The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

The poetry that was in vogue when war broke out, and that some poets continued to write for some years afterward, was named "Georgian" in honor of King George V, who had succeeded Edward VII in 1910. The term was first used of poets when Edward Marsh brought out in 1912 the first of a series of five anthologies called Georgian Poetry. The work therein represented an attempt to wall in the garden of English poetry against the disruptive forces of modern civilization. Cultured meditations of the English countryside ("I love the mossy quietness / That grows upon the great stone flags") alternated with self-conscious exercises in the exotic ("When I was

1954

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BROOKE: THE SOLDIER / 1955

but thirteen or so / I went into a golden land, / Chimporazo, Cotopaxi / Took me by the hand"). Sometimes the magical note was authentic, as in many of Walter de la Mare's poems, and sometimes the meditative strain was original and impressive, as in Edward Thomas's poetry. But as World War I went on, with more and more poets killed and the survivors increasingly disillusioned, the whole world on which the Georgian imagination rested came to appear unreal. A patriotic poem such as Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier" became a ridiculous anachronism in the face of the realities of trench warfare, and the even more blatantly patriotic note sounded by other Georgian poems (as in John Freeman's "Happy Is England Now," which claimed that "there's not a nobleness of heart, hand, brain / But shines the purer; happiest is England now / In those that fight") seemed obscene. The savage ironies of Siegfried Sassoon's war poems and the combination of pity and irony in Wilfred Owen's work portrayed a world undreamed of in the golden years from 1910 to 1914.

World War I left throughout Europe a sense that the bases of civilization had been destroyed, that all traditional values had been wiped out. We see this sense reflected in the years immediately after the war in different ways in, for example, T. S. Eliot's Waste Land and Aldous Huxley's early fiction. But the poets who wrote during the war most directly reflected the impact of the war experience.

For more documents, images, and contexts related to this subject, see "Representing the Great War" at Norton Literature Online.

RUPERT BROOKE 1887-1915

Rupert Brooke was educated at Rugby School and at King's College, Cambridge. When World War I began he was commissioned as an officer into the Royal Naval Division and took part in its brief and abortive expedition to Antwerp. On leave in December 1914 he wrote the "war sonnets" that were to make him famous; five months later he died of dysentery and blood poisoning on a troopship destined for Gallipoli.

Brooke was the most popular of the Georgians, pastoral poets who infused nature with nationalist feeling. His early death symbolized the death of a whole generation of patriotic Englishmen. Shortly before then the dean of St. Paul's read "The Soldier" in a sermon from the Cathedral pulpit, and in a 1915 valediction in the London Times, Winston Churchill sounded a note that swelled over the following months and years: "Joyous, fearless, versatile, deeply instructed, with classic symmetry of mind and body, he was all that one would wish England's noblest sons to be in days when no sacrifice but the most precious is acceptable, and the most precious is that which is most freely proffered." Brooke's 1914 and Other Poems was published in June 1915, and during the next decade this and his Collected Poems sold three hundred thousand copies.

The Soldier

If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is forever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

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1956 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

5

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, A body of England's, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

10And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the Eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given, Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. 1914 1915

EDWARD THOMAS 1878-1917

Edward Thomas was born of Welsh parents in London and was educated there and at Lincoln College, Oxford, which he left with a wife, a baby, and high literary ambitions. Despite his chronic depression, which became more marked over the difficult years that followed, he reviewed up to fifteen books a week, published thirty books between 1897 and 1917, and during those twenty years edited sixteen anthologies and editions. His great gifts as a literary critic appeared to best advantage in his reviewing of poetry, and he was the first to salute new stars in the literary firmament such as Robert Frost and Ezra Pound.

Although he had long been conscientiously reviewing poetry, which he regarded as the highest form of literature, he apparently made no serious attempt to write poems until the autumn of 1914. Then, under the stress of deciding whether or not to enlist, poems began to pour out of him: five between December 3 and 7, and ten more before the end of the month. His friend Frost offered to find him work in the United States, but feelings of patriotism, and the attraction of a salary that would support his growing family, led him to enlist in July 1915. His awareness of the natural world, its richness and beauty, was then intensified by a sense of impending loss and the certainty of death�his own and others'. In the long sentences that make up his verse, he ruminates with great delicacy on beauty and nature, but he also demonstrates an unsentimental toughness. In "Rain," for example, he compares the dead to "Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff." As violence to the natural order of things, war indirectly but persistently shadows Thomas's poems. In January 1917 he was sent to the Western Front and, on Easter Monday, was killed by a shell blast.

Adlestrop1

Yes, I remember Adlestrop� The name, because one afternoon Of heat the express-train drew up there Unwontedly. It was late June.

I. A village in Gloucestershire.

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THOMAS: THE OWL / 1957

5 The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat. No one left and no one came On the bare platform. What I saw Was Adlestrop�only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

10 And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry, No whit less still and lonely fair Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang Close by, and round him, mistier, 15 Farther and farther, all the birds Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Jan. 1915 1917

Tears

It seems I have no tears left. They should have fallen� Their ghosts, if tears have ghosts, did fall�that day When twenty hounds streamed by me, not yet combed out But still all equals in their rage of gladness

5 Upon the scent, made one, like a great dragon In Blooming Meadow that bends towards the sun And once bore hops: and on that other day When I stepped out from the double-shadowed Tower Into an April morning, stirring and sweet

io And warm. Strange solitude was there and silence. A mightier charm than any in the Tower Possessed the courtyard. They were changing guard, Soldiers in line, young English countrymen, Fair-haired and ruddy, in white tunics. Drums

is And fifes were playing "The British Grenadiers."1 The men, the music piercing that solitude And silence, told me truths I had not dreamed, And have forgotten since their beauty passed.

Jan.1915 1917

The Owl

Downhill I came, hungry, and yet not starved; Cold, yet had heat within me that was proof Against the North wind; tired, yet so that rest Had seemed the sweetest thing under a roof.

1. Famous British marching song about the Brigade of Guards, an elite infantry unit.

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1958 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

Then at the inn I had food, fire, and rest, Knowing how hungry, cold, and tired was I. All of the night was quite barred out except An owl's cry, a most melancholy cry

Shaken out long and clear upon the hill,

No merry note, nor cause of merriment, But one telling me plain what I escaped And others could not, that night, as in 1 went.

10

And salted" was my food, and my repose, flavored (as with salt) Salted and sobered, too, by the bird's voice 15 Speaking for all who lay under the stars, Soldiers and poor, unable to rejoice.

Feb. 1915 1917

Rain1

Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me Remembering again that I shall die And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks For washing me cleaner than I have been Since I was born into this solitude. Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon: But here I pray that none whom once I loved Is dying tonight or lying still awake

10 Solitary, listening to the rain, Either in pain or thus in sympathy Helpless among the living and the dead, Like a cold water among broken reeds, Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,

15 Like me who have no love which this wild rain Has not dissolved except the love of death, If love it be towards what is perfect and Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.

Jan. 1916 1917

The Cherry Trees

The cherry trees bend over and are shedding On the old road where all that passed are dead,

1. Cf. Thomas's account of an English walking so will the rain fall darkly upon the grass over the tour, The Icknield Way (1913): "In the heavy, black grave when my ears can hear it no more. . . . Black rain falling straight from invisible, dark sky to invis-and monotonously sounding is the midnight and ible, dark earth the heat of summer is annihilated, solitude of the rain. In a little while or in an age� the splendour is dead, the summer is gone. The for it is all one�I shall know the full truth of the midnight rain buries it away where it has buried all words I used to love, I knew not why, in my days sound but its own. I am alone in the dark still night, of nature, in the days before the rain: 'Blessed are and my ear listens to the rain piping in the gutters the dead that the rain rains on.' " and roaring softly in the trees of the world. Even

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THOMAS: AS THE TEAM'S HEAD BRASS / 1959

Their petals, strewing the grass as for a wedding This early May morn when there is none to wed.

May 1916 1917

As the Team's Head Brass1

As the team's head brass flashed out on the turn The lovers disappeared into the wood. I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm That strewed an angle of the fallow,2 and

5 Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square Of charlock.0 Every time the horses turned wild mustard Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned Upon the handles to say or ask a word, About the weather, next about the war.

10 Scraping the share he faced towards the wood, And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed Once more.

The blizzard felled the elm whose crest I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole, The ploughman said. "When will they take it away?"

15 "When the war's over." So the talk began� One minute and an interval of ten, A minute more and the same interval. "Have you been out?" "No." "And don't want to, perhaps?" "If I could only come back again, I should.

20 I could spare an arm. I shouldn't want to lose A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so, I should want nothing more. . . . Have many gone From here?" "Yes." "Many lost?" "Yes, a good few. Only two teams work on the farm this year.

25 One of my mates is dead. The second day In France they killed him. It was back in March, The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if He had stayed here we should have moved the tree." "And I should not have sat here. Everything 30 Would have been different. For it would have been Another world." "Ay, and a better, though If we could see all all might seem good." Then The lovers came out of the wood again: The horses started and for the last time 35 I watched the clods crumble and topple over After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

May 1916 1917

1. Also known as horse brass: a decorative brass 2. Ground plowed and harrowed but left uncropmedallion or emblem attached to a horse's harness. ped for a year or more.

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1960

SIEGFRIED SASSOON 1886-1967

Siegfried Sassoon was educated at Marlborough College and Clare College, Cambridge (which he left without taking a degree). His father came from a prosperous family of Sephardic Jews, his mother from Anglican English gentry. As a young man he divided his time between literary London and the life of a country gentleman. These worlds and the brutally different one of the trenches, in which he found himself in 1914, are memorably described in his classic Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) and its sequel, Memoirs of an Infantry1 Officer (1930).

He fought at Mametz Wood and in the Somme Offensive of July 1916 with such conspicuous courage that he acquired the Military Cross and the nickname Mad Jack. After a sniper's bullet went through his chest, however, he was sent back to England at the beginning of April 1917, and he began to take a different view of the war. Eventually, with courage equal to any he had shown in action, he made public a letter he sent to his commanding officer: "I am making this statement as an act of wilful defiance of military authority, because I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it." Sassoon continued: "I am a soldier, convinced that I am acting on behalf of soldiers. I believe that this war, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest." (For the full text, see "Representing the Great War" at Norton Literature Online.) The military authorities, rather than make a martyr of him, announced that he was suffering from shell shock and sent him to a hospital near Edinburgh, where he met and befriended Wilfred Owen.

