A. E. HOUSMAN, RUDYARD KIPLING, ISAAC ROSENBERG, WILFRED OWEN, SIEGFRIED SASSOON, RUPERT BROOKE
How artful and artificial Alfred Edward Housman seems, set beside Stephen Crane. For a long time it was considered a bit de trop for people with literary taste to love, or even to like, Housman’s verse. It belonged to self-pitying adolescence and after that to the mass of readers who don’t like real poetry—whose taste will encompass John Betjeman, Charles Causley and Dylan Thomas but stop short at Hardy, Auden and W. S. Graham. Housman: solitary, sour, homosexual, without a lover, without God. Today it is again possible to confess a liking for his work, though it still hardly figures on the academic syllabus. The unmade bed of Stephen Crane is more critically acceptable than the passionate, cold pillow of Housman.
Yet from the day A Shropshire Lad was published until now he has been a best-selling author. The silence of critics has not affected popular taste. The poems are taken to heart and learned by heart, despite the now mercilessly documented character of the harsh, opinionated professor, the sometimes vindictive classical scholar, the tensely repressed homosexual. The voice of the poems is of an uncannily refined classless purity. He sings—for he seldom speaks in the way of modern poets—the ageless themes of mortality, thwarted love and sacrifice.
He touches two exposed poetic nerves: the nerve that responds to popular ballads, for his poems, in strategy, theme and tone often resemble the anonymous elegiac ballads of the Borders; and the nerve that responds to hymns, though his hymnlike stanzas celebrate no god. We find in his pastoral nostalgia something more than bittersweetness, in his melodies something more than mere song. The poems are above all memorable. Phrases and stanzas come to mind at times of stress, or simply when one is out walking and a landscape or memory suddenly appropriates a stanza. Composers including George Butterworth in 1913 and Ralph Vaughan Williams in 1914 recognized excellent Lieder texts in the poems. (Benjamin Britten, surprisingly, kept his distance, perhaps warded off by Auden.)
What some modern poetry readers look for—grit, real hearts on imaginary sleeves, a deliberate roughening of diction and meter—they do not find in Housman. Formal conservatism and the repetitiveness of mood and tone leave them cold. The raw imperialism of Kipling or the authentic pastoral of Hardy say more to them than the poise of Housman. He is a poet different in kind, his affinities more in the eighteenth and early nineteenth than the twentieth century, yet his poems are not archaic, old-fashioned or conventional. He does something new, yet it has the huge authority of classical and English antecedents. He defines in practice the difference between traditional and merely conventional verse. It would be foolish to pretend that he is a major poet: he has too limited a repertoire, his achievements are in one genre. But he is undeniably a great poet, since he did what he did with genius, finding impersonal idioms to express his deepest hurt.
He was born in 1859 in Fockbury, Worcestershire. His comfortable, conservative, middle-class background was conducive to the development of an interest in literature, which matured into a passion for classical studies. He seems to have enjoyed escaping into the countryside for walks. The eastern horizon of these childhood outings was Shropshire.
He was educated at Bromsgrove, Worcester, and then at Oxford. His university career included impressive achievements and failures. He became an outstanding textual critic, so single-mindedly involved in his texts that he omitted to mug up his ancient history and philosophy and—under severe emotional strain—failed to take even a pass degree. He went down and entered a civil service job in the Patent Office. After a decade there (1882–92) his classical achievements earned him a chair of Latin at University College, London, where he worked for the next decade. From there he published his first collection of poems, A Shropshire Lad (1896). In 1911 he became professor of Latin at Cambridge, a post he held until his death in 1936. His editions of Manilius, Juvenal and Lucan are magisterial; his acerbity in critical debate and his passion for accuracy made him something of a terror to his professional colleagues.
A Shropshire Lad achieved for Housman wide and almost immediate fame as a poet. In its expressions of frustration and futility and in its measured, traditional voice, the book answered needs like those Tennyson’s In Memoriam had answered two generations earlier. It was twenty-six years before Housman published another collection, called simply Last Poems. This was followed, as “last poems” sometimes are, by More Poems, a collection issued in 1936, shortly before he died. A few poems (including some very funny parodies) have since been appended to the oeuvre, but the Collected Poems is slim for a poet who reached the age of seventy-seven. Its thinness is manifest in various ways. Though all the work was assembled by a mature man—his books appeared when he was thirty-seven, sixty-three and seventy-seven—the mood and content are stuck in a groove that seems adolescent. The poems lack formal and linguistic development and seem self-imitative, not only revisiting themes but redeveloping earlier phrases and images. If, as his biographers suggest, he came to terms, to some troubled extent, with his sexual and emotional nature, the poems touch on this resolution only obliquely. Unless, that is, we read them as encoded expressions of a secret odyssey.
Housman expressed his public attitude to poetry most fully in a lecture, “The Name and Nature of Poetry,” delivered in Cambridge in 1933. He condemned the “difficult” poetry of the Metaphysicals, in vogue at the time, and by implication discredited much of the new poetry of the century, especially the poets who had brought the Metaphysicals back into currency. Poetry, both composition and reading, was for him less an intellectual than a physical experience. It took hold of him, engaged him, at a level he could not intellectually plumb. A poem’s effect had to do with music, rhyme and emotional direction, less with teasing out meaning. His theories drew on his own practice, not on an assessment of modern poetry; they answered a deep prejudice in his audience. If they signify primarily as they relate to his verse and the classical verse he liked best, his admirers gave them wider credence. Here was an unanswerable—because instinctive and unanalyzable—case against those odd, rebarbative experiments that threatened the coherence of English poetry. The young poet-critic I. A. Richards left the lecture muttering, “Housman has put the clock back thirty years!”
And indeed his attitudes and his poems in several ways recall the purer poets of the Rhymers’ Club, though without the taint of decadence. Whatever Housman’s emotional turmoils, his poems are remote from the indulgences of the Decadents. After Oscar Wilde’s trial and punishment, whole areas of experiment and sensibility were sealed off, as if radioactive. Only a close reader (with or without knowledge about the poet’s life) will note Housman’s connection with the Decadents and take a subversive moral meaning from the poems. Housman’s perennial appeal has something to do with the accretions of biography, which “open out” the poems to unexpected readings, the very readings they may have been intended to be proof against. Just when he might have begun to fade, biographical fashions of the day broke open his privacies to prurient light.
The poems are not argumentative. They are metaphors for emotions. Because of their formal and tonal predictability, they can be parodied, their pessimism is at times forced, at times sentimental. Not infrequently the expression is convoluted and banal. His passions—for the Greek Anthology, Heine, Wordsworth, Arnold, Kipling and others—did not imbue him with the power to think in verse. Indeed he did not wish to do so. Though an atheist, he is often ambivalent in his use of religious images and themes and—like Hardy—seems frequently to acknowledge a malignant deity, calling him “whatever brute or blackguard made the world.” Unlike Hardy, he never hankers after communion or community. What thought there is in his poems engages only the surface: it edits, while he lets emotion hold the depths—often distressingly unchecked. A classical concern with surfaces yields some coy circumlocutions, as in the famous stanza:
Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score
It only leaves me fifty more.
He’s saying that one is young only once and life is brief. In another poem he has a peculiar way of saying that the lads found and picked a lot of daffodils: “And home at noonday from the hills / They bring no dearth of daffodils.” The parodies of Housman that many, including Ezra Pound, have attempted are not nearly as amusing as Housman’s inadvertent self-parodies.
