whose title, with prophetic irony, anticipates the military command, is like all the work collected in Rhymes of a P.F.C. built upon a firm narrative base: a young boy, the narrator, is taken by his uncle to'... the big boys' club, /Where they swam nude, drank beer, shared secrecy.' The child, who evi...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: Setting the Scene
• Keith Douglas
• Alun Lewis
• Sidney Keyes
• Roy Fuller
• Alan Ross and Charles Causley
• Henry Reed and others
• American Poets of the Second World War
• Notes
• Select Bibliography
• Index