Sassoon's public protest may have been smothered, but his poems, with their shock tactics, bitter irony, and masterly use of direct speech (learned from Thomas Hardy), continued to attack the old men of the army, Church, and government, whom he held responsible for the miseries and murder of the young. His poems satirically play on contrasts between the romanticization of war and the grim realities. They angrily flaunt the grisly effects of violence: in "The Rear-Guard" a corpse is "a soft unanswering heap" whose "fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound."

Sassoon returned to the Western Front in 1918, was wounded again, and was again sent home. An increasingly reclusive country gentleman, he continued to write poetry, but his style never regained the satiric pungency of the war poems that made him famous. His 1933 marriage failed because of his homosexuality; and after he became a Roman Catholic in 1957, he wrote mainly devotional poems.

'They'

The Bishop tells us: "When the boys come back

They will not be the same; for they'll have fought

In a just cause: they lead the last attack

On Anti-Christ; their comrades' blood has bought

5 New right to breed an honourable race,

They have challenged Death and dared him face to face.'

'We're none of us the same!' the boys reply.

'For George lost both his legs; and Bill's stone blind;

Poor Jim's shot through the lungs and like to die;

iu And Bert's gone syphilitic: you'll not find

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SASSOON: THE GENERAL / 1961

A chap who's served that hasn't found some change.' And the Bishop said: 'The ways of God are strange!'

Oct. 31, 1916 1917

The Rear-Guard

(Hindenburg Line, April 1917)'

Groping along the tunnel, step by step, He winked his prying torch with patching glare From side to side, and sniffed the unwholesome air. Tins, boxes, bottles, shapes too vague to know;

5 A mirror smashed, the mattress from a bed; And he, exploring fifty feet below The rosy gloom of battle overhead.

Tripping, he grabbed the wall; saw some one lie Humped at his feet, half-hidden by a rug,

10 And stooped to give the sleeper's arm a tug. 'I'm looking for headquarters.' No reply. 'God blast your neck!' (For days he'd had no sleep) 'Get up and guide me through this stinking place.' Savage, he kicked a soft unanswering heap,

15 And flashed his beam across the livid face Terribly glaring up, whose eyes yet wore Agony dying hard ten days before; And fists of fingers clutched a blackening wound.

Alone he staggered on until he found

20 Dawn's ghost that filtered down a shafted stair To the dazed, muttering creatures underground Who hear the boom of shells in muffled sound. At last, with sweat of horror in his hair, He climbed through darkness to the twilight air,

25 Unloading hell behind him step by step.

Apr. 22, 1917 1918

The General

'Good-morning; good-morning!' the General said When we met him last week on our way to the line. Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead, And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

!. In 1916 Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg sive "line" named after him. Its barbed-wire entan( 1847�1934) became commander in chief of the glements, deep trenches, and gun emplacements German armies and, for a time, blocked the Allied ran from Lens to Rheims. advance in western France with the massive defen

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1962 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

s 'He's a cheery old card,' grunted Harry to Jack As they slogged up to Arras1 with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Apr. 1917 1918

Glory of Women

You love us when we're heroes, home on leave, Or wounded in a mentionable place. You worship decorations; you believe That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.

5 You make us shells.1 You listen with delight. By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled. You crown our distant ardours while we fight, And mourn our laurelled2 memories when we're killed. You can't believe that British troops 'retire'

10 When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run, Trampling the terrible corpses�blind with blood.

O German mother dreaming by the fire, While you are knitting socks to send your son His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

1917 1918

Everyone Sang

Everyone suddenly burst out singing; And I was filled with such delight As prisoned birds must find in freedom, Winging wildly across the white

; Orchards and dark-green fields; on�on�and out of sight.

Everyone's voice was suddenly lifted; And beauty came like the setting sun: My heart was shaken with tears; and horror Drifted away . . . O, but Everyone

10 Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.

Apr. 1919 1919

1. A city in northern France, in the front line 1. Many women were recruited into munitions through much of the war. The British assault on factories during the war. the Western Front that began on April 9, 1917, 2. In ancient Greece and Rome, victorious genwas known as the Battle of Arras. erals were crowned with laurel wreaths.

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SASSOON: MEMOIRS OF AN INFANTRY OFFICER / 1963

On Passing the New Menin Gate1

Who will remember, passing through this Gate,

The unheroic Dead who fed the guns?

Who shall absolve the foulness of their fate,�

Those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones?

5 Crudely renewed, the Salient2 holds its own.

Paid are its dim defenders by this pomp;

Paid, with a pile of peace-complacent stone,

The armies who endured that sullen swamp.

Here was the world's worst wound. And here with pride

10 'Their name liveth for ever,' the Gateway claims.

Was ever an immolation so belied

As these intolerably nameless names?

Well might the Dead who struggled in the slime

Rise and deride this sepulchre0 of crime. tomb

1927-28 1928

From Memoirs of an Infantry Officer

[THE OPENING OF THE BATTLE OF THE SOMME]

On July [1916] the first the weather, after an early morning mist, was of the kind commonly called heavenly. Down in our frowsty cellar we breakfasted at six, unwashed and apprehensive. Our table, appropriately enough, was an empty ammunition box. At six-forty-five the final bombardment began, and there was nothing for us to do except sit round our candle until the tornado ended. For more than forty minutes the air vibrated and the earth rocked and shuddered. Through the sustained uproar the tap and rattle of machine-guns could be identified; but except for the whistle of bullets no retaliation came our way until a few 5.9' shells shook the roof of our dug-out. Barton and I sat speechless, deafened and stupefied by the seismic state of affairs, and when he lit a cigarette the match flame staggered crazily. Afterwards I asked him what he had been thinking about. His reply was 'Carpet slippers and Kettle- holders'. My own mind had been working in much the same style, for during that cannonading cataclysm the following refrain was running in my head:

They come as a hoon and a blessing to men,

The Something, the Owl, and the Waverley Pen.

For the life of me I couldn't remember what the first one was called. Was it the Shakespeare? Was it the Dickens? Anyhow it was an advertisement which I'd often seen in smoky railway stations. Then the bombardment lifted and lessened, our vertigo abated, and we looked at one another in dazed relief. Two Brigades of our Division were now going over the top on our right. Our

1. The names of 54,889 men are engraved on this nerable, being exposed to enemy fire from the front war memorial outside Brussels. and both sides. 2. Protruding part of fortifications or, as here, line 1. I.e., 5.9-caliber. of defensive trenches. Salients are particularly vul

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1964 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

Brigade was to attack 'when the main assault had reached its final objective'. In our fortunate role of privileged spectators Barton and I went up the stairs to see what we could from Kingston Road Trench. We left Jenkins crouching in a corner, where he remained most of the day. His haggard blinking face haunts my memory. He was an example of the paralysing effect which such an experience could produce on a nervous system sensitive to noise, for he was a good officer both before and afterwards. I felt no sympathy for him at the time, but I do now. From the support-trench, which Barton called 'our opera box', I observed as much of the battle as the formation of the country allowed, the rising ground on the right making it impossible to see anything of the attack towards Mametz. A small shiny black note-book contains my pencilled particulars, and nothing will be gained by embroidering them with afterthoughts. I cannot turn my field-glasses on to the past.2

7.45. The barrage is now working to the right of Fricourt and beyond. I can see the 21st Division advancing about three-quarters of a mile away on the left and a few Germans coming to meet them, apparently surrendering. Our men in small parties (not extended in line) go steadily on to the German front-line. Brilliant sunshine and a haze of smoke drifting along the landscape. Some Yorkshires3 a little way below on the left, watching the show and cheering as if at a football match. The noise almost as bad as ever. 9.30. Came back to dug-out and had a shave. 21st Division still going across the open, apparently without casualties. The sunlight flashes on bayonets as the tiny figures move quietly forward and disappear beyond mounds of trench debris. A few runners come back and ammunition parties go across. Trench-mortars are knocking hell out of Sunken Road trench and the ground where the Manchesters4 will attack soon. Noise not so bad now and very little retaliation. 9.50. Fricourt half-hidden by clouds of drifting smoke, blue, pinkish and grey. Shrapnel bursting in small bluish-white puffs with tiny flashes. The birds seem bewildered; a lark begins to go up and then flies feebly along, thinking better of it. Others flutter above the trench with querulous cries, weak on the wing. I can see seven of our balloons,5 on the right. On the left our men still filing across in twenties and thirties. Another huge explosion in Fricourt and a cloud of brown-pink smoke. Some bursts are yellowish. 10.5. I can see the Manchesters down in New Trench, getting ready to go over. Figures filing down the trench. Two of them have gone out to look at our wire gaps!6 Have just eaten my last orange. .. . I am staring at a sunlit picture of Hell, and still the breeze shakes the yellow weeds, and the poppies glow under Crawley Ridge where some shells fell a few minutes ago. Manchesters are sending forward some scouts. A bayonet glitters. A runner comes back across the open to their Battalion Headquarters, close here on the right. 21 st Division still trotting along the sky line toward La Boisselle. Barrage going strong to the right of Contalmaison Ridge. Heavy shelling toward Mametz. 1916 1930

2. The extracts that follow are edited versions of 4. Men of the Manchester regiment. the actual entries in Sassoon's diary. (See Siegfried 5. Long cables, tethering such balloons, prevented Sassoon: Diaries 1915-1918, ed. Rupert Hart-attacks by low-flying aircraft. Davis, 1983, pp. 82-83.) 6. Holes, made by shell fire, in the long coils of 3. Men of a Yorkshire regiment. barbed wire protecting the trenches.

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1965

IVOR GURNEY 1890-1937

Ivor Bertie Gumey was born in Gloucester and showed an early aptitude for music. After five years at the King's School, Gloucester, he won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music. He first acquired a modest reputation as a composer. After war broke out in August 1914, he enlisted; his battalion was sent to France the following year, and Gurney experienced the horrors of the Western Front. He was wounded in April 1917, and when in the hospital in Rouen, he sent some of his poems to friends in London. The resultant volume, Severn and Somme, was published that year. (The Severn is the English river at the head of whose estuary Gloucester is situated; it appears often in his poetry. The Somme is the northern French river that was the scene of some of the most murderous fighting in the war.) Gurney was returned to the front in time to take part in the grim Paschendale offensive of the summer of

1917. He suffered the effects of a poison-gas attack on August 22 and was sent home, where he moved from hospital to hospital. He returned to the Royal College of Music to study under the composer Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872�1958) and continued also to write poetry. His second book of poems, War's Embers, appeared in 1919. Gurney, now believed to have been schizophrenic, spent the last fifteen years of his life in mental asylums.