For him, the pastoral is a literary world. The intensely English feeling of his poems derives less from a closeness to landscapes and rural communities than from a nostalgic deployment of place-names and a strong sense of traditional value in his chosen forms. A real Shropshire milkmaid or lad lost in one of his landscapes would recognize little but the flowers. This is part of the late nineteenth-century heritage that Housman, like Kipling, Hardy, Elizabeth Daryush and to some degree Yeats, brought into the twentieth.
Housman’s was a more modern temperament than Kipling’s, willing to let go, to wave a rueful rather than a rhetorical farewell to things. But he was less modern than Hardy, resorting to gauged plangencies, never deliberately ruffling up his meters or alloying his diction with contemporary idiom. His choice of subject matter too defines him. He elects for himself what Hardy was elected by, the pastoral. It would be better to speak of Hardy as “rural” rather than “pastoral.” For all Housman’s use of English names and his ruddy lads and lasses, his debt is to classical masters, to Theocritus, Horace, Virgil, to the condensed and aphoristic poems in the Greek Anthology.
His insistent rhymed quatrains (almost all his poems are in a single basic measure, though he wrings remarkable variations from it) have a haunting authenticity of movement. His furtive desires helped to fence him into the world where his poems exist, and also intensified his expression around an emotional core. The poems could not be forthright about his theme at the time; they take advantage of the necessary obliquity in various ways, not least in their apparent universality of application. They are not, as Christopher Isherwood declares homosexual writing generally to be, propaganda; or if they are, they are arcane. A knowledge of the poet’s life refocuses attention on the homoerotic element within the poems, but it cannot translate the poems into gay poetry in any meaningful sense, any more than a sense of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s sexual nature radically revises our response to any but two or three of his poems.
As with Hopkins, however, the poet’s sexuality contributes to the pessimism that makes the poetry poignant. Housman’s condensed language and instantly memorable rhythms are a different strategy from Hopkins’s resolute, baroque impurities. To Housman, poetry was “a morbid secretion, like the pearl in an oyster.” He would often conceive a stanza whole, sometimes an entire poem, and write it out in almost a final draft. At other times part of a poem would come easily while another part might demand from him superhuman concentration and numerous drafts and redrafts. Sometimes a phrase appears in his notebooks and is lost sight of for years, to emerge later in a poem. He usually composed when depressed or unwell. Great bouts of creativity are followed by long gestating vacancies.
All of his poems work together, thematically and formally, almost as a sequence or, more correctly, a series. The Collected Poems add up to a sort of preemptive elegy—not for things lost but, more melancholically, for things never attained. They look back on no emotional or physical fulfillment, anticipate no trumped-up theological consummation. Youth did not recognize the urgency of self-fulfillment; age muses wryly that, had youth made its choice, a different anguish would have ensued. The situation is that of classical tragedy: any choice condemns the chooser. When, in later years on holiday in Italy, he found a native friend or friends with whom he could engage in intimacy, he was locked as much by age as habit into a poetic idiom that could admit fulfillment only as a brief respite intensifying the sense of ephemerality and loss. Given the moral world he lived in, to act out a homosexual passion had destructive consequences. Wilde’s fate paralyzed men like Housman. Yet sublimation had real consequences too, blighting his life. Retrospective desire prompts some of the best poems, epitomes of “the wound and the bow” vision of art:
Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose:
But young men think it is, and we were young.
In another poem he writes, “But he that drinks in season / Shall live before he dies.” Housman missed his season: when he came to drink it was toward sunset.
We cannot conveniently label Housman’s verse: the forms are classical, the content Romantic; the forms are simple, the content at times sophisticated; the forms are derivative, the content, masked, as it sometimes must be, feels original. He is a classical poet and like Gray a classicist of accomplishment, for whom the classics are a source of imaginative life; but like Gray he has a romantic temperament. The world to which his romanticism is confined confronts him, as it does Hardy, with teeming paradoxes, inscrutable irony. He writes from personal apprehension of this, but when he says that his verse with its sad and “narrow measure spans / Tears of eternity, and sorrow / Not mine, but man’s,” he is guilty of partial deception—whether he deceives himself we cannot say. He acknowledges in other poems that his is a specific suffering; the mass of others are more or less content, if not happy, ignorant of the ironies that impale him.
The poets of this century whose distinctive mood is pessimistic seem often to be the tautest formalists: Hardy, Housman, Elizabeth Daryush, Philip Larkin and Geoffrey Hill. They are also impersonal writers, expressing negative vision without direct recourse to autobiography. The inability to find objects for authentic commitment makes them elect a self-contained, effective form of statement, larded with negatives, setting off the darkness with a deeper darkness, confronting chaos with sharply formed fragments. They bear torches like Lawrence’s gentians, which radiate darkness, not light. Form is a solid thing, a stay in a world of flux with no revealed order and no inherent structure, in which projected order is recognized as nothing more than projection.
Housman’s poems often begin in apparent optimism: day breaks, the heart identifies a new object of love. But they seldom maintain good cheer. His ballads—among the most achieved literary ballads in our literature—reveal his skill in dramatic reversal. “Farewell to barn and stack and tree” and “The Carpenter’s Son” are faultless, timeless, and each time we read them the emotional impact is deeper. There is drama, bordering on melodrama, in some of his recurrent situations: a man committing suicide, a man hanged, a soldier dying gratefully. The still nullity of the grave—“the nation that is not” he calls it more than once—is peopled by the multitude at last released from passion, and also from the social convention of marriage:
Lovers lying two and two
Ask not whom they sleep beside,
And the bridegroom all night through
Never turns him to the bride.
In the last half of the poem from which the stanza comes, five negatives appear: “not,” “nothing,” “never” and “no,” four prominent steeds in Housman’s apocalypse. Vainly he tries to escape this world by fancy. In one poem he gazes at pure reflections on water, longing for that other world, until he perceives a face looking back at him with the same discontent and longing. There is no Echo in sight.
When anguish borrows a historical perspective, Housman’s poems take on magnificent authority. The particular anguish is seen to recur down the ages; the men who have suffered it are together in the commonwealth of death. When wind frets Wenlock Edge, the poet stands where a Roman soldier stood when Uriconium was a settlement:
’Tis the old wind in the old anger,
But then it threshed another wood.
Then, ’twas before my time, the Roman
At yonder heaving hill would stare:
The blood that warms an English yeoman,
The thoughts that hurt him, they were there.
Recurrence is inevitable and harshly consoling, conferring legitimacy on a profound anxiety: “The tree of man was never quiet: / Then ’twas the Roman, now ’tis I.” He comforts himself with oblivion: “Today the Roman and his trouble / Are ashes under Uricon.”
Soldiers are the principal actors in the poems. The Shropshire Lad enlists and is wounded and killed all over the Empire, responding to each fate with much the same resignation. Soldiers inhabit the poems even when they are unseen, “drumming like a noise in dreams.” The noise is constant though the dream changes.
Nostalgia for the shire where, in sadness, “homely comforters I had” is an occasional consolation, though usually it heightens unfulfillment. “The land of lost content”: Housman has no peer this century for evoking the ambivalent contents of the past, the ambivalent bourn of the future, and a present diseased with longing for both a past that cannot be relived and a future death that, when it comes, will render him insentient, will not even be apprehended as relief.
Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?
That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.
