Handbook of British Literature and Culture of the First World War

Ralf Schneider, Jane Potter, Ralf Schneider, Jane Potter

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9783110422559
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: Literature

The First World War has given rise to a multifaceted cultural production like no other historical event. This handbook surveys British literature and film about the war from 1914 until today. The continuing interest in World War I highlights the interdependence of war experience, the imaginative re-creation of that experience in writing, and individual as well as collective memory. In the first part of the handbook, the major genres of war writing and film are addressed, including of course poetry and the novel, but also the short story; furthermore, it is shown how our conception of the Great War is broadened when looked at from the perspective of gender studies and post-colonial criticism. The chapters in the second part present close readings of important contributions to the literary and filmic representation of World War I in Great Britain. All in all, the contributions demonstrate how the opposing forces of focusing and canon-formation on the one hand, and broadening and revision of the canon on the other, have characterised British literature and culture of the First World War.

Part I: Systematic Questions: Genres and Perspectives

1 The First World War in Poetry

Martin Löschnigg

Abstract

TheLöschnigg, Martin present chapter deals with the significance of poetry for the cultural memory of the First World War in Britain. In a first section, it analyses ways in which poetry has shaped images of the war and of the ‘war poet’. It then goes on to discuss aspects of poetry as a medium for rendering the war experience, addressing questions of canon formation and the role of poetic traditions, of the referential dimension of war poetrySinclair, May | war poetryBlunden, Edmund | war poetry and of the tension between ethics and aesthetics in the poetry of war. Another section deals with approaches to First World War poetry which have widened the scope of scholarly investigations to reach beyond canonical English war poets especially towards the inclusion of women’s poetry. The following section places the works of the major British war poets in these frameworks, aiming at a concise yet necessarily selective survey of phases of development, themes and historical contexts. The concluding section on resonances and legacies pursues some of the responses by later writers to the First World War and its poets.

Key Terms: Cultural memory, war poet, canon, women’s poetry, phases of development, legacy,

1 Poetry and the Cultural Memory of the First World War

“Not since the Siege of Troy has a conflict been so closely defined by the poetry that it inspired”, Tim Kendall writes in the introduction to his anthology of First World War poetry (2013b, xxvii). Indeed, the Great War of 1914–1918 produced a body of verse unsurpassed as to its bulk and the poetic quality of its outstanding examples by any previous or subsequent conflict. In Britain in particular, the poetry of the war has shaped its cultural memory. The war poems of Siegfried Sassoon, Robert GravesGraves, Rupert, Edmund Blunden, Wilfred Owen and Isaac RosenbergRosenberg, Isaac have entered the canon, and Owen and Rosenberg are among the most widely read English poets today (↗11 Edmund Blunden, ↗15 Robert Graves, ↗23 Wilfred Owen, ↗25 Isaac Rosenberg, ↗26 Siegfried Sassoon). In the 1960s, their works became part of the A-level syllabus in England, and since then they have been widely taught in schools and universities throughout the UK. As historian David Sheffield has argued, “a strong case can be made that it is teachers of English, not history, who have had the greatest impact on the shaping of views on the First World War through the teaching of war poetrySinclair, May | war poetryBlunden, Edmund | war poetry” (2002 [2001], 18). First World War poetry also greatly influenced poetic renderings of later wars, whose poets, according to Jane PotterPotter, Jane, “found models in the work of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and others, yet also felt constrained and overshadowed by them” (2012, 21).

The Great War poets have anchored in the British collective consciousness images which have become emblematic of the first ‘industrialized’ war in human history: soldiers huddled in labyrinthine trenches, choking on poison gas or being blown to bits by high explosives, troops ‘going over the top’ to be mowed down by machine guns, in battles over yards of mud, and corpses rotting in no man’s land. These images have influenced writing about war far beyond the Great War and its aftermath:

The Second World War killed roughly five times as many people as did the first, brought untold destruction to civilian populations, and in its final throes unleashed a horror that could – and still can – wipe out life on earth. The facts, and logic, dictate that if any images dominate poetry they should be those of Hiroshima, Dachau, and Stalingrad. Certainly these images appear frequently in modern writing, but it is far easier to find the images of the Great War ... (Stephen 1993 [1988], 289)

Poems like Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”, which refutes military glory through its drastic depiction of a poison-gas victim, have come to be regarded as exemplary renderings of the horrors of war and their traumatizing impact: “In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” (WW 198).¹ As the motif of haunting in this poem and others, like Charles HamiltonHamilton, Ian (General) SorleySorley, Charles Hamilton’s “When you see millions of the mouthless dead / Across your dreams in pale battalions go” (WW 68), indicates, they have also become emblematic of the persistence of the past, and the need to remember.