Gurney was a mere private in the war, unlike officers such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and his poems recapture with immediacy particular scenes and moments in the trenches. He was influenced by the poetry of Edward Thomas, with whom he shares a limpid directness, and Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose "terrible" sonnets are racked by despair. Though ruminating on traditional subjects such as landscape, nature, and mortality, Gurney dislocates these Georgian conventions through the compression, disharmony, and unredemptive language of his poetry. His "modern" techniques include syntactic contortions, colloquial diction, shifting rhythms and rhymes, and enjambments that accentuate the jarring experience of war (a body described as "that red wet / Thing" in "To His Love").

To His Love

He's gone, and all our plans Are useless indeed. We'll walk no more on Cotswold1 5 Where the sheep feed Quietly and take no heed. His body that was so quick Is not as you Knew it, on Severn river0 Under the blue a British river 10 Driving our small boat through. You would not know him now . . . But still he died 15 Nobly, so cover him over With violets of pride Purple from Severn side.

1. Range of hills in Gloucestershire, in western England.

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1966 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

Cover him, cover him soon! And with thick-set Masses of memoried flowers� Hide that red wet 20 Thing I must somehow forget.

1919

The Silent One

Who died on the wires,' and hung there, one of two� Who for his hours of life had chattered through Infinite lovely chatter of Bucks2 accent: Yet faced unbroken wires; stepped over, and went

s A noble fool, faithful to his stripes�and ended. But I weak, hungry, and willing only for the chance Of line�to fight in the line, lay down under unbroken Wires, and saw the flashes and kept unshaken, Till the politest voice�a finicking accent, said:

10 "Do you think you might crawl through there: there's a hole." Darkness, shot at: I smiled, as politely replied� "I'm afraid not, Sir." There was no hole no way to be seen Nothing but chance of death, after tearing of clothes. Kept flat, and watched the darkness, hearing bullets whizzing�

15 And thought of music�and swore deep heart's deep oaths (Polite to God) and retreated and came on again, Again retreated�and a second time faced the screen.

1954

1. The barbed wire protecting the front from 2. Buckinghamshire, in southern England, infantry attack. ISAAC ROSENBERG 1890-1918

Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol to a poor Jewish family that moved to London in 1897. There, at Stepney, he attended elementary schools until the age of fourteen, when he became apprenticed as an engraver in a firm of art publishers and attended evening classes at the Art School of Birkbeck College. His first ambition was to be a painter, and in 1911, when his apprenticeship was over, a group of three Jewish women provided the means for his studying at the Slade School of Art. His interest in writing poetry steadily developed, and with his sister's encouragement he circulated copies of his poems among members of London's literary set and gained a certain reputation, though neither his poetry nor his painting won him any material success. In 1912 he published Night and Day, the first of three pamphlets of poetry at his own expense. The other two were Youth (1915) and Moses, A Play (1916).

In 1915 Rosenberg enlisted in the army, and he was killed in action on April 1,

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ROSENBERG: LOUSE HUNTING / 1967

1918. After his death his reputation steadily grew as an unusually interesting and original poet, who, though he did not live to maturity, nevertheless broke new ground in imagery, rhythms, and the handling of dramatic effects. His poetry strangely amalgamates acerbic irony (the sardonic grin of a rat in "Break of Day in the Trenches") with lush, resonant, even biblical diction and imagery ("shrieking iron and flame / Hurled through still heavens"). The fierce apprehension of the physical reality of war, the exclamatory directness of the language, and the vivid sense of involvement distinguish his poems. Perhaps Rosenberg's working-class background had something to do with this vividness: like Ivor Gurney and David Jones, he served in the ranks.

Break of Day in the Trenches

The darkness crumbles away. It is the same old druid1 Time as ever, Only a live thing leaps my hand, A queer sardonic rat,

5 As I pull the parapet's2 poppy To stick behind my ear. Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew Your cosmopolitan sympathies. Now you have touched this English hand

10 You will do the same to a German Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure To cross the sleeping green between. It seems you inwardly grin as you pass Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,

15 Less chanced than you for life, Bonds to the whims of murder, Sprawled in the bowels of the earth, The torn fields of France. What do you see in our eyes

20 At the shrieking iron and flame Hurled through still heavens? What quaver�what heart aghast? Poppies whose roots are in man's veins Drop, and are ever dropping;

25 But mine in my ear is safe� Just a little white with the dust.

June 1916 1922

Louse Hunting

Nudes�stark and glistening, Yelling in lurid glee. Grinning faces And raging limbs Whirl over the floor one fire,

s For a shirt verminously busy

1. Ancient Celtic priest. 2. Wall protecting a trench.

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1968 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

Yon soldier tore from his throat, with oaths Godhead might shrink at, but not the lice. And soon the shirt was aflare Over the candle he'd lit while we lay.

10 Then we all sprang up and stript To hunt the verminous brood. Soon like a demons' pantomime The place was raging. See the silhouettes agape, 15 See the gibbering shadows Mixed with the battled arms on the wall. See gargantuan hooked fingers Pluck in supreme flesh To smutch0 supreme littleness. blacken, besmirch 2 0 See the merry limbs in hot Highland fling1 Because some wizard vermin Charmed from the quiet this revel When our ears were half lulled By the dark music 25 Blown from Sleep's trumpet. 1917 1922

Returning, We Hear the Larks

Sombre the night is. And though we have our lives, we know What sinister threat lurks there.

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know 5 This poison-blasted track opens on our camp� On a little safe sleep.

But hark! joy�joy�strange joy. Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks. Music showering on our upturned list'ning faces.

10 Death could drop from the dark As easily as song� But song only dropped, Like a blind man's dreams on the sand By dangerous tides,

15 Like a girl's dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there, Or her kisses where a serpent hides.

1917 1922

1. In wild Scottish dance.

.

ROSENBERG: DEAD MAN'S DUMP / 1969

Dead Man's Dump

The plunging limbers' over the shattered track Racketed with their rusty freight, Stuck out like many crowns of thorns, And the rusty stakes like sceptres old

5 To stay the flood of brutish men Upon our brothers dear.

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead But pained them not, though their bones crunched, Their shut mouths made no moan.

10 They lie there huddled, friend and foeman, Man born of man, and born of woman, And shells go crying over them From night till night and now.

Earth has waited for them,

is All the time of their growth Fretting for their decay: Now she has them at last! In the strength of their strength Suspended�stopped and held.

20 What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit? Earth! have they gone into you? Somewhere they must have gone, And flung on your hard back Is their soul's sack,

25 Emptied of God-ancestralled essences. Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

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,

so When the swift iron burning bee Drained the wild honey of their youth.

What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre, Walk, our usual thoughts untouched, Our lucky limbs as on ichor2 fed,

35 Immortal seeming ever? Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us, A fear may choke in our veins And the startled blood may stop.

1. Two-wheeled carts, here carrying barbed wire. 2. In Greek mythology the ethereal fluid that flowed in the veins of the gods.

.

197 0 / VOICE S FROM WORL D WA R 1 4045The air is loud with death, The dark air spurts with fire, The explosions ceaseless are. Timelessly now, some minutes past, These dead strode time with vigorous life, Till the shrapnel called "An end!" But not to all. In bleeding pangs Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home, Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts. 50A man's brains splattered on A stretcher-bearer's face; His shook shoulders slipped their load, But when they bent to look again The drowning soul was sunk too deep For human tenderness. 55They left this dead with the older dead, Stretched at the crossroads. 60Burnt black by strange decay Their sinister faces lie; The lid over each eye, The grass and coloured clay More motion have than they, Joined to the great sunk silences. Here is one not long dead; His dark hearing caught our far wheels, And the choked soul stretched weak hands 6570 To reach the living word the far wheels said, The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light, Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels Swift for the end to break, Or the wheels to break, Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight. 75Will they come? Will they ever come? Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules, The quivering-bellied mules, And the rushing wheels all mixed With his tortured upturned sight. So we crashed round the bend, We heard his weak scream, We heard his very last sound, And our wheels grazed his dead face. 1917 1922

.

1971

WILFRED OWEN 1893-1918

Wilfred Owen was brought up in the backstreets of Birkenhead and Shrewsbury, and on leaving school he took up a post as lay assistant to a country vicar. Removed from the influence of a devout mother, he became increasingly critical of the Church's role in society. His letters and poems of this period show an emerging awareness of the poor's sufferings and the first stirrings of the compassion that was to characterize his later poems about the Western Front. In 1913 he broke with the vicar and went to teach English in France.

For more than a year after the outbreak of war, Owen could not decide whether he ought to enlist. Finally he did, and from January to May 1917 he fought as an officer in the Battle of the Somme. Then, suffering from shell shock, he was sent to a hospital near Edinburgh, where he had the good fortune to meet Siegfried Sassoon, whose first fiercely realistic war poems had just appeared. The influence of Sassoon's satiric realism was a useful tonic to Owen's lush, Keatsian Romanticism. Throughout his months in the hospital, Owen suffered from the horrendous nightmares symptomatic of shell shock. The experience of battle, banished from his waking mind, erupted into his dreams and then into poems haunted with obsessive images of blinded eyes ("Dulce et Decorum Est") and the mouth of hell ("Miners" and "Strange Meeting"). The distinctive music of such later poems owes much of its power to Owen's mastery of alliteration, onomatopoeia, assonance, half-rhyme, and the para- rhyme that he pioneered. This last technique, the rhyming of two words with identical or similar consonants but differing, stressed vowels (such as groined / groaned, killed / cold, hall / hell), of which the second is usually the lower in pitch, produces effects of dissonance, failure, and unfulfillment that subtly reinforce his themes.

Echoing Dante, Shakespeare, Shelley, Keats, and the Bible, Owen puts literary and religious language into jarring new relationships with the absurdities of modern war experience. He recuperates but distorts the conventions of pastoral elegy, relocating them to scenes of terror, extreme pain, and irredeemable mass death.

In the year of life left to him after leaving the hospital in November 1917, Owen matured rapidly. Success as a soldier, marked by the award of the Military Cross, and as a poet, which had won him the recognition of his peers, gave him a new confidence. He wrote eloquently of the tragedy of young men killed in battle. In his later elegies a disciplined sensuality and a passionate intelligence find their fullest, most moving, and most memorable expression.

Owen was killed in action a week before the war ended.

Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? �Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons.0 prayers 5 No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells; Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,� The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells; And bugles calling for them from sad shires.0 counties

What candles may be held to speed them all?

10

Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes

.

1972 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

Shall shine the holy glimmers of goodbyes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall; Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds, And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

Sept.�Oct. 1917 1920

Apologia Pro Poemate Meo1

I, too, saw God through mud,� The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled. War brought more glory to their eyes than blood, And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.

5 Merry it was to laugh there� Where death becomes absurd and life absurder. For power was on us as we slashed bones bare Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.