Joseph Rudyard Kipling—nostalgic too for lost content—shares more with Housman than the year of his death, 1936. He was born in Bombay in 1865. “Rudyard” refers to Lake Rudyard, Staffordshire, where his mother and father had courted. His father was a talented teacher of sculpture at the Bombay School of Art and later curator of the museum at Lahore, responsive to the rich multitude of cultures in which he and his family lived. His mother was sister of Lady Burne-Jones and of Stanley Baldwin’s mother. Thus one of his backgrounds was intellectually lively and socially privileged. The other shared in different and older cultures. India in his early years was real to him, not as something inferior or dominated but as something mysterious and compelling. It helped constitute his imagination and memory. As a young child he was under the care of an Indian nurse, and he became proficient in Hindustani as well as English. This was more than a “below stairs” experience of the Raj. When as a little sahib he returned to England with his sister, he stood at an awkward angle to the colonial world; the country he came to lacked the warmth, color and easy intimacy of the one he had left. When he returned to India as a young man, he had changed, but it was India that seemed different, no longer second nature to him. He invests much of his writing in reclaiming the first India for himself, and for others—children and adults.
He was six when he was packed off to England for his education, first to the home of an elderly evangelical relation in Southsea. His miserable six years there (“the House of Desolation”) were relieved by occasional visits to the Burne-Jones establishment near Brighton. There William Morris became his Uncle Topsy. Sir Edward Burne-Jones was at work on illustrations for Morris’s Kelmscott Press edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Apart from these oases of warmth and jollity, the boy endured a life of solitary unhappiness, moving in 1879 to a minor public school, the United Services College, Westward Ho!, in Devon. There he began writing verse. The experiences of those early years frame much of his later writing.
His first book was a collection of poems, privately printed in 1881: Schoolboy Lyrics. The next year, at sixteen, he returned to India and served on the staff of the Lahore Civil and Military Gazette, contributing articles and poems. In 1889 he became foreign correspondent for the Allahabad Pioneer and began traveling—to China, Japan, America, Australia and Africa. Work as a correspondent made him a keen observer. He saw deeply into Indian—and not only Indian—affairs, with the complex perspective of one who understands his own British tribal needs and priorities, but also the needs and priorities of a loved other world. He gives the impression of a writer with inside information—about the British Army, India and other subjects. Accuracy of detail and a public tone are results of his journalistic training.
The light verse he wrote for newspapers was collected in Departmental Ditties (1886), a book that reached an English audience. But it was Plain Tales from the Hills (1888) that made a real mark in England and paved the way for the writer’s return. He arrived in London in 1889 with a reputation. He was fêted by editors and fellow writers but generally stood apart, a plain man among the literati, preferring the company of men of action, of public deeds—Stanley Baldwin, Lord Milner, Max Aitken (who became Lord Beaverbrook). This was the period of his greatest popularity. Until 1902 he was the most eloquent literary spokesman for a Tory populism that was patriotic, imperial and—above all—responsible. The privileges of being English entailed real duties, duties that were imperatives.
When we say he was popular, we can quantify what we mean. By 1918, Departmental Ditties, his least achieved book, had sold 81,000 copies; by 1931 it had sold 117,000 copies. Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses remained his most popular book, selling 182,000 copies by 1918 and 255,000 by 1931. The Definitive Edition of the poems, published in 1940, had gone through sixty impressions by 1982. Like Housman, even when his shares were no longer quoted on the intellectual bourse, and critics turned their backs on him, he remained popular with readers.
His first major success, Barrack-Room Ballads (1892, 1896), contains many of his best-known poems. Hymns, music-hall songs, ballads and public poetry lay behind his instantly popular verse. Popularity did not earn him the obloquy of fellow writers that it tends to engender today. It was not considered culpable or vulgar that he fixed his eye on an audience. He developed his demotic Cockney dialect, experimental forms, and mastered traditional metrics in long and short measures as no poet apart from Auden has since done. He fails when skillful technique betrays inadequate ideas, when a poem has no intellectual or emotional necessity and is a mere exercise or pretext.
Such was his reputation that, after Tennyson’s death, he was offered the poet laureateship. He refused. This was the first of several honors he declined. In later years, for example, he would not accept the Order of Merit, and when his remains finally came to rest at Westminster Abbey, his name was “unenhanced.”
Kipling married the American Caroline Balestier (Carrie), lived for five unpleasant years on her family estate in Vermont, and in 1897 returned to England for good, settling first at The Elms, Rottingdean, Sussex, and then in 1902 acquiring Bateman’s, Burwash, Sussex, from which he stirred abroad only occasionally in the last thirty-four years of his life. He was still a relatively young man, but he had wearied of travel. The unsuccessful American experiment blurred his later work, producing a vein of anti-American sentiment, a coarse misogyny, a distaste for extreme forms of democracy and a renewed sense of the mission and the values of Empire. There was more in this than the growing conservatism of a successful man growing old, wanting the world to stay the same. For Kipling there was an urgent duty in arguing the case for the Empire in its irreversible decline.
After all, he had seen so much of it from so many angles, he had understood its cultures and potentials, and he foresaw the consequences of its decline not only for England but for the subject nations. His reporting during the Boer War was brilliant, presenting “news events” that showed an understanding of the underlying causes. In retirement at Bateman’s, observing from a distance rather than reporting from the fray, and, often alone with his disappointments, he was beset by serious melancholy. The relentless themes of duty, sacrifice and devotion were elicited particularly by the First World War, in which his only son John was killed in 1915 at the Battle of Loos (the body was never found). “The Children” is about his and other parents’ loss:
These were our children who died for our lands: they were dear in our sight.
We have only the memory left of their home-treasured sayings and laughter.
The price of our loss shall be paid to our hands, not another’s hereafter.
Neither the Alien nor Priest shall decide on it. That is our right.
But who shall return us the children?
It is as though the biblical cadences gradually lay hold of his verse: he speaks from a moral height in a voice that contains all the voices he has spoken in before.
In Kipling as in Hardy we find a poetry from the turn of the century without traces of poetic weariness, without the rhythmic overemphasis of Swinburne, the esoteric qualities of Arthur Symons, or the twilight of early Yeats. He was a plain-speaking poet, nowhere more pithily than in his “Epitaphs of the War.” These brief, uncompromising last words illustrate his skill in poetry of summary declaration, tough yet humane. “The Coward” is the best of them: “I could not look on death, which being known, / Men took me to him, blindfold and alone.” His most famous epitaph has the same epigrammatic conciseness; few talents of this century have been given to epigram, a form more difficult to master—for it demands pure content and direct expression—than discursive forms. “If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied.”
This bald, concise style does not dominate Kipling’s work. But it reaches its finest development in the poem “The Way Through the Woods,” which seems at first different in kind, but which is similarly declarative, summary and unclouded by sentiment. The movement is of pensive speech:
They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and ruin have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
There are a few poems of comparable, quiet directness. “The Runes on Weland’s Sword” is another one, gnomic but equally resonant.
The completeness of Kipling’s experiences—of the Raj, where he knew the Indian and the colonial; of England, where he was insider and outsider; of the Empire, where he was apologist and elegist—give him an aloofness or apartness, even when he pretends to be familiar. It also contributes to the impersonality of his writing, an unwillingness to dwell on subjective experience, a preference for the hard completeness and truth-telling of the “Epitaphs,” for example. The death of his son informs “My Boy Jack,” but it is a poem of general loss. Such impersonality is, however, usually accompanied by certain thematic obsessions—they are the subjective element, forcing the verse toward particular meanings, or celebrating certain virtues and chastising certain vices.
The opinions and preoccupations attributed to the soldier and the “lower” classes—indeed the very terms in which Kipling has them express themselves—are not as authentic as they seem. He does not exactly appropriate them, but he does at times assign to them a character and opinions that he infers rather than hears. The personae in the dramatic monologues and ballads can seem like journalist caricatures, forfeiting authenticity to authority, for an effect of easy resonance. There is inadvertent satire even in his most earnest ballads.
