Guilty Knowledge, Guilty Pleasure by William Logan

Author:William Logan [Logan, William]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2014-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

World War II Poetry, Reloaded

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.

My subject is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity.

—Wilfred Owen, “Preface”

War makes strange bedfellows, as beds make strange warfellows. During the Phony War—the eight months of chest- and tub-thumping following the formal declaration on September 3, 1939—British journals and newspapers found time to ask, “Where are the war poets?”

The question proved difficult to answer. Two years later, not long after the end of the Blitz, the journal Horizon issued a manifesto, “Why Not War Writers?” The house organ of progressive culture lamented the lack of contributions from poets to the war effort, noting that “The Times and other papers asked why this war produced no poets. The poets wrote essays on why they couldn’t write poetry.” Poets on the left had shied from the subject while the Soviets and Nazis were allies, but with the German invasion of Russia in the summer of 1941 there was no longer any excuse. The manifesto, signed by Cyril Connolly, the magazine’s editor, as well as George Orwell, Stephen Spender, and Arthur Koestler, proposed an “official group of war writers”:

The Government . . . is discovering that it is making a mistake in reserving the occupation of journalism but not of creative writing. During the Spanish War writers of international reputation such as Hemingway, Malraux and Silone exerted a deeper influence than journalists. Their propaganda was deeper, more humanly appealing and more imaginative than newspaper men had space or time for.

Such appeals to authority seem peculiar now, though for Britain the danger of invasion had barely passed, and it was feared that the United States might never join the Allies. (In June 1940, an MP had asked if the government would deprive Auden and Isherwood, safe in America, of their nationality.)

Though discontent crystallized around the missing war poets, the form of the question is less interesting than why the question was asked. It could not have been posed in America, not in that way. America had entered the Great War too late for war poetry to develop—there was no history of it, yet British poets had created an example, if not a tradition. The idea that armed combatants would spend their off hours writing poetry was a novel one. Poems on a passing war, even poems by civilians, were rarely remembered when the war was over. If you except Whitman’s Civil War poems, which evaded the usual sentimental gestures, not a single decent poem emerged from the most costly war America had fought—and Whitman was not a soldier. (There have been many arguments defending the war poetry of Melville, another noncombatant, but never a convincing one.) Where were the memorable poems of the Mexican War, the War of 1812, or the American Revolution?

In Britain, however, poetry had been central to the Great War. During years of ruinous losses, the poems of soldiers paying tribute to soldiers came to embody the national spirit and commemorate the sacrifice. (On Remembrance

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