In the public imagination, the poetry of the Great War has been stereotyped as a poetry of protest after initial enthusiasm, and its diversity has been channelled into reductive patterns of ‘development’ or ‘contrast’ (from enthusiasm to disillusion, pro- vs. anti-war, traditional vs. modern). Rupert BrookeBrooke, Rupert | 1914 and Wilfred Owen have become iconic figures of early pro-war and later anti-war attitudes respectively. However, some front line poets wrote in the ‘high diction’ of Brooke throughout the war, while the example of SorleySorley, Charles Hamilton, killed in the Battle of Loos in October 1915, shows that there were critical voices from the beginning. The popular image of a shift from early enthusiasm to disillusionment, with the Battle of the Somme in 1916 marking the turning-point, thus needs to be qualified, as needs that of a pro-war/anti-war polarity. There is no consistent pacifism even in Owen and Sassoon, whose poetry sometimes reveals a subliminal fascination with the violence, and is often expressive of a pride in their sacrifice and military achievements. (In one of his letters to his mother, Owen called himself “a conscientious objector with a very seared consciousness”, letter to Susan Owen, [? 16] May 1917; Owen 1967, 461). In fact, “[t]he poetry of the Great War was generated across a continuum in which protest and patriotism, modernists and Georgians, propaganda and remembrance, humour and pathos, coexisted, if uneasily” (PotterPotter, Jane 2012, 28).

While the poetry of the First World War has often been the subject of simplifying interpretations, it has itself greatly contributed to the rise of popular myths about the war, like that of an unbridgeable divide between combatants and civilians, and to prevailing views of the war as ‘futile’ or ‘absurd’. The great loss of lives, and the “obscurity of any purpose”, which many saw in the stalemate of the trenches, engendered post-war interpretations that emphasized the ‘futility’ of the war – a war which has since then “offered the perfect paradigm for contemporary determinations to resist war in general” (Stevenson 2013, 195). Poetry has played a major role in constructing the cultural memory of the war, including its mythology. During and immediately after the war years, however, it served a range of emotional needs, foremost among them the necessity of making sense of loss and grief. First World War poetry thus crystallizes the distinction between “what the war was and what it meant” (Hynes 1990, ix), rendering imaginative versions of the war which contributed to the transformation of historical complexity into the evident of uncontested narratives.

Before the war of 1914–1918, when Britain’s wars were fought by (small) professional armies, poetry about war had been the domain of civilians. With regard to the number of poems written, this still holds true for the First World War, yet the greater impact was now clearly made by the poetry written by combatants. Mass recruitment and conscription as introduced in 1916 had created a far bigger army than ever before, of greater social diversity and with an unprecedented number of better educated men among its ranks. Poetry was read at the front line (Paul Fussell emphasises the importance of the Oxford Book of English VerseQuiller-Couch, Arthur | Oxford Book of English Verse (1900) as a source of literary knowledge shared by many soldiers, 1977 [1975], 155–160), and many of those who would render poetic accounts of the trenches had written poetry before. The First World War thus re-defined the role of the poet in war in the sense that “[b]y 1914 [...] the participation of the poet in war [...] was as important as his writing” (Featherstone 1995, 14). Due to the extraordinary amount of poetry that was now written by combatants, ‘war poetrySinclair, May | war poetryBlunden, Edmund | war poetry’ “established itself as a genre, and the soldier poet became a species” (Das 2013b, 5). According to Robert GravesGraves, Rupert, ‘war poet’ and ‘war poetry’ were “terms first used in World War I and perhaps peculiar to it” (1949, 307). The term ‘soldier poet’ appears, for instance, in Galloway KyleKyle, Galloway’s anthology Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men, published in September 1916; Rupert BrookeBrooke, Rupert | 1914, whose sonnet “The Soldier” was probably the most famous war poem between 1914 and 1918, was referred to as a “poet soldier” by Dean Inge, who recited the poem from the pulpit of St. Paul’s cathedral on Easter Sunday 1915 (Das 2013, 7, 5). In any case, the poetry written by a comparatively small group of ‘soldier poets’ has come to dominate the common understanding of First World War poetry as one which is based on the actual experience of battle, whose attitude is invariably anti-war, and whose aim was to tell the truth about the war to ignorant civilians.

During the last three decades in particular, critics and anthologists have shown how the popular identification of ‘war poetrySinclair, May | war poetryBlunden, Edmund | war poetry’ with ‘soldier poetry’ falls short of the wide range and diversity of the poetry engendered by the war. Most importantly, the equation of ‘war experience’ with actual combat led to the long-time neglect of the poetry written by civilians (with the exception of Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling), and especially by women (↗17 Thomas Hardy, ↗20 Rudyard Kipling, ↗6 Gendering the First World War). Women did not take part in the fighting, yet they had to cope with the loss of husbands, lovers, sons or brothers, and wi...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• 0 Introduction
• Part I: Systematic Questions: Genres and Perspectives
• Part II: Close Readings
• Index of Subjects
• Index of Names
• List of Contributors
• Sachregister