10I, too, have dropped off Fear� Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon, And sailed my spirit surging light and clear Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn; And witnessed exultation�2 15Faces that used to curse me, scowl for scowl, Shine and lift up with passion of oblation,3 Seraphic0 for an hour; though they were foul. ecstatic

I have made fellowships� Untold of happy lovers in old song. For love is not the binding of fair lips

20 With the soft silk of eyes that look and long,

By Joy, whose ribbon slips,� But wound with war's hard wire whose stakes are strong; Bound with the bandage of the arm that drips; Knit in the webbing of the rifle-thong.

25 I have perceived much beauty In the hoarse oaths that kept our courage straight; Heard music in the silentness of duty; Found peace where shell-storms spouted reddest spate.

Nevertheless, except you share

30

With them in hell the sorrowful dark of hell,

1. This Latin title, meaning "Apology for My mirror which makes beautiful that which is dis- Poem," may have been prompted by that of Car-torted. .. . It exalts the beauty of that which is dinal Newman's Apologia Pro Vita Sua, "Apology most beautiful, and it adds beauty to that which is for His Life." Here an apology is a written vindi-most deformed; it marries exultation and horror." cation rather than a remorseful account. 3. Sacrifice offered to God. 2. Cf. Shelley, A Defence of Poetry: "Poetry is a

.

OWEN: MINERS / 1

Whose world is but the trembling of a flare And heaven but as the highway for a shell,

You shall not hear their mirth: You shall not come to think them well content 35 By any jest of mine. These men are worth Your tears. You are not worth their merriment.

Nov.�Dec. 1917 19

Miners1

There was a whispering in my hearth, A sigh of the coal, Grown wistful of a former earth It might recall.

5 I listened for a tale of leaves And smothered ferns, Frond-forests, and the low sly lives Before the fauns.

My fire might show steam-phantoms simmer 10 From Time's old cauldron, Before the birds made nests in summer, Or men had children.

But the coals were murmuring of their mine, And moans down there 15 Of boys that slept wry sleep, and men Writhing for air.

And I saw white bones in the cinder-shard, Bones without number. Many the muscled bodies charred, 20 And few remember.

I thought of all that worked dark pits Of war,2 and died Digging the rock where Death reputes Peace lies indeed.

25 Comforted years will sit soft-chaired, In rooms of amber; The years will stretch their hands, well-cheered By our life's ember;

1. Wrote a poem on the Colliery Disaster [of Jan. about 150 miners. 12, 1918, at Halmerend]: but I get mixed up with 2. Miners who dug tunnels under no-man'sthe War at the end. It is short, but oh! sour [Owen's in which to detonate mines beneath the en Jan. 14 letter to his mother]. The explosion killed trenches.

.

1974 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

The centuries will burn rich loads 30 With which we groaned, Whose warmth shall lull their dreaming lids, While songs are crooned; But they will not dream of us poor lads, Left in the ground.

Jan. 1918 1931

Dulce Et Decorum Est1

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

5 Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines2 that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!�An ecstasy of fumbling,

10 Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling, And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . . Dim, through the misty panes3 and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

15 In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

20 His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,�

25 My friend,4 you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

Oct. 1917�Mar. 1918 1920

1. The famous Latin tag [from Horace, Odes 4. Jessie Pope, to whom the poem was originally 3.2.13] means, of course, It is sweet and meet to to have been dedicated, published jingoistic war die for one's country. Sweet! And decorous! [Owen's poems urging young men to enlist. See her poems Oct. 16, 1917, letter to his mother]. in ''Representing the Great War" at Norton Liter2. I.e., 5.9-caliber shells. ature Online. 3. Of the gas mask's celluloid window.

.

OWEN: STRANGE MEETING / 1975

Strange Meeting1

It seemed that out of battle I escaped Down some profound dull tunnel,2 long since scooped Through granites which titanic wars had groined.0 grooved

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

5 Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred. Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared With piteous recognition in fixed eyes, Lifting distressful hands, as if to bless. And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall,�

io By his dead smile I knew we stood in Hell.

With a thousand pains that vision's face was grained; Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. "Strange friend," I said, "here is no cause to mourn."

15 "None," said that other, "save the undone years, The hopelessness. Whatever hope is yours, Was my life also; I went hunting wild After the wildest beauty in the world, Which lies not calm in eyes, or braided hair,

20 But mocks the steady running of the hour, And if it grieves, grieves richlier than here. For by my glee might many men have laughed, And of my weeping something had been left, Which must die now. I mean the truth untold,

25 The pity of war, the pity war distilled.3 Now men will go content with what we spoiled, Or, discontent, boil bloody, and be spilled. They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress. None will break ranks, through nations trek from progress. 30 Courage was mine, and I had mystery, Wisdom was mine, and I had mastery:

To miss the march of this retreating world Into vain citadels that are not walled. Then, when much blood had clogged their chariot-wheels,

35 I would go up and wash them from sweet wells, Even with truths that lie too deep for taint.4 I would have poured my spirit without stint But not through wounds; not on the cess5 of war. Foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were.

1. Cf. Shelley, The Revolt of Islam, lines 1828-32: 2. Cf. Sassoon's "The Rear-Guard" (p. 1961). 3. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The And one whose spear had pierced me, leaned

Poetry is in the pity [Owen's draft preface to his

beside,

poems],

With quivering lips and humid eyes;�and all

4. Cf. "Thoughts that do often lie too deep for Seemed like some brothers on a journey wide

tears," line 203 of William Wordsworth's "Ode:

Gone forth, whom now strange meeting did

Intimations of Immortality" (1807).

befall

5. Luck, as in the phrase bad cess to yon (may evil In a strange land.

befall you), and muck or excrement, as in the word The speaker of Owen's poem imagines his victim a cesspool. poet like himself.

.

1976 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

40 "I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold. Let us sleep now. . . ."

May [?] 1918 1920

Futility

Move him into the sun� Gently its touch awoke him once, At home, whispering of fields half-sown. Always it woke him, even in France,

5 Until this morning and this snow. If anything might rouse him now The kind old sun will know.

Think how it wakes the seeds� Woke once the clays of a cold star.

10 Are limbs, so dear achieved, are sides Full-nerved, still warm, too hard to stir? Was it for this the clay grew tall? �O what made fatuous sunbeams toil To break earth's sleep at all?

May 1918 1920

S.I.W.1 I will to the King, And offer him consolation in his trouble, For that man there has set his teeth to die, And being one that hates obedience, Discipline, and orderliness of life, I cannot mourn him.

w. B. YEATS2 I. The Prologue Patting goodbye, doubtless they told the lad He'd always show the Hun3 a brave man's face; Father would sooner him dead than in disgrace,� Was proud to see him going, aye, and glad,

s Perhaps his mother whimpered how she'd fret Until he got a nice safe wound to nurse. Sisters would wish girls too could shoot, charge, curse . . .

1. Military abbreviation for self-inflicted wound. describes the poet Seanchan's heroic resolve to die. 2. Irish poet and playwright (1865-1939). The 3. German soldier; in the fourth century a passage from the play The King's Threshold (1906) nomadic people feared for their military prowess.

.

OWEN: DISABLED / 1977

Brothers�would send his favourite cigarette. Each week, month after month, they wrote the same,

10 Thinking him sheltered in some Y.M. Hut,4 Because he said so, writing on his butt� rifle's stock Where once an hour a bullet missed its aim. And misses teased the hunger of his brain. His eyes grew old with wincing, and his hand

15 Reckless with ague.0 Courage leaked, as sand fever From the best sandbags after years of rain. But never leave, wound, fever, trench-foot, shock, Untrapped the wretch. And death seemed still withheld For torture of lying machinally shelled,

20 At the pleasure of this world's Powers who'd run amok.

He'd seen men shoot their hands, on night patrol. Their people never knew. Yet they were vile. 'Death sooner than dishonour, that's the style!' So Father said.

II. The Action One dawn, our wire patrol

25 Carried him. This time, Death had not missed. We could do nothing but wipe his bleeding cough. Could it be accident?�Rifles go off . . . Not sniped? No. (Later they found the English ball.)

III. The Poem It was the reasoned crisis of his soul

30 Against more days of inescapable thrall, Against infrangibly0 wired and blind trench wall unbreakably Curtained with fire, roofed in with creeping fire, Slow grazing fire, that would not burn him whole Rut kept him for death's promises and scoff,

35 And life's half-promising, and both their riling.

IV. The Epilogue With him they buried the muzzle his teeth had kissed, And truthfully wrote the mother, 'Tim died smiling.'

Sept. 1917, May 1918

Disabled

He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark, And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey, Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park

4. Hostel of the Young Men's Christian Association.

.

1978 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn, 5

Voices of play and pleasure after day, Till gathering sleep had mothered them from him.

About this time Town used to swing so gay When glow-lamps budded in the light blue trees, And girls glanced lovelier as the air grew dim,�

10 In the old times, before he threw away his knees. Now he will never feel again how slim Girls' waists are, or how warm their subtle hands. All of them touch him like some queer disease.

There was an artist silly for his face,

is For it was younger than his youth, last year. Now, he is old; his back will never brace; He's lost his colour very far from here, Poured it down shell-holes till the veins ran dry, And half his lifetime lapsed in the hot race

20 And leap of purple spurted from his thigh.

One time he liked a blood-smear down his leg, After the matches, carried shoulder-high.1 It was after football, when he'd drunk a peg,2 He thought he'd better join.�He wonders why.

25 Someone had said he'd look a god in kilts, That's why; and maybe, too, to please his Meg, Aye, that was it, to please the giddy jilts3 He asked to join. He didn't have to beg; Smiling they wrote his lie: aged nineteen years.4

30 Germans he scarcely thought of; all their guilt, And Austria's, did not move him. And no fears Of Fear came yet. He thought of jewelled hilts For daggers in plaid socks;5 of smart salutes; And care of arms; and leave; and pay arrears;

35 Esprit de corps;6 and hints for young recruits. And soon, he was drafted out with drums and cheers.

Some cheered him home, but not as crowds cheer Goal. Only a solemn man who brought him fruits Thanked him; and then enquired about his soul.

40 Now, he will spend a few sick years in institutes, And do what things the rules consider wise,

1. Cf. Housman's "To an Athlete Dying Young" service. (p. 1949, lines 1^1). 5. Kilted Scottish Highlanders used to carry a 2. Slang for a drink, usually brandy and soda. small ornamental dagger in the top of a stocking. 3. Capricious women. 6. Regard for the honor and interests of an orga4. The recruiting officers entered on his enlist-nization or, as here, a military unit. "Pay arrears": ment form his lie that he was nineteen years old back pay. and, therefore, above the minimum age for military

.