Kipling’s ambition to achieve an “irrefutable prose statement,” as C. H. Sisson puts it, means that poems often end on a specific effect, not a general one. Background, setting, tones and accents of voice become more important than the integrity of poetic statement. The storyteller will not let the poet loose. Where in Hardy’s Satires of Circumstance the background is implicit, in Kipling it is made explicit and often dominates the foreground. He has to define a context through his speakers before he can wrest from them the poem he wants.
We’re often uneasy reading Kipling. The poems, when one has grasped what they say or has been cudgeled by it, seem better than their meanings—as though the communication of meaning is an excuse for something else, perhaps the fulfillment of a technical or dramatic challenge the poet sets himself; yet, because the meanings are bluntly present, because they coordinate that “something else,” they are bound to them and lack autonomy. T. S. Eliot stresses that Kipling is, to begin with, a ballad maker, that we do not defend him against charges of obscurity but of “excessive lucidity”: “People are exasperated by poetry which they do not understand, and contemptuous of poetry which they understand without effort.” Obscurities occur in Kipling, but not in his meanings so much as in his motives. Eliot makes another valuable point: Kipling’s use of language in verse differs little from his use of it in prose.
Setting Kipling’s verse alongside his prose, we feel that there is simply too much language, too many words in many of the poems. When he sets out toward a rhetorical effect, as in refrain poems and narrative pieces, we see the destination a mile off, and the remainder of the journey can be tedious. In prose Kipling is not sidetracked: it relates to, and relates, a story and setting efficiently and faithfully. When he interposes a poetic form between himself and his subject, he is tempted to elaborate, to test the form he’s created almost as though this testing were the purpose of the poem.
Kipling is indebted, among his contemporaries, to Browning for his dramatic monologues, to Swinburne for some of his rhythms, to the Pre-Raphaelites; towering behind his work is the King James Version of the Bible. But ballad, hymn and short story remain his chief poetic determinants. He is a public poet first and last, despite formal inventiveness. His work develops thematically, but the style remains spry, unrepetitive, essentially stable. Eliot sees his development as a shift from “the imperial imagination into the historical imagination”—from geography and the present to history and the sources of and analogies for the present. There’s a change, too, from a concern with the limbs of Empire—India and the army, principally—to a concern with the imperial heart, with England, with Sussex in particular as its emblem. He pursues imperial responsibilities home.
His ballads are either narrative, with a plot and often dialogue, or dramatic monologues. He writes topical poems, occasional verse, sometimes “hymn-ballads” such as “Ave Imperatrix,” celebrating Queen Victoria’s escape from an assassination attempt in 1882. Eliot praises his hymn writing, stressing the extreme poetic objectivity necessary for this mode. And Kipling writes prophecies as well, with remarkable prescience as to events, though his imperial perspectives can seem archaic. In later years he translated Horace with his customary directness, and throughout his life he was a parodist: The Muse Among the Motors is a delightful, neglected sequence in which he parodies Chinese, Greek and Latin poems, the Rubáiyát, Middle English, Shakespeare, Donne, Wordsworth, Emerson, Longfellow, the Brownings, Clough and others, setting them the task of writing about the motor car. “The Idiot Boy” parodies Wordsworth’s “Lucy” poems:
He went alone, that none might know
If he could drive or steer,
Now he is in the ditch, and Oh!
The differential gear.
Housman is a poet of fixed emotions, Kipling, of fixed ideas. He knows what most of his poems will say before he begins. They are not essays in discovery but expositions and iterations. The idea—which can be dramatic, political or satirical—is generally introduced in the first stanza and repeated or decorated as the poem progresses. In the dedication to Barrack-Room Ballads he promises us poems about “such as fought and sailed and ruled and loved and made our world.” “Our” world is England and its Empire: Kipling’s verse does not readily lend itself to translation. And yet Bertolt Brecht translated Barrack-Room Ballads into German—implausible, given their political differences. But Brecht found in Kipling a quality of directness, a concern with “actual” speech, that he needed in shaping his own verse and drama.
In Kipling’s dedication he describes the sort of man he admires, the man who “had done his work and held his peace and had no fear to die”—a preference he shared with Joseph Conrad, whom he resembles in various dark ways. In the subtle “Sestina of the Tramp-Royal,” written in the quasi-Cockney dialect devised for his rustics, his chosen man speaks out:
Speakin’ in general, I’ave tried ’em all—
The ’appy roads that take you o’er the world.
Speakin’ in general, I’ave found ’em good
For such as cannot use one bed for long,
But must get ’ence, the same as I’ave done,
An’ go observin’ matters till they die.
This is the “trail that is always new” of “The Long Trail”; a mood of acceptance, of dutiful, cheerful resignation, dominates.
“The Vampire” and “Harp Song of the Dane Woman” are in Kipling’s more mysterious ballad vein. The “Harp Song” begins,
What is a woman that you forsake her,
And the hearth fire and the home-maker,
To go with the old grey widow-maker?
The “widow-maker” is the sea. The other poem, never specifying its meaning, evokes the fool who prayed “to a rag and a bone and a hank of hair.” Several poems are charged with a cruel mystery, suggesting sometimes a revulsion from sexual intimacy. They are as much about death and sexual uncertainty as about vampires and Danish women.
The political and prophetic poems are at once the most popular and unpopular of his works. At times he turns against his own political stance, writing “The Fabulists 1914–18” with a bitterness that lends power to the public statement. The rhythmic and syntactical echoes of his most popular poem, “If... ,” add a vehemence to the irony:
When desperate Folly daily laboureth
To work confusion upon all we have,
When diligent Sloth demandeth Freedom’s death,
And banded Fear commandeth Honour’s grave—
Even in that uncertain hour before the fall,
Unless men please they are not heard at all.
Despite misgivings about democracy, Kipling celebrates England and English institutions. The psalmodic “A Song for the English,” full of Biblical cadences in a strictly rhymed form, has attracted various parodies. “Fair is our lot—O goodly is our heritage!” he says. After five introductory stanzas he presents “a song of broken interludes... of little cunning.” The songs are essentially dramatic narratives of England’s relations with the sea, Empire, and the duties of the present to those who died in making that Empire. Kipling praises the virtues of severity, resistance, strength, taciturnity and loyalty. He is at pains here and elsewhere to alert the English at home to their responsibilities. He does this most powerfully in “The Islanders.” “The Dykes,” a later poem, dramatically laments irresponsibility. “All that our fathers taught us of old pleases us now no more.” The exhortation to “Take up the White Man’s burden— / Send forth the best ye breed” comes in a poem that tends to prophetic satire, not jingoism. The responsibility the burden imposes, the reluctance of those who are ruled, the conceit and deceit of administrators, are conveyed in it.
Everywhere in his poetry we are confronted by formidable skill. Though he wrote few fine lyrics, few lyric writers could achieve his balladic forms. In “The Ballad of East and West” his aptitude with long lines is unmatched: “There is rock to the left, and rock to the right, and low lean thorn between, / And ye may hear the breech-bolt snick where never a man is seen.” This is the natural, expressive style Kipling evolved: it can deal with surface reality, it can name things—anything, the style is inclusive—and it can suggest depths without damaging the surface. Though it has the veracity of speech, it also has the authority of song.
“The Benefactors,” a poem that opens with a parody of Landor, goes on to question the usefulness of art in confronting reality:
And what is Art whereto we press
Through paint and prose and rhyme—
When nature in her nakedness
Defeats us every time?
