Belonging and Estrangement in the Poetry of Philip Larkin, R. S. Thomas and Charles Causley by Waterman Rory

Author:Waterman, Rory.
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing Ltd.
Published: 2014-03-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Between the Wars

The historian Eric Hobsbawm uses the term ‘Age of Extremes’1 to describe the period between the start of the First World War and the end of the Cold War: an age largely defined in and beyond Europe by swift technological advancements and by ultimately failed or overturned political ‘extremes’. This period roughly correlates with the lives of the three poets discussed in this study. Having grown up in the aftermath of the ‘war to end all wars’, Larkin, Thomas and Causley were all young adults when their country was fighting Hitler in ‘the people’s war’; the Second World War was an integral part of the young adulthood of all three, just as the Great War had been to their parents. Their responses to war against Nazism, however, and to the subsequent Cold War and associated ‘hot’ conflicts and military manoeuvrings, differed widely.

Popular disgust at the carnage of the Great War was not just predicated on the futility and senselessness of the conflict, or the technological advancements that had mechanized war – though both of these factors were significant – but was also the result of technological advancements that had enabled images of horror to become widespread on the Home Front: the War was brutal and senseless, and suddenly something of this could be seen in facsimile at home. But the same technology also put an abundance of photographs of soldiers into the living rooms of Britain. Causley and Larkin both reacted to the social and personal implications of the First World War through the medium of photographs, tapping into this phenomenon of life on the Home Front in the 1910s. The parents of these poets had grown up in the first golden age of photography. The advent of the dry-plate in the early 1870s meant that travelling photographers needed no more equipment than a camera, a tripod, and a supply of dry-plate negatives. In 1884, George Eastman developed photographic roll film, doing away with any need for photographers to carry plates or chemicals, and in 1888 marketed the Kodak Eastman camera with the slogan: ‘You press the button, we do the rest.’ A mass market was opening up. In 1901, the Kodak Brownie camera was made available for $1 in the United States, and soon spread to Britain and elsewhere.2 Photography was suddenly inexpensive, no longer the preserve of the specialist, and this meant that during the 1914–18 war, homes across Britain were filled with photographs of families altered, and of young men now facing death – or who had recently died – in foreign fields.

Looking at his family portraits from that period encourages Causley to contemplate the fragility of life by contrasting his present, and what he knows, with another ‘present’, that of the photographic subjects, and what they knew. As the adult poet looks into the faces of family members captured in celluloid, he is also looking back across a period spanning both world wars, through the most brutal period in modern Western history, at people who were unaware of what might be in store for them.

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