OWEN: LETTERS TO HIS MOTHER / 1979

And take whatever pity they may dole.

Tonight he noticed how the women's eyes

Passed from him to the strong men that were whole.

45 How cold and late it is! Why don't they come

And put him into bed? Why don't they come?

Oct. 1917�July 1918

From Owen's Letters to His Mother

16 January 1917

* # s I can see no excuse for deceiving you about these last 4 days. I have suffered seventh hell.

I have not been at the front.

I have been in front of it.

I held an advanced post, that is, a 'dug-out' in the middle of No Man's Land.

We had a march of 3 miles over shelled road then nearly 3 along a flooded trench. After that we came to where the trenches had been blown flat out and had to go over the top. It was of course dark, too dark, and the ground was not mud, not sloppy mud, but an octopus of sucking clay, 3, 4, and 5 feet deep, relieved only by craters full of water. Men have been known to drown in them. Many stuck in the mud & only got on by leaving their waders, equipment, and in some cases their clothes.

High explosives were dropping all around out, and machine guns spluttered every few minutes. But it was so dark that even the German flares did not reveal us.

Three quarters dead, I mean each of us % dead, we reached the dug-out, and relieved the wretches therein. I then had to go forth and find another dugout for a still more advanced post where I left 18 bombers. I was responsible for other posts on the left but there was a junior officer in charge.

My dug-out held 25 men tight packed. Water filled it to a depth of 1 or 2 feet, leaving say 4 feet of air.

One entrance had been blown in & blocked.

So far, the other remained.

The Germans knew we were staying there and decided we shouldn't.

Those fifty hours were the agony of my happy life.

Every ten minutes on Sunday afternoon seemed an hour.

I nearly broke down and let myself drown in the water that was now slowly rising over my knees.

Towards 6 o'clock, when, I suppose, you would be going to church, the shelling grew less intense and less accurate: so that I was mercifully helped to do my duty and crawl, wade, climb and flounder over No Man's Land to visit my other post. It took me half an hour to move about 150 yards.

I was chiefly annoyed by our own machine guns from behind. The seengseeng- seeng of the bullets reminded me of Mary's canary. On the whole I can support1 the canary better.

I. Tolerate. Mary: Owen's sister.

.

1980 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

In the Platoon on my left the sentries over the dug-out were blown to nothing. One of these poor fellows was my first servant whom I rejected. If I had kept him he would have lived, for servants don't do Sentry Duty. I kept my own sentries half way down the stairs during the more terrific bombardment. In spite of this one lad was blown down and, I am afraid, blinded.2

31 December 1917

Last year, at this time, (it is just midnight, and now is the intolerable instant of the Change) last year I lay awake in a windy tent in the middle of a vast, dreadful encampment. It seemed neither France nor England, but a kind of paddock where the beasts are kept a few days before the shambles. I heard the revelling of the Scotch troops, who are now dead, and who knew they would be dead. I thought of this present night, and whether I should indeed� whether we should indeed�whether you would indeed�but I thought neither long nor deeply, for I am a master of elision.

But chiefly I thought of the very strange look on all faces in that camp; an incomprehensible look, which a man will never see in England, though wars should be in England; nor can it be seen in any battle. But only in Etaples.3

It was not despair, or terror, it was more terrible than terror, for it was a blindfold look, and without expression, like a dead rabbit's. It will never be painted, and no actor will ever seize it. And to describe it, I think I must go back and be with them.

Preface1

This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.

Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War.2 The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may

be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.

(If I thought the letter of this book would last, I might have used proper names; but if the spirit of it survives�survives Prussia3�my ambition and those names will have achieved fresher fields than Flanders.4 . . . )

1918 1920

2. This incident prompted Owen's poem "The Sentry." 3. Until 1914, a fishing port of 5,800 inhabitants, Etaples and its surrounding hills housed 100,000 soldiers on their way to and from the front in 1917. 1. In May 1918 Wilfred Owen was posted in Ripon, North Yorkshire, England, and was preparing a book of his war poems. Around this time he drafted this unfinished preface, which was published posthumously, along with most of his poems, in Poems (1920), edited by his friend the poet Siegfried Sassoon. The text is reprinted from The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1985), ed. Jon Stall- worthy.

2. Cf. Jude 1.25: "To the only wise God our Saviour, be glory and majesty, dominion and power, both now and ever." 3. Dominant region of the German Empire until the end of World War I. 4. In western Belgium, site of the front line. The Canadian poet John McCrae (1872-1918) memorialized one devastating 1915 battle in his famous poem "In Flanders Fields."

.

1981

MAY WEDDERBURN CANNAN 1893-1973

Born and educated in Oxford, May Wedderburn Cannan was the daughter of the secretary to the delegates (or chief executive) of the Oxford University Press. At eighteen, she joined the Red Cross Voluntary Aid Detachment, and when England entered the war three years later, she was active in the Red Cross mobilization, setting up a hospital in a local school. During the early part of the war, she worked at Oxford University Press, continued her volunteer nursing, and spent a month as a volunteer worker in a soldiers' canteen in Rouen, France. In 1918 she joined the War Office in Paris to work in intelligence. Her fiance, Bevil Quiller-Couch, survived the devastating Battle of the Somme and the remainder of the war, only to die of pneumonia several months after the armistice. Canaan later worked at King's College, London, and at the Athenaeum Club as assistant librarian. She wrote three books of poems� In War Time (1917), The Splendid Days (1919), and The House of Hope (1923)� and a novel, The Lonely Generation (1934). Her unfinished autobiography, Grey Ghosts and Voices, was published posthumously in 1976.

"Bouen," with its echoes of G. K. Chesterton's incantatory "Tarantella" (beginning "Do you remember an Inn, / Miranda?"), voices emotions closer to those of Bupert Brooke's "The Soldier" than to any given expression by the other soldier poets in this section. In 1917, however, Cannan and Brooke spoke for what was then the majority. As she wrote in her autobiography: "Siegfried Sassoon wrote to the Press from France saying that the war was now a war of conquest and without justification, and declared himself to be a conscientious objector. .. . A saying went round, 'Went to the war with Bupert Brooke and came home with Siegfried Sassoon.' " Her own poems pose an alternative to protest and despair: "I had much admired some of Sassoon's verse but I was not coming home with him. Someone must go on writing for those who were still convinced of the right of the cause for which they had taken up arms."

Rouen

26 April-25 May 1915

Early morning over Rouen, hopeful, high, courageous morning, And the laughter of adventure and the steepness of the stair, And the dawn across the river, and the wind across the bridges, And the empty littered station and the tired people there.

5 Can you recall those mornings and the hurry of awakening, And the long-forgotten wonder if we should miss the way, And the unfamiliar faces, and the coming of provisions, And the freshness and the glory of the labour of the day?

Hot noontide over Rouen, and the sun upon the city,

10 Sun and dust unceasing, and the glare of cloudless skies, And the voices of the Indians and the endless stream of soldiers, And the clicking of the tatties,' and the buzzing of the flies.

Can you recall those noontides and the reek of steam and coffee, Heavy-laden noontides with the evening's peace to win,

I. Screens or mats hung in a doorway and kept wet to cool and freshen the air.

.

1982 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

And the little piles of Woodbines,2 and the sticky soda bottles, And the crushes3 in the "Parlour," and the letters coming in?

Quiet night-time over Rouen, and the station full of soldiers, All the youth and pride of England from the ends of all the earth; And the rifles piled together, and the creaking of the sword-belts, And the faces bent above them, and the gay, heart-breaking mirth.

Can I forget the passage from the cool white-bedded Aid Post Past the long sun-blistered coaches of the khaki Red Cross train To the truck train full of wounded, and the weariness and laughter, And "Good-bye, and thank-you, Sister,"4 and the empty yards again?

Can you recall the parcels that we made them for the railroad, Crammed and bulging parcels held together by their string, And the voices of the sergeants who called the Drafts5 together, And the agony and splendour when they stood to save the King?6

Can you forget their passing, the cheering and the waving, The little group of people at the doorway of the shed, The sudden awful silence when the last train swung to darkness, And the lonely desolation, and the mocking stars o'erhead?

Can you recall the midnights, and the footsteps of night watchers, Men who came from darkness and went back to dark again, And the shadows on the rail-lines and the all-inglorious labour, And the promise of the daylight firing blue the window-pane?

Can you recall the passing through the kitchen door to morning, Morning very still and solemn breaking slowly on the town, And the early coastways engines that had met the ships at daybreak, And the Drafts just out from England, and the day shift coming down?

Can you forget returning slowly, stumbling on the cobbles, And the white-decked Red Cross barges dropping seawards for the tide, And the search for English papers, and the blessed cool of water, And the peace of half-closed shutters that shut out the world outside?

Can I forget the evenings and the sunsets on the island, And the tall black ships at anchor far below our balcony, And the distant call of bugles, and the white wine in the glasses, And the long line of the street lamps, stretching Eastwards to the sea?

. . . When the world slips slow to darkness, when the office fire burns lower, My heart goes out to Rouen, Rouen all the world away; When other men remember I remember our Adventure And the trains that go from Rouen at the ending of the day.

2. Popular brand of cheap cigarette. 5. Groups of soldiers. 3. Crowded social gatherings. 6. I.e., to sing the British National Anthem, "God 4. Nurse. Save the King."

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CANNAN: GREY GHOSTS AND VOICES / 1983

From Grey Ghosts and Voices

I suppose it is difficult for anyone to realise now what "France" meant to us. In the second war I met a young man of the Left who assured me that Rupert Brooke's verse was of no account, phoney, because it was "impossible that anyone should have thought like that." I turned and rent him, saying that he was entitled to his own opinion of Rupert Brooke's verse, but not entitled to say that no one could have thought like that. How could he know how we had thought?�All our hopes and all our loves, and God knew, all our fears, were in France; to get to France, if only to stand on her soil, was something; to share, in however small a way, in what was done there was Heart's Desire.

I asked my Father1 could I take all my holidays in one and go for four weeks to France�I did not want holidays, I said, but I did want France. It was dark and we were walking home through the confines of Little Clarendon Street; my voice, I knew, shook; he took his pipe out of his mouth, halted his step for a moment and looked down at me. "Ah! France," he said, "France, yes I think you should go. We'll manage." I stammered thanks and we walked home in silence, understanding each other.

The Canteen was started at Rouen because Lord Brassey's yacht, The Sunbeam, had made two or three journeys there during the shortage of hospital ships bringing wounded home. Lady Mabelle Egerton, his daughter, looking round the desolate railway yards beyond the quays asked the R[ail]. Transport], Offficer]. if there was anything that could be done for the troops; drafts going up the line to Railhead, who had to spend a long day there, and sometimes a long night.