It is the nakedness Kipling is after. Using popular rhythms, from music hall for instance, the poet approaches a common poetry. “Bobs” can be sung to the tune of “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain”; “Danny Deever,” “Fuzzy-Wuzzy,” “Tommy,” “Gunga Din” and “Mandalay” have the lilt and verve of music-hall turns. Other poems march, others have a pulpit feel about them. “Natural” expression includes humor, a quality in which the early poems abound and which critics tend to overlook.
Insider and outsider: Kipling was an innovator from within a tradition, inventing forms, developing rhythms, pursuing a poetry that instructs as it entertains. The instruction is of its period; it repels readers with the experience of the Second World War behind them, and young readers who cannot abide incorrect notions. Insistence on racial superiority, on “the Blood” that binds the English, and the paternalistic note reserved for the people of the colonies, grate. But Kipling also wrote Kim. His critics deduce his politics selectively, finding in him a crude consistency of thought that the major works themselves belie. Hardy is a pessimist, but not a programmatic one, any more than Kipling is a thoroughgoing racist, sadist, protofascist or feudalist—all terms his critics have applied to him. Each poem aspires to consistency and truth to itself. But the poet is neither philosopher nor politician. He retains the essential freedom to change, to start a new book, a new poem, to find a new path or an old path through the woods. As an epitaph for journalists killed in the First World War Kipling inscribed, “We have served our day.” This is what he did, in a day when journalism was not merely a job but a vocation, and when ideals of service were not held suspect.
Was he an interpreter of popular will or the inadvertent advocate of a new barbarism, the barbarism inherent in the imperial ideal? Robert Buchanan, a Gladstonian Liberal, characterized him as “the voice of the hooligan,” and—yes—we can agree, but beyond the hooligan there is the deep believer, who knows what he has seen and deduces from it what might be, against the current of what actually was happening: the Empire’s overextension and eventual decline. “Recessional” is the great poem of Empire, discursive rather than dramatic, expressing anxiety at imperial hubris, the pride before the fall. Like Edward Elgar’s music, so Kipling’s verse was appropriated by the jingoists. At the victory ceremony for the Boer War outside the Transvaal Parliament, 10,000 soldiers sang “Recessional.” Kipling became less popular as he began to question and to stigmatize those who had become his chief admirers. He insisted on the hard truths underlying his—and their—ideology. His popular poems, Eliot says, elicit a single response: they shape that response, conforming readership as hymns and prayers conform a congregation—a common language, the vulgar tongue. This instrumentalism would be a profanation of poetry, but Kipling’s muse speaks with conviction; she is not bought or compelled, and she is not complacent. “The Islanders” did much to estrange his devoted audience; it was a poisoned chalice he presented them.
Arid, aloof, incurious, unthinking, unthanking, gelt,
Will ye loose your schools to flout them till their brow-beat columns melt?
Will ye pray them or preach them, or print them, or ballot them back from our shore?
Will your workmen issue a mandate to bid them strike no more?
Will ye rise and dethrone your rulers? (Because ye were idle both?
Pride by Insolence chastened? Indolence purged by Sloth?)
Angus Wilson declares that it “takes each sacred cow of the clubs and senior common rooms and slaughters it messily before its worshippers’ eyes.” Magisterial, with vehement sarcasm, he turns to the flag wavers, the lazy, the malingerers, and shows them where they are likely to fail. They serve false gods, like the chosen people who, in the Bible, suffer the scourge of the angry prophets. Despite his formal variety, he always sounds a hectoring note; he insists in the way that Marlowe’s dramatic verse or the Old Testament insists, with severity.
Out of the Old Testament, not the King James Version, but rather the Hebrew, emerges the first major Jewish voice in English poetry. Isaac Rosenberg is another poet for whom authority is a central theme, but who never had a land of content to lose. His rhythms have no precedent in English verse; his poems are as original as Stephen Crane’s, but in scope and accomplishment much greater. And yet not one of Rosenberg’s poems is entirely successful. For him writing poems was a necessity, and the struggle to find a serviceable idiom very nearly an agony.
The troubled throng
Of words breaks out like smothered fire through dense
And smouldering wrong.
T. S. Eliot was one of his first advocates. “Let the public ask itself,” he wrote in 1920, “why it has never heard of the poems of T. E. Hulme or Isaac Rosenberg, and why it has heard of the poems of Lady Precocia Pondoeuf and has seen a photograph of the nursery in which she wrote them.” Well, for one thing, the poems of Hulme and Rosenberg were not generally available. More to the point in Rosenberg’s case, for all his promise, he was killed in action before that promise was fulfilled. He lacks the formal polish, the conventional authority of Owen and Sassoon. He had none of their social advantages. From a very different background, he was feeling his way toward another kind of poetry, a goal he did not attain, and he left his uneven attempts. But he was the only poet involved in the First World War who consciously set out to devise a language to engage with the experience directly, veering neither into Owen’s public rhetoric nor Sassoon’s ironizing. He is distinguished in the canon not only by his exceptional imagination, but also by his unusual background.
He was born in Bristol in 1890 into a family of Russian Jewish émigrés. At the age of seven, he went with his family to London, moving from relative poverty to actual poverty. He was sent to elementary school in Stepney. When he was fourteen he was apprenticed as an engraver to a firm of “art publishers” and attended evening classes at the Arts School of Birkbeck College. He wanted to become a painter.
In 1911, after his apprenticeship, three ladies from his community provided the wherewithal to send him to the Slade. His graphic work has as many startling qualities as his verse—careful heightenings, subtle distortions, some intentional and some the result of a technique not quite mastered. His boldness at times recalls the line-work of the young Wyndham Lewis, and his portraits are powerful.
When very young he began writing verse and circulated it, attracting some attention. The earliest surviving piece, composed when he was fifteen, is indebted to Byron (including the unusual Byron of the Hebrew Melodies); it draws too on his Jewish background, the source of much of his early thematic material. “Ode to David’s Harp,” with its archaisms, vocatives and unironized enthusiasm, is the work of a boy with natural if unshaped skills. It concludes:
So clearly sweet—so plaintive sad
More tender tone no harper had.
O! when again shall Israel see
A harp so toned with melody?
In 1912 he published privately the first of three pamphlets, Night and Day, including principally poems of his adolescence. Youth (1915) and Moses: A Play (1916) followed. The total extent of his pamphlets, including preliminary matter, is sixty-eight pages. His reputation rests not on these works so much as on the war poems, which were not collected and published in full until nineteen years after his death, by Gordon Bottomley and Denys Harding. Siegfried Sassoon provided an introduction. An inadequate Selected Poems had appeared in 1922.
In 1914 Rosenberg traveled to South Africa for his health, but returned the next year, having been unable to make his way as a teacher or portrait painter. He delayed enlisting as long as he could, for he was physically and temperamentally ill suited for military service. Driven by poverty, he finally enlisted, and in 1916 he was sent to France, where he fell in action two years later.
Introducing the Collected Works, Sassoon raises several important points. “I have recognised in Rosenberg,” he writes, “a fruitful fusion between English and Hebrew culture.” Sassoon himself was of Jewish ancestry. He speaks of a “racial quality, biblical and prophetic.” With a few exceptions, notably “The Jew,” the poems are not about being Jewish. The biblical imagery and the strange accent of the poems bring new tonal elements into English.
