The Myth of the Blitz by Angus Calder

Author:Angus Calder
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448104048
Publisher: Random House

He sees the Blitz as a challenge to the current resources of ‘common speech’ and to the English verse tradition, now ‘sunk in the throat’ between the opposing voices of the old (capitalism) and the new (socialism). His Marxist perspective aligns him with what Paul Fussell and John Keegan would later show us about the failures of language in 1914–18, and sets him counter to Eliot’s Christian confidence in the endurance of tradition, as where he asks the questions, already quoted:

Who can observe this save as a frightened child

Or careful diarist? And who can speak

And still retain the tones of civilisation?9

The reluctance of the better young poets, Fuller excepted, to tackle overviews and large themes is a point on which all who have read through wartime magazines and anthologies seem to be agreed. Robin Skelton in his thorough anthology of Poetry of the Forties quotes approvingly another anthologist, Ronald Blythe, as remarking: ‘The great thing was not to pretend, or proffer solutions or to be histrionic. Each poet spoke as wholly and truthfully as he could from out of the one inviolable spot of an otherwise violated order, his own identity.’10 Reasons for this are not hard to find. The trench poets of the Great War – Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg – had exposed the horrors of battle definitively. A younger generation believed with them that war might be necessary, but that pre-1914 heroics in verse about it were contemptible.

Furthermore, this new kind of war – heavily mechanised, often fast-moving, scattering conscripts south into Africa, east into far parts of Asia – had an impersonal character and a vast complexity which defied representative verse statement. The ‘careful diarist’, as Fuller had shrewdly anticipated, was the most plausible model for poets, presenting their ‘components of the scene’ (a phrase from one of them which Blythe used as title for his anthology).

That poetry can have extraordinary myth-making power is demonstrated by the case of Wilfred Owen, whose effigy and imagery still domineer over conceptions (as purveyed by television) of what the Great War ‘was like’. So my detour, as it might seem, into discussion of an art form which, except through Eliot, made very little short-term or long-run impact on memory of 1940–41, is actually helping to establish a most important, though negative, point.

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