He said that the men brought their rations, including tea, but that there was no means of making hot water. (It was long before the days of another war when motorised infantry "brewed up" with their petrol cans)�Could she find some philanthropic person to take on the job? She could find no one�� and decided to do it herself, and so the canteen, later known affectionately to thousands of the B[ritish]. E [xpeditionary]. F[orce]. and the New Armies, as "the Coffee Shop" was born.

I had a passport. I packed. Left as little urgent work behind me as I could, and met Lucie, who I adored, in London. We travelled to Southampton and Hilary, who after sick leave had been posted to a home battalion of his regiment in Hampshire, came to dinner and we sat far into the night talking. He had been in France; I was going, and generously he treated me as if I was one of the fraternity. . . .

I had done nothing about a berth, and there was none to be had so I spent the night curled up, blissfully happy, on a coil of rope in the bow where no one noticed me, and woke in the early morning as we came into Le Havre. There were English soldiers in the streets, and in the cold spring sunshine a battery clattered by. We went up by train to Rouen. Someone had got us a couple of rooms in a small hotel with a restaurant below that overlooked the quays; those same broad quays where Bevil had disembarked. I fell into bed too happy to worry or to dream and went on duty after breakfast next morning.

Along the length of railway line ran a row of sheds with huge sliding doors.

1. Chief executive of the Oxford University Press, for which his daughter then worked.

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1984 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

In the first, and smaller one, was established a boiler room where enormous vats of hot water forever boiled. * * *

When the big trains were due in we opened the sliding doors of the sheds, the train doors banged and banged down the long line of the corridors and some 2,000 men would surge in. Barricaded behind our heavy table, and thankful for it when the pressure was heavy or a draft2 had somehow got hold of some drink, we handed out bowls of coffee and sandwiches, washed dirty bowls till the water in the tall vats was chocolate brown, and served again.

Someone would play the piano; Annie Laurie; Loch Lomond.3 Blurred lanterns lit the scene as best they might when it rained and our candles in the tills under the tables guttered in the wind. One was hot or horrid cold, harried, dirty, and one's feet ached with the stone floors. When the smaller drafts came one could distinguish faces, and regimental badges; have a word or two. * * *

When the whistle blew they stood to save the King4 and the roof came off the sheds. Two thousand men, maybe, singing�it was the most moving thing I knew. Then there'd be the thunder of seats pushed back, the stamp of army boots on the pave, and as the train went out they sang Tipperary.5

1976

2. Group of soldiers. Save the King." 3. Two Scottish songs. 5. The Irish song "It's a Long Way to Tipperary." 4. I.e., to sing the British National Anthem, "God ROBERT GRAVES 1895-1985

Robert von Ranke Graves was born in London of partly Anglo-Irish and partly German descent�his great-uncle was the distinguished German historian Leopold von Ranke. He left Charterhouse School to go immediately into the army, serving in World War I until he was invalided out in 1917. After the war he went to Oxford, took a B.Litt. degree, and in 1929 published Goodby e to All That, a vivid account of his experiences in the war, including his almost dying from severe chest wounds. His autobiography, as he put it, "paid my debts and enabled me to set up in Majorca as a writer." He lived on that Spanish island with the American poet Laura Riding�his muse and mentor�until in 1936 the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War forced them to leave. Their relationship soon ended, and after World War II he returned to Majorca, where he remained for the rest of his life.

Graves began as a Georgian poet, but he was a Georgian with a difference. The mingling of the colloquial and the visionary in his vocabulary, the accent of conversation underlying the regular rhythms of his stanzas, the tension between a Romantic indulgence in emotion and a cool appraisal of its significance�these are qualities found even in his early poetry. His best work combines the ironic and the imaginative in a highly individual manner, and he is also capable of a down-to-earth poetry, often mocking in tone and dealing with simple domestic facts or even the more annoying of personal relationships. He admired Thomas Hardy but chided Yeats, Pound, and Eliot for their obscurity and slovenliness, preferring that poetry be lucid, orderly, and civil.

Graves made his living by his prose, which is extensive and varied and includes, in

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GRAVES: GOODBYE TO ALL THAT / 198 5

addition to Goodbye to All That, a number of historical novels in which characters and events from the classical or biblical past are reconstructed in a modern idiom: the most notable of his historical novels are I, Claudius (1934), Claudius the God (1934), and King Jesus (1946). In The White Goddess (1948), a study of mythology drawn from a great variety of sources and devoted to what he considered the great female inspirational principle, Graves argued that only a return to goddess worship and an abandonment of patriarchal for matriarchal society could help modern poetry recover its lost force, clarity, and mythic wisdom.

From Goodbye to All That

[THE ATTACK ON HIGH WOOD]

Next evening, July 19th, we were relieved and told that we would be attacking High Wood,1 which could be seen a thousand yards away to the right at the top of a slope. High Wood, which the French called 'Raven Wood', formed part of the main German battle-line that ran along the ridge, with Delville Wood not far off on the German left. Two British brigades had already attempted it; in both cases a counter-attack drove them out again. The Royal Welch2 were now reduced by casualties to about four hundred strong, including transport, stretcher-bearers, cooks and other non-combatants. I took command of 'B' Company.

The German batteries were handing out heavy stuff, six- and eight-inch, and so much of it that we decided to move back fifty yards at a rush. As we did so, an eight-inch shell burst three paces behind me. I heard the explosion, and felt as though I had been punched rather hard between the shoulder-blades, but without any pain. I took the punch merely for the shock of the explosion; but blood trickled into my eye and, turning faint, I called to Moodie: 'I've been hit.' Then I fell. A minute or two before I had got two very small wounds on my left hand; and in exactly the same position as the two that drew blood from my right hand during the preliminary bombardment at Loos.' This I took as a lucky sign, and for further security repeated to myself a line of Nietzsche's, in French translation:

Now, tn ne me -pens pas tuer!4

One piece of shell went through my left thigh, high up, near the groin; I must have been at the full stretch of my stride to escape emasculation. The wound over the eye was made by a little chip of marble, possibly from one of the Bazentin5 cemetery headstones. [Later, I had it cut out, but a smaller piece has since risen to the surface under my right eyebrow, where I keep it for a souvenir.] This, and a finger-wound which split the bone, probably came from another shell bursting in front of me. But a piece of shell had also gone in two inches below the point of my right shoulder-blade and came out through my chest two inches above the right nipple.

]. The battle for High Wood, one of the bloodiest 3. The Battle of Loos, September 1915. fights of the Somme Offensive, began on July 14, 4. No, you cannot kill me. Friedrich Nietzsche 1916, and was won by the British on September (1844-1900), German philosopher. 15, 1916. 5. The Battle of Bazentin Ridge, July 14-17,

2. Royal Welch Fusiliers. 1916, part of the Somme Offensive.

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1986 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

My memory of what happened then is vague. Apparently Dr Dunn came up through the barrage with a stretcher-party, dressed my wound, and got me down to the old German dressing-station at the north end of Mametz Wood.6 1 remember being put on the stretcher, and winking at the stretcher-bearer sergeant who had just said: 'Old Gravy's got it, all right!'They laid my stretcher in a corner of the dressing-station, where I remained unconscious for more than twenty-four hours.

Late that night, Colonel Crawshay came back from High Wood and visited the dressing-station; he saw me lying in the corner, and they told him I was done for. The next morning, July 21 st, clearing away the dead, they found me still breathing and put me on an ambulance for Heilly, the nearest field hospital. The pain of being jolted down the Happy Valley, with a shell hole at every three or four yards of the road, woke me up. I remember screaming. But back on the better roads I became unconscious again. That morning, Craws- hay wrote the usual formal letters of condolence to the next-of-kin of the six or seven officers who had been killed. This was his letter to my mother:

22.7.16

Dear Mrs Graves,

I very much regret to have to write and tell you your son has died of

wounds. He was very gallant, and was doing so well and is a great loss.

He was hit by a shell and very badly wounded, and died on the way

down to the base I believe. He was not in bad pain, and our doctor man

aged to get across and attend to him at once.

We have had a very hard time, and our casualties have been large.

Believe me you have all our sympathy in your loss, and we have lost a very

gallant soldier.

Please write to me if I can tell you or do anything.

Yours sincerely,

C. Crawshay, Lt.-Col. Then he made out the official casualty list�a long one, because only eighty men were left in the battalion�and reported me 'died of wounds'. Heilly lay on the railway; close to the station stood the hospital tents with the red cross prominently painted on the roofs, to discourage air-bombing. Fine July weather made the tents insufferably hot. I was semi-conscious now, and aware of my lung-wound through a shortness of breath. It amused me to watch the little bubbles of blood, like scarlet soap-bubbles, which my breath made in escaping through the opening of the wound. The doctor came over to my bed. I felt sorry for him; he looked as though he had not slept for days.

I asked him: 'Can I have a drink?'

'Would you like some tea?'

I whispered: 'Not with condensed milk.'

He said, most apologetically: 'I'm afraid there's no fresh milk.'

Tears of disappointment pricked my eyes; I expected better of a hospital

behind the lines.

'Will you have some water?'

6. Recently captured by the British.

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GRAVES: THE DEAD FOX HUNTER / 1987

'Not if it's boiled.'

'It is boiled. And I'm afraid I can't give you anything alcoholic in your present condition.'

'Some fruit then?'

'I have seen no fruit for days.'

Yet a few minutes later he returned with two rather unripe greengages.7 In whispers I promised him a whole orchard when I recovered.

The nights of the 22nd and 23rd were horrible. Early on the morning of the 24th, when the doctor came round the ward, I said: 'You must send me away from here. This heat will kill me.' It was beating on my head through the canvas.

'Stick it out. Your best chance is to lie here and not to be moved. You'd not reach the Base alive.'

'Let me risk the move. I'll be all right, you'll see.'

Half an hour later he returned. 'Well, you're having it your way. I've just got orders to evacuate every case in the hospital. Apparently the Guards have been in it up at Delville Wood, and they'll all be coming down tonight.' I did not fear that I would die, now�it was enough to be honourably wounded and bound for home.