Sassoon finds the poet “scriptural and sculptural”—he “modelled words with fierce energy and aspiration.” Rosenberg did not readily accept words as they came to him. He interrogated them, meditated on them, and combined them in startling new ways. The English he uses does not come to him by second nature, as a given. The poet controls his medium, as best he can, at every point. Here is the real “wrestle with words and meanings” that Eliot writes of in Four Quartets, a wrestle enacted between the poet and his language, and in the war poems, between the language and the intractable material with which it must deal. What are received diction and form for his Georgian contemporaries are simply inexpressive for him. Language remains dynamic, resistant. Paying little attention to punctuation, concentrating on cadence and image, he never shies away from mixed metaphor or questionable and archaic usage. When he had a war image to convey he did so with resolute objectivity, neither blurring nor heightening the literal. In “Dead Man’s Dump” we read, “A man’s brains spattered on / A stretcher-bearer’s face.” He doesn’t dwell on the image for effect: the image suffices. The use of the indefinite article suggests generality, and the poem goes on drawing the wider context. This detail takes its place among others, many horrific, others strange or neutral. Rosenberg is not a rhetorician, a photographer or journalist. He’s a soldier, his eyes wide with wonder turned on the world that bursts around him. When, describing the dead, he uses in the same poem the image “a lid over each eye,” he suggests decomposition, the isolation of the twinned organs of sight in death. Though they decay, the dead are united as well, but not in a sentimental way:
The grass and coloured clay
More motion have than they,
Joined in the great sunk silences.
The sparse hard images are sparked alive by verbs: bones “crunch” under wheels. But his most powerful effects depend on a psalmodic lengthening and shortening of cadence and on words that, without specifying single meanings, carry a burden of suggestion, integrated in the firm but uneasy cadence. Freed from mere description, freed too from prescriptive meaning and association, they find new significance. In “Dead Man’s Dump” one stanza wavers between image and symbol, between experience and response:
None saw their spirits’ shadow shake the grass,
Or stood aside for the half used life to pass
Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,
When the swift iron burning bee
Drained the wild honey of their youth.
There is none of Owen’s sugar in that honey. Rosenberg presents time in war not as a chronology but as an unrelenting present: “The shells go crying over them / From night till night and now.”
In the war poems Rosenberg came close to achieving the kind of verse his early writings cleared the ground for, though there is an incompleteness about them which is part of their power. Though they’re more accomplished than his early work, there is continuity between the apprentice pieces of Night and Day and his last poems. In the first pamphlet, the poet muses: Is he a god finder or a sin bearer for man? He wakes in the morning with “a larger capacity to feel and enjoy things”; having “communed with the stars, his soul has exalted itself, and become wiser in intellectual experience.” The burden of the early poems is that “by thinking of higher things we exalt ourselves to what we think about.” Prophetic and didactic voices dominate. His early poems are striking not for their achievement but for their oddness, even in the transitional decade of the 1900s:
Sing to me, for my soul’s eyes
Anguish for these ecstasies
And voluptuous mysteries
That must somewhere be,
Or we could not know of them.
There are, too, strange images from vertiginous perspectives of the sort we get in David Jones:
Sudden the night blazed open at my feet.
Like splintered crystal tangled with gold dust
Blazed on my ear and eye the populous street.
The only stylistic affinities that come to mind are with Blake. The archaisms are piled on: “starven,” “’gainst,” the “en-” prefix is used to make verbs intensive. Language is under pressure, forging its own resources. Rosenberg, like Lawrence, does without stylistic irony. He writes because he has something to say, and only poetry will do.
His early poems reject notions of a benevolent God. He comes to realize that compassion and endurance are not enough. The struggle against a bad god, against evil generally, even if it is rooted in the maker, is worth undertaking if it effects “realignments” in individual ways of seeing and in social attitudes. Critics note the radical tendencies in his verse and consider his radical approach to prosody and diction, his very openness to experience, to be a political dimension. They may be right, but the radicalism is not necessarily “democratic.” There is more in his verse of the seeds of “vorticism,” more affinity with the Imagists and modernists than with liberal writers. For him poetry is not instrumental: it is a language of exploration and record, not a suasive tool. Rupert Brooke, Sassoon and Owen write a poetry different in kind from his.
His main theme is power: of god, of evil, or of man. Biblical allusions charge the poems with a volatile energy. He casts himself in the role of Absalom and God in the role of David, and in “Chagrin” describes the inexplicable, unexpected and apparently malevolent power at work, snaring him:
From the imagined weight
Of spaces in a sky
Of mute chagrin, my thoughts
Hang like branch-clung hair...
The formal imagination, peopling empty air with forms, concretizing thought but avoiding apostrophe, is “sculptural,” aware of space and its potentialities:
We ride, we ride, before the morning
The secret roots of the sun to tread,
And suddenly
We are lifted of all we know
And hang from implacable boughs.
Power includes responsibility—to past and future as well as the present. This is Kipling’s theme translated to a metaphysical realm. Irresponsibility has consequences: first causing suffering, then reaction. In “The Dead Heroes” he declares, “Strong as our hurt is strong / Our children are.” In a potentially sensational subject matter, there is no sensationalism. He can define through indefinition, as Edgar Allan Poe does, or Milton in hell—and his refusal to make pretty or ugly what is neither pretty nor ugly, what simply is, confirms his integrity of purpose. He is always thinking in his poems, especially about language. “Snow is a strange white word,” one poem begins. Elsewhere he would “bruise the air” with words. They have magical power, shadowing the things and qualities they denote.
There is humor—sometimes black humor—too. In “Break of Day in the Trenches,” his best-known poem, he addresses a rat: “Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew / Your cosmopolitan sympathies.” It has brushed the hands of men in opposing trenches, it has scrabbled among the dead. Later in the poem he plucks a poppy and with careless insouciance places it behind his ear. The tone of the poem wavers but holds, yet in its wavering is the whole force of Rosenberg’s art:
Poppies, whose roots are in man’s veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe—
Just a little white with the dust.
The rhythm of the last two lines, unresolved, observing, is entirely his own. It belongs to the moment of the experience. Rosenberg does not step back or draw a moral. The poem stays in a present tense that will not relinquish its immediacy, that will not release us with a reassuring cadence. Edwin Muir characterized Rosenberg’s achievement in these terms: “He gives above all a feeling of power which is not yet certain of itself, which is sometimes tripped up by its own force.” At his best he conveys the power of the events that snared him—in the trenches, for example—and will not allow poetic conventions to let him, or us, off that immediate hook. We don’t weep at his poems as we do at Owen’s; he doesn’t deliberately stir up anger like Sassoon. He brings an individual human situation up close, he exposes us by evoking his own exposure as calmly as the dawn will allow. When Lawrence was looking for “the urgent, insurgent now,” he might have found it in Rosenberg at his best, suspended in the perpetual present of his unchosen circumstances. It is no wonder that in the next world war Keith Douglas, a comparable poet of presence, wrote, “Rosenberg, I only repeat what you were saying.”
The First World War was for Housman and for Kipling another war. They had lived through earlier ones, and the difference this time was one of scale, of proximity, and of immediate loss—of friends, of a son. Yet for Rosenberg the war was his maturity, the whole of it. And for Rupert Brooke, who died in 1915, it was the canonization. All the younger poets who fell in the war experienced it as something horribly new and unprecedented. Those who fell before the end of 1915 were able to imagine that their endeavor was heroic. Those who survived into the later years of the war, experiencing the camaraderie, bereavement, cold, mud, cruel authority, gas, rats, and the incomprehension of the civilians back home, came to understand its real cost and the vanity of that cost as it seemed to them. Brooke wrote poems—most famously “If I should die”—that were of use to the war effort. Rosenberg wrote poems that could not be put to such use. Sassoon and Owen wrote poems that could be turned against the war, instrumental poems that by shrewd selection and heightening of detail and vivid word magic might be used against the conflict, or at least used to make the civilian population understand the reality—or rather the surreality—of it.