A brigade-major, wounded in the leg, who lay in the next bed, gave me news of the battalion. He looked at my label and said: 'I see you're in the Second Royal Welch. I watched your Fligh Wood show through field-glasses. The way your battalion shook out into artillery formation, company by company�with each section of four or five men in file at fifty yards interval and distance� going down into the hollow and up the slope through the barrage, was the most beautiful bit of parade-ground drill I've ever seen. Your company officers must have been superb.' Yet one company at least had started without a single officer. When I asked whether they had held the wood, he told me: 'They hung on to the near end. I believe what happened was that the Public Schools Battalion came away at dark; and so did most of the Scotsmen. Your chaps were left there more or less alone for some time. They steadied themselves by singing. Afterwards the chaplain�R. C.8 of course�Father McCabe, brought the Scotsmen back. Being Glasgow Catholics, they would follow a priest where they wouldn't follow an officer. The centre of the wood was impossible for either the Germans or your fellows to hold�a terrific concentration of artillery on it. The trees were splintered to matchwood. Late that night a brigade of the Seventh Division relieved the survivors; it included your First Battalion.'

1929, 1957

The Dead Fox Hunter

(In memory of Captain A. L. Samson, 2nd Battalion Royal Welch Fusiliers, killed near CuinchySept. 25th, 1915)

We found the little captain at the head; His men lay well-aligned. We touched his hand�stone cold�and he was dead,

7. Type of plum. 1. Village in northern France. 8. Roman Catholic.

.

198 8 / VOICE S FRO M WORL D WA R 1 5And they, all dead behind, Had never reached their goal, but they died well; They charged in line, and in the same line fell. 10The well-known rosy colours of his face Were almost lost in grey. We saw that, dying and in hopeless case, For others' sake that day He'd smothered all rebellious groans: in death His fingers were tight clenched between his teeth. 15For those who live uprightly and die true Heaven has no bars or locks, And serves all taste . . . or what's for him to do Up there, but hunt the fox? Angelic choirs? No, Justice must provide For one who rode straight and in hunting died. 20So if Heaven had no Hunt before he came, Why, it must find one now: If any shirk and doubt they know the game, There's one to teach them how: And the whole host of Seraphim" completeMust jog in scarlet to his opening Meet. angels 191 6 Recalling War s10Entrance and exit wounds are silvered clean, The track aches only when the rain reminds. The one-legged man forgets his leg of wood, The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm. The blinded man sees with his ears and hands As much or more than once with both his eyes. Their war was fought these twenty years ago And now assumes the nature-look of time, As when the morning traveller turns and views His wild night-stumbling carved into a hill. isWhat, then, was war? No mere discord of flags But an infection of the common sky That sagged ominously upon the earth Even when the season was the airiest May. Down pressed the sky, and we, oppressed, thrust out Boastful tongue, clenched fist and valiant yard. Natural infirmities were out of mode, For Death was young again: patron alone Of healthy dying, premature fate-spasm.

.

DAVI D JONE S / 198 9 20 Fear made fine bed-fellows. Sick with delight At life's discovered transitoriness, Our youth became all-flesh and waived the mind. Never was such antiqueness of romance, Such tasty honey oozing from the heart. 25 And old importances came swimming back� Wine, meat, log-fires, a roof over the head, A weapon at the thigh, surgeons at call. Even there was a use again for God� A word of rage in lack of meat, wine, fire, 30 In ache of wounds beyond all surgeoning. War was return of earth to ugly earth, War was foundering" of sublimities, collapsing Extinction of each happy art and faith By which the world had still kept head in air, 35 Protesting logic or protesting love, Until the unendurable moment struck� The inward scream, the duty to run mad. And we recall the merry ways of guns� Nibbling the walls of factory and church 40 Like a child, piecrust; felling groves of trees Like a child, dandelions with a switch. Machine-guns rattle toy-like from a hill, Down in a row the brave tin-soldiers fall: A sight to be recalled in elder days 45 When learnedly the future we devote To yet more boastful visions of despair. 193 5 193 8

DAVID JONES 1895-1974

David Jones was born in Brockley, Kent, son of a Welsh father and an English mother, and studied at the Camberwell School of Art before joining the army in January 1915 to serve as a private soldier until the end of World War I�service that provided the material for his modern epic of war, In Parenthesis. He attended Westminster Art School after the war and subsequently made a name for himself as an illustrator, engraver, and watercolorist. In 1921 he joined the Roman Catholic Church and a few months later began working with the Catholic stone carver and engraver Eric Gill. Jones's Welsh and English origins, his visual sensitivity as an artist, and his interest in Catholic liturgy and ritual can be seen in his literary work, which includes the obscure but powerful long religious poem The Anathemata (1952) and The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments (1973).

In Parenthesis, Jones's first literary work, was published in 1937 and won the Hawthornden Prize. Its seven parts, combining prose and poetry, evoke the activities of a

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1990 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

British infantry unit from its training in England to its participation in the Somme Offensive of July 1916. The work proceeds chronologically, beginning with a battalion parade in England before embarkation for France, moving to the preparation for the offensive, and concluding when the protagonist Private John Ball's platoon is destroyed. Far from a straightforward narrative, since every contemporary detail is associated with the heroic past, the poem echoes in carefully patterned moments Shakespeare's history plays, Malory's accounts of Arthurian quests, Welsh epics of heroic and futile battles, the Bible, and Catholic liturgy. Even so, In Parenthesis avoids the traditional epic concentration on high-ranking heroes and builds its narrative around ordinary characters, both English and Welsh. Identified with historical or mythological figures, they�Mr. Jenkins, Sergeant Snell, Corporal Quilter, Lance- Corporal Lewis, and John Ball, who is wounded in the leg, as Jones was at the First Battle of the Somme�are presented in vivid silhouettes and sudden stabs of personal memory.

Begun a decade after the armistice, In Parenthesis could not have been written when Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon wrote their war poems. Jones profits from the ways in which James Joyce's Ulysses and T. S. Eliot's Waste Land drew on mythology and ritual and thus gained depth and scope. He has combined the pity for and irony of the soldier that we see in Owen with the distanced, more elaborately illustrated, less immediately personal style of Eliot's long poem. And like Eliot, he introduces notes to help the reader follow the mythological and literary references. Unique among the soldier poets, Jones combines the immediacy of war poetry with high modernism's strategies of formal discontinuity and rich allusiveness. The poem conveys the texture of war experience through comic or sardonic references to popular soldiers' songs, to follies and vices and vanities and every kind of trivial behavior. At the same time the poem is multilayered and densely textured, its complex allusions to history, ritual, and heroic myth infusing the characters and the war with mysterious meaning.

The extracts printed here are, first, from Jones's preface, in which he explains his intention and method, and, second, from part 7, describing events during and after the attack. At the beginning of the last section quoted, Ball is wounded and crawling toward the rear through the mingled bodies of British and German soldiers. In his fevered imagination he sees the Queen of the Woods distributing flowers to the dead. He wonders whether he can continue carrying his rifle, which he finally leaves under an oak tree. (At the end of the medieval French epic Chanson de Roland [Song of Roland], the dying Boland tries in vain to shatter his sword, Durendal, to prevent its being taken as a trophy by the Saracens; he finally puts it under his body.) In the end Ball lies still under the oak beside a dead German and a dead Englishman, hearing the reserves coming forward to continue the battle.

FROM IN PARENTHESIS

From Preface

This writing has to do with some things I saw, felt, & was part of. The period covered begins early in December 1915 and ends early in July 1916. The first date corresponds to my going to France. The latter roughly marks a change in the character of our lives in the Infantry on the West Front. From then onward things hardened into a more relentless, mechanical affair, took on a more sinister aspect. The wholesale slaughter of the later years, the conscripted

.

JONES:IN PARENTHESIS / 1991

levies filling the gaps in every file of four, knocked the bottom out of the intimate, continuing, domestic life of small contingents of men, within whose structure Roland could find, and, for a reasonable while, enjoy, his Oliver.1 In the earlier months there was a certain attractive amateurishness, and elbowroom for idiosyncrasy that connected one with a less exacting past. The period of the individual rifle-man, of the "old sweat" of the Boer campaign, the "Bairns-father"2 war, seemed to terminate with the Somme battle. There were, of course, glimpses of it long after�all through in fact�but it seemed never quite the same. * * *

My companions in the war were mostly Londoners with an admixture of Welshmen, so that the mind and folk-life of those two differing racial groups are an essential ingredient to my theme. Nothing could be more representative. These came from London. Those from Wales. Together they bore in their bodies the genuine tradition of the Island of Britain, from Bendigeid Vran to Jingle and Marie Lloyd. These were the children of Doll Tearsheet. Those are before Caractacus3 was. Both speak in parables, the wit of both is quick, both are natural poets; yet no two groups could well be more dissimilar. It was curious to know them harnessed together, and together caught in the toils of "good order and military discipline"; to see them shape together to the remains of an antique regimental tradition, to see them react to the few things that united us�the same jargon, the same prejudice against "other arms" and against the Staff, the same discomforts, the same grievances, the same maims, the same deep fears, the same pathetic jokes; to watch them, oneself part of them, respond to the war landscape; for I think the day by day in the Waste Land, the sudden violences and the long stillnesses, the sharp contours and unformed voids of that mysterious existence, profoundly affected the imaginations of those who suffered it. It was a place of enchantment. It is perhaps best described in Malory,4 book iv, chapter 15�that landscape spoke "with a grimly voice."

I suppose at no time did one so much live with a consciousness of the past, the very remote, and the more immediate and trivial past, both superficially and more subtly. No one, I suppose, however much not given to association, could see infantry in tin-hats, with ground-sheets over their shoulders, with sharpened pine-stakes in their hands, and not recall

.. . or may we cram,

Within this wooden O , . . 5

But there were deeper complexities of sight and sound to make ever present

the pibble pabble in Pompey's camp.6 Every man's speech and habit of mind were a perpetual showing: now of Napier's expedition, now of the Legions at the Wall, now of "train-band captain," now of Jack Cade, of John Ball, of the commons in arms. Now of High

1. Roland's close friend and companion-at-arms in the medieval French epic Chanson de Roland (Song of Roland). 2. Bruce Bairnsfather (1888-1959), English cartoonist and journalist, best-known for his sketches of life in the trenches during World War I. 3. Caractacus or Caradoc, king of the Silures in the west of Britain during the reign of Roman emperor Claudius. He was taken to Rome as a prisoner in 51 C.E., but was pardoned by Claudius, who was impressed by his nobility of spirit. Bendigeid Vran, hero in Welsh heroic legend. Alfred Jingle, character in Dickens's Pickwick Papers. Marie Lloyd (real name Matilda Alice Victoria Wood), English music-hall comedienne. Doll Tearsheet, prostitute in Shakespeare's 2 Henry IV.

4. Sir Thomas Malory, author of Morte Darthnr. 5. Shakespeare's Henry V, prologue, lines 12�13. The "wooden O" is the stage of the theater. 6. Cf. Henry V 4.1.71.