For Owen it began with word magic, a Keatsian program: “Escape? There is one unwatched way: your eyes, / O Beauty! Keep me good that secret gate.” His Keats was diluted with early Yeats. He borrowed epigraphs from Yeats, he followed his lushly adjectival example. Yeats did not reciprocate the admiration. When he came to edit the Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936, he excluded Owen, later describing him as “all blood, dirt, and sucked sugar-stick... He calls poets ‘Bards,’ a girl a ‘maid,’ and talks about ‘Titanic wars.’ There is every excuse for him, but none for those who like him.” This summary dismissal has at best a grain of truth in it. Did Yeats read beyond the effusive, lush, energyless early poems? Whenever Yeats uses the word “all,” it’s best to take what he says with a pinch of salt.
But it is also important to approach Owen with as clear a head as possible. His poetry is so closely linked with his death, his sentiments, and the almost sacred cloak that posterity has draped around his ghost, that an assessment of his actual achievement and contribution is hard. Sylvia Plath is the only other poet whose life, death and work are so closely interfused. Martyr-poets both. Rosenberg, T. E. Hulme and Edward Thomas were not martyrs in the same sense. They belonged to the wrong set.
Owen’s poems answer certain preconceptions about poetry and war: for those reared on Palgrave’s Golden Treasury, they are reassuringly traditional, even in their formal innovations. They seem true, even if they do not extend but rather endorse and clarify what the bien pensant already believe or feel. Owen’s work helped to shape postwar beliefs and feelings as, early in the war, Rupert Brooke’s helped to stimulate the patriotic nerve. Do Owen’s poems now evoke experiences, or merely feed preconceptions? A naïve reader is drawn to the appealing naïveté of Owen’s changing passions as he is exposed to war and the issues it raises, to Sassoon and the issues he raises. Owen attracts serious artists too, notably Benjamin Britten, whose War Requiem expanded Owen’s audience and added a haunting extra element to the poems. Britten’s choice of texts was political: his pacifism found in the elegiac, the sardonic and the vatic Owen the words it needed, their authenticity heightened by the poet’s death. Britten chose the poems for other reasons, too. There is a challenging prosody, and a clear development yielding a mighty emotional charge.
Owen was born in 1893 in Oswestry, Shropshire, where he spent a pampered childhood. At the age of ten he visited rural Broxton by the Hill and—in Wordsworthian fashion—his poetic vocation was affirmed. There, “First I felt my boyhood fill / With uncontainable movements; there was born / My poethood.” He wrote copiously in his early years. His education was conducted at the Birkenhead Institute, at the Shrewsbury Technical College, and at London University. Edmund Blunden recalls that Owen tended to choose his friends for what he could get out of them—intellectual stimulus, principally. His first master was Keats, whom he celebrated and to whose shrines he made pilgrimage. His early devotion to the beautiful is often expressed in a Keatsian spirit. Gray, Shelley, Tennyson, Arnold and Swinburne colored his imagination, too: it was steeped in elegiac Romanticism.
In 1913 he wrote half seriously of his plan to publish “Minor Poems—in Minor Keys—By a Minor.” The early writings are little more. Sharp, sensuous passages do occur, but set in a relentless tide of assonance and alliteration. The “music” of poetry drew him: sounds generally but especially the sounds of instruments are mimed:
I have been gay with trivial fifes that laugh;
And songs more sweet than possible things are sweet;
And gongs, and oboes.
Ineffable “sweetness” and “music” made him overfond of adjectives, which clot the verse and steal the limelight from perfectly adequate nouns. The adjectives often draw out qualities already implicit in the verbs. “Pale flakes with fingering stealth come feeling down our faces” is perilously close to tautology. Sound, not sense, dictates unhappy epithets even in the major poems: “dull rumour” and (Yeats is responsible for this one) “the poignant misery of the dawn” in “Exposure,” for instance. Agony treated in this way becomes mellifluous, aestheticized. The language betrays its occasion into mere pretext. In the first eight lines of the sonnet “The Seed,” another fault appears: the seven-times repeated syntactical construction, “the—of the—.” Dylan Thomas learned some of his less convincing strategies from such redundant rhetoric.
Owen may have been entranced by the poetic “music” of the French poet Paul Verlaine. He spent two years teaching English in France (1913–15) and made some literary friendships. He read Baudelaire, and through him turned his attention back to English poetry and Swinburne, Baudelaire’s first English advocate. He realized how the French writers he admired were all transgressors, men who got in trouble with the police, who went to and beyond the limits of convention, as their admirer Oscar Wilde had done. Verlaine cast a salutary gloom over Owen’s early exuberance, though the melancholy tone does not entirely suit him—until he has a suitable subject. Love might have been such a subject: the 1916 sonnet that begins “Three rompers...” refers back to a time of innocent male love and ends with the line “The sea is rising... and the world is sand”; in “To Eros” of the same year, he casts himself in the role of Psyche. These unposturing, almost direct expressions of sexual perspective have the candor of Shakespeare’s disappointed sonnets. They strike a note unlike the decadent strains of the fin-de-siècle. But they strike it only a few times, unassertively, and until recent years it has been a polite convention to look the other way when passing by these poems.
In 1915 Owen enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles. Under intolerable stress he was invalided out in 1917 and convalesced for a time near Edinburgh. There he became friendly with the already established and dissident poet Siegfried Sassoon. They discussed poetry and other topics and Owen’s admiration knew no bounds. His letters were always fulsome, but those he wrote to and of Sassoon achieve absurd adolescent intensity. He calls Sassoon his “Keats + Christ + Elijah + my Colonel + my father-confessor + Amenophus IV, in profile.” No doubt Sassoon’s enthusiasm for the promising work of an attractive young man helped bolster Owen’s confidence. Sassoon was a poet of considerable accomplishment, undervalued today. In 1917 Owen was able to report proudly to his mother: “I am held peer by the Georgians.”
Sassoon talked about the war and war in general—and the Christian duty of passivity before violence, as well as other problems of conscience. Owen agreed—even his letters from the front echo Sassoon’s sentiments. He became less a poet than a “war poet,” his mission to tell those at home, in the clearest terms, what the trenches were like, how fear of death and the presence of suffering numbed the sensitive men or drove them mad. This was Sassoon’s theme and mission, too: to make the civilian population sensible to its responsibilities (Kipling’s mission, with a new twist). Home on leave, Owen carried photographs of the war injured to illustrate his point.
Psychologists have got to work on the biographical material. Owen has been characterized—reductively—as an “injustice collector.” A sense of duty coupled with a gnawing masochism sent him back to the front, and after writing more poems and enduring the worst of the last campaign, he was awarded the Military Cross but was killed the week before the Armistice, in 1918. Edith Sitwell and Siegfried Sassoon published the first collection of his poems in 1920.
In some ways he resembles the once equally idolized Rupert Brooke. Unlike Brooke, however, he was not known by his trench comrades as a poet and thus preserved a receptive anonymity. Like Brooke’s, his poetic approach was rhetorical; his aim, to adjust the new subject matter to the old forms. For him poetry was instrumental, a form of witness and also of propaganda. It must be suasive, not only evocative: it must contain the experience but also, implicit or explicit, a moral conclusion. Though he reverses Brooke’s “noble heroics,” his attempts at realism are parallel to Brooke’s. Brooke had the audacious gumption to describe seasickness in a satiric poem—an experience not celebrated in English poetry since Byron’s Don Juan. Owen, who lived through most of the war, takes harder risks, describing for example the effect of gas on soldiers. Brooke’s poems were used to advance the war cause; Owen’s, no less emotive, would have served pacifism had they been collected during his lifetime, and did so after his death. Each poet put his rather different new wine in old bottles.
“The new material, if it could be presented at all, needed a profound linguistic invention,” C. H. Sisson has written. Owen lacked that originality. He did experiment effectively with what Edmund Blunden called “para-rhyme”—off-rhymes such as “head” / “lad”—and Blunden praises the effect. Less successfully he experimented with internal rhyme, strong assonance and alliteration. Such experiments developed or refined common poetic techniques. His approach is not formally radical, his blend of irony and pity not new—we have it in Hardy, Housman and Kipling, and earlier in Landor, Arnold and Clough. Only the subject matter is wholly new, and his fascination with the detail of physical suffering.
At heart Owen is less a realist than an idealist. He is drawn to the ugly and sordid because he is attracted to the beautiful. His passion for poetry is not, and never could have been, overwhelmed by pity. Others among the Georgians face the same problem; masked as realists, they follow beauty down urban alleyways and into the trenches. Adapting to “the ugly” the rhetoric attached conventionally to “the beautiful,” they elicit a plangent irony from the misalliance of language and subject matter. Rosenberg and Edward Thomas are exceptional, discerning in extreme experience the convention-purged, unique language and forms it requires.
When Owen realized how poignantly the hideous can be conveyed in terms previously reserved for the beautiful, his work developed suddenly and decisively. But traditional poetic diction, traditional meters and forms, particularly Keatsian, entail a certain neutralizing moral effect. They depend on balance, proportion and perspective, qualities that, since they are absent from the war experience, the poet has to fabricate, resorting to irony and to those forms that, with a final couplet, nudge away the immediate, rhetoricize or sentimentalize it. Pain does not groan or scream and break the form open; poise is never violated. The resonance is in understatement, an accepting irony, a very English tone. This is why Owen’s poems are susceptible to musical setting where Rosenberg’s are not: the expression can be left to the music, since the unspoken anguish in the vivid reportage remains unspoken—that is its force. In Rosenberg form and language answer to content: they do not neutralize but realize it. Owen can express intense love and describe intense physical agony in the same forms. The maimed man and the pastoral landscape are given in the same rhythms. Owen sensed this neutralizing effect and tried to overcome it by moralizing. In “Disabled” he displays his war photographs, and with grotesque sexual overtones dwells in fascinated detail on wounds.
What makes Owen a war poet, while Thomas and Rosenberg, both victims of the war, have a broader remit, is the biographical accident that Owen was very young and inexperienced when he went into the trenches. Thomas and Rosenberg had endured a life of hardship; the war was for them an extreme experience in a life of experiences. The war was Owen’s big experience, his one theme. It supplied its own absolute context.
In the famous “Preface” to the poems—rough notes, not a finished, gnomic essay—he is naturally dominated by the immediate experience. He promises a rhetorical and moralistic collection. The youthful arrogance—“This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them”—is pardonable only in the light of the achieved poems. “Above all,” he writes, “I am not concerned with Poetry.” In fact—unlike Rosenberg—he is so concerned with “poetry” that the force of much of his war experience is excluded from the poems.
Poets of the Second World War turned to models other than Owen. Keith Douglas turned to Rosenberg, Alun Lewis to Edward Thomas. The reason is clear: Douglas and Rosenberg are concerned with power, with the moral and psychological issues of human motive, and the lasting transformations that war effects in men. Owen’s concern is with phenomena, vivid externals, and the poems are in the end didactic rather than psychologically or, indeed, morally penetrating. His models are taken over from the nineteenth century, his grotesques are romantic, his beauty is late romantic.
The achievement of Owen’s poems is considerable, and Rosenberg, from whom one can learn so much, left no poem as finished, as solidly made, as the best of Owen’s early or mature work. Owen’s poems not directly about the war contain a violence of a different kind. “Shadwell Stair” is a fanciful, disturbing “spirit of the place” poem:
I am the ghost of Shadwell Stair.
Along the wharves by the water-house,
And through the dripping slaughter-house,
I am the shadow that walks there.
Other pieces are less felicitous. In “Fragment: ‘Cramped in the Funnelled Hole,’ ” he overwrites. In nine lines, the possessive runs rife: “yawn of death,” “middle of his throat of phlegm,” “one of many mouths of Hell,” “teeth of traps,” “odour of the shell,” and so on. In “Arms and the Boy” the overwritten insistent alliteration issues in bathetic, weirdly erotic sentiment: “Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-heads / Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads.” We can contrast this with the entirely appropriate word choice in “Conscious”: “The blind cord drawls across the window-sill.” That subtle, disorienting synesthesia drew Edith Sitwell to the poems.
The authority of his command of traditional forms makes for dramatic climaxes and conclusions. “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young” retells, with a savage twist, the story of Abraham and Isaac. Religion, tradition, leadership, are pilloried. “Greater Love” and “Dulce et Decorum” are driven by an even more vigorous rhetoric. As indictments of war they cannot be surpassed. The specific historical reality that has given rise to them, their occasion in the history of conflict between nations, pales into insignificance. Nations, their values and institutions, disappear in the blinding light of Owen’s irony. It is this that gives them their durability as poems of use. But we can see—when rhetoric breaks down—just how intellectually thin his characters are, how psychologically unrealized his monsters of authority. In “The Dead-Beat” a doctor laughs at the death of a supposed malingerer: “That scum you sent last night soon died. Hooray.” In “The Next War” a similar tonal miscalculation occurs.
Subject matter apart, Owen’s great originality is found in certain spare, carefully worked passages where movement from line to line is heartrending: at once surprising and in retrospect inevitable. Some of the best lines occur in “Asleep,” constructed for the most part of monosyllables:
After the many days of work and waking,
Sleep took him by the brow and laid him back.
And in the happy no-time of his sleeping
Death took him by the heart.
The few adjectives are simply chosen. If in the lines that follow he forfeits the force achieved here, these lines are a satisfactory climax in a less than satisfactory poem.
Owen finished few poems to his absolute satisfaction. They exist in several drafts, and the invidious task of piecing together authoritative versions has fallen to his editors. We may imagine, from the passage above, that Owen would have pared down his overwriting, further adjusted his forms, and extended the best of the longer poems, “Strange Meeting.” The perfection of “Futility”—which does not once specifically mention the war—shows what finality he could achieve. And “Anthem for Doomed Youth” mingles pastoral and war imagery to the point of resigned heartbreak.
“Hospital Barge at Cérisy”—a sonnet of late 1917, not much anthologized—achieves in the sestet (after a labored octave) an effect as rare in Owen’s work as it is in modern English poetry: a sudden fusion, in a moment of broken quietness, of allusions from various areas of experience, a poetic rather than a rhetorical resonance. “Her” in the second line quoted here refers to the barge.
One reading by the sunset raised his eyes
To watch her lessening westward quietly,
Till, as she neared the bend, her funnel screamed.
And that long lamentation made him wise
How unto Avalon, in agony,
Kings passed in the dark barge, which Merlin dreamed.
The echo of Yeats’s version of Ronsard, “When you are old,” may be heard in the first two lines. But Owen moves on to a momentary transformation here well beyond the scope of Yeats’s early style. It is a natural grandeur of statement, intuitive and unanswerable.