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1992 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

Germany, of Dolly Gray, of Bullcalf, Wart and Poins; of Jingo largenesses, of things as small as the Kingdom of Elmet; of Wellington's raw shire recruits, of ancient border antipathies, of our contemporary, less intimate, larger unities, of John Barleycorn, of "sweet Sally Frampton." Now of Coel Hen�of the Celtic cycle that lies, a subterranean influence as a deep water troubling, under every tump7 in this Island, like Merlin8 complaining under his big rock.9 * 4 *

* * $

This writing is called In Parenthesis because I have written it in a kind of space between�I don't know between quite what�but as you turn aside to do something; and because for us amateur soldiers (and especially for the writer, who was not only amateur, but grotesquely incompetent, a knocker- over of piles, a parade's despair) the war itself was a parenthesis�how glad we thought we were to step outside its brackets at the end of '18�and also because our curious type of existence here is altogether in parenthesis.

D.J. From Part 7: The Five Unmistakeable Marks1

Gododdin I demand thy support. It is our duty to sing: a meeting place has been found.2

* * �

The gentle slopes are green to remind you of South English places, only far wider and flatter spread and grooved and harrowed criss-cross whitely and the disturbed subsoil heaped up albescent.3

Across upon this undulated board of verdure4 chequered bright when you look to left and right small, drab, bundled pawns severally make effort moved in tenuous line and if you looked behind�the next wave came slowly, as successive surfs creep in to dissipate on flat shore; and to your front, stretched long laterally,

7. Mound or tumulus. beneath everything. 8. The powerful enchanter of the Arthurian leg-1. Carroll's Hunting of the Snark, Fit the 2nd verse ends. 15 [Jones's note]. Lewis Carroll's mock-heroic 9. The mass of references here provide a wide area nonsense poem concerns the hunting of the eluof historical and literary association, beginning sive animal Snark, which may be known by "five with Henry V and going on to refer to Sir William unmistakable marks." A reference to the five Napier, who fought in the Peninsular War and wounds of the crucified Christ may also be later wrote a famous history of that campaign; to intended. the Roman legions who manned the Great Wall 2. From Y Gododdin, early Welsh epical poem built by the Romans in Britain; to Jack Cade, who attributed to Aneirin (6th century); commemorates led an unsuccessful popular revolt against the mis-raid of 300 Welsh of Gododdin (the territory of the rule of Henry VI in 1450, and John Ball, a leader Otadini located near the Firth of Forth) into of the Peasants' Revolt of 1381; to a number of English kingdom of Deira. Describes the ruin of English ballads and popular songs and to charac-this 300 in battle at Catraeth (perhaps Catterick ters in Henry TV; to the ancient British kingdom of in Yorkshire). Three men alone escaped death, Elmet in southwest Yorkshire, finally overthrown including the poet, who laments his friends by Anglo-Saxon invaders early in the 7th century; [Jones's note]. to Wellington's "raw shire recruits," who helped 3. Becoming white. win the Battle of Waterloo; and concluding with a 4. Green vegetation. reference to the old Celtic British myths that lie

.

JONES: PART 7: THE FIVE UNMISTAKEABLE MARKS / 1993

and receded deeply, the dark wood.

And now the gradient runs more flatly toward the separate scarred saplings, where they make fringe for the interior thicket and you take notice.

There between the thinning uprights at the margin straggle tangled oak and flayed sheeny beech-bole, and fragile birch

whose silver queenery is draggled and ungraced and June shoots lopt and fresh stalks bled

runs the Jerry5 trench. And cork-screw stapled trip-wire to snare among the briars and iron warp with bramble weft6 with meadow-sweet and lady-smock for a fair camouflage.

Mr Jenkins half inclined his head to them�he walked just barely in advance of his platoon and immediately to the left of Private Ball.

He makes the conventional sign and there is the deeply inward effort of spent men who would make response for him, and take it at the double. He sinks on one knee and now on the other, his upper body tilts in rigid inclination this way and back; weighted lanyard7 runs out to full tether,

swings like a pendulum

and the clock run down. Lurched over, jerked iron saucer over tilted brow, clampt unkindly over lip and chin nor no ventaille8 to this darkening

and masked face lifts to grope the air and so disconsolate; enfeebled fingering at a paltry strap� buckle holds, holds him blind against the morning.

Then stretch still where weeds pattern the chalk predella''� where it rises to his wire1�and Sergeant T. Quilter takes over.

� � *

It's difficult with the weight of the rifle. Leave it�under the oak. Leave it for a salvage-bloke2 let it lie bruised for a monument

5. British army slang for "German" in both world 8. Hinged visor of a helmet. wars. 9. A platform or shelf below or behind an altar. 6. Warp and weft are the horizontal and vertical 1. The approach to the German trenches here threads of woven cloth. rose slightly, in low chalk ridges [Jones's note]. 7. Short cord (here "weighted" by a whistle). 2. Man (slang).

.

1994 / VOICES FROM WORLD WAR 1

dispense the authenticated fragments to the faithful. It's the thunder-besom for us it's the bright bough borne it's the tensioned yew for a Genoese jammed arbalest3 and a scarlet square for a mounted mareschal,4 it's that county-mob back to back.5 Majuba mountain and Mons Cherubim6 and spreaded mats for Sydney Street East,7 and come to Bisley for a Silver Dish.8 It's R.S.M. O'Grady9 says, it's the soldier's best friend if you care for the working parts and let us be 'aving those springs released smartly in Company billets on wet forenoons and clickerty-click and one up the spout and you men must really cultivate the habit of treating this weapon with the very greatest care and there should be a healthy rivalry among you�it should be a matter of very proper pride and

Marry it man! Marry it! Cherish her, she's your very own.

Coax it man coax it�it's delicately and ingeniously made�it's an instrument of precision�it costs us tax-payers, money�I want you men to remember that.

Fondle it like a granny�talk to it�consider it as you would a friend� and when you ground these arms she's not a rooky's gas-pipe for greenhorns to tarnish.1

You've known her hot and cold. You would choose her from among many. You know her by her bias, and by her exact error at 300, and by the deep scar at the small, by the fair flaw in the grain, above the lower sling-swivel� but leave it under the oak.

* $ *

The secret princes between the leaning trees have diadems given them. Life the leveller hugs her impudent equality�she may proceed at once to less discriminating zones.

The Queen of the Woods has cut bright boughs of various flowering. These knew her influential eyes. Her awarding hands can pluck for each their fragile prize.

She speaks to them according to precedence. She knows what's due to this elect society. She can choose twelve gentle-men. She knows who is most lord between the high trees and on the open down.

Some she gives white berries

some she gives brown

3. A powerful medieval crossbow. is said that in 'The Battle of Sydney Street' under 4. Marshal (French). Mr. Churchill's Home Secretaryship mats were 5. The Gloucestershire Regiment, during an spread on the pavement for troops firing from the action near Alexandria, in 1801, about-turned prone position" [Jones's note], their rear rank and engaged the enemy back to 8. At Bisley marksmen compete annually in rifle back [Jones's note]. shooting for trophies such as "a Silver Dish." 6. The British were defeated by the Boers on 9. "R.S.M.": regimental sergeant major. "R.S.M. Majuba Hill on February 27, 1881. The "Angels of O'Grady," according to Jones's note, "refers to Mons" were angels (varying in number from two to mythological personage figuring in Army exercises, a platoon) widely believed to have helped the Brit-the precise describing of which would be tedious. ish repel an attack at Mons by superior German Anyway these exercises were supposed to foster forces on August 23, 1914. alertness in dull minds�and were a curious blend 7. In what became known as the Siege or Battle of the parlour game and military drill." of Sydney Street, Winston Churchill, when he was 1. I have employed here only such ideas as were home secretary in 1911, directed military opera-common to the form of speech affected by Instructions in London against a group of anarchists. "It tors in Musketry [Jones's note].

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JONES: PART 7: THE FIVE UNMISTAKEABLE MARKS / 1995

Emil has a curious crown it's

made of golden saxifrage.

Fatty wears sweet-briar, he will reign with her for a thousand years.

For Balder she reaches high to fetch his.

Ulrich smiles for his myrtle wand.

That swine Lillywhite has daisies to his chain�you'd hardly credit it.

She plaits torques2 of equal splendour for Mr Jenkins and Billy Crower.

Hansel with Gronwy share dog-violets for a palm, where they lie in serious embrace beneath the twisted tripod.

Sion gets St John's Wort�that's fair enough.

Dai Great-coat,3 she can't find him anywhere�she calls both high and low, she had a very special one for him. Among this July noblesse she is mindful of December wood�when the trees of the forest beat against each other because of him.

She carries to Aneirin-in-the-nullah4 a rowan5 sprig, or the glory of Guenedota.6 You couldn't hear what she said to him, because she was careful for the Disciplines of the Wars.

At the gate of the wood you try a last adjustment, but slung so, it's an impediment, it's of detriment to your hopes, you had best be rid of it�the sagging webbing and all and what's left of your two fifty7�but it were wise to hold on to your mask.

You're clumsy in your feebleness, you implicate your tin-hat rim with the slack sling of it. Let it lie for the dews to rust it, or ought you to decently cover the working parts. Its dark barrel, where you leave it under the oak, reflects the solemn star that rises urgently from Cliff Trench. It's a beautiful doll for us it's the Last Reputable Arm. But leave it�under the oak. leave it for a Cook's tourist to the Devastated Areas and crawl as far as you can and wait for the bearers.8

1937

2. Collars, like those of gold worn by warriors of Y Gododdin.

3. Character whose first name is the familiar Welsh form of David, alluding to a figure in Malory's Morte Darthur. 4. A river, stream, or riverbed. 5. Also called mountain ash, a tree with magical properties in Celtic folklore. 6. The northwest parts of Wales. The last king of Wales, Llywelyn, was killed there in 1282. Jones refers to his death in another note on this part of Wales. He adds: "His [Llywelyn's] contemporary, Gruffydd ap yr Ynad Coch, sang of his death: The voice of lamentation is heard in everyplace . . . the course of nature is changed . . . the trees of the forest furiously rush against each other.' "

7. Two hundred and fifty rounds of ammunition. 8. This may appear to be an anachronism, but I remember in 1917 discussing with a friend the possibilities of tourist activity if peace ever came. I remember we went into details and wondered if the unexploded projectile lying near us would go up under a holiday-maker, and how people would stand up to be photographed on our parapets. I recall feeling very angry about this, as you do if you think of strangers ever occupying a house you live in, and which has, for you, particular associations [Jones's note].

.

Modernist Manifestos

At the beginning of the twentieth century, traditions and boundaries of many kinds were under assault across the Western world. Rapid developments in science and technology were transforming the texture of everyday life and conceptions of the universe; psychology, anthropology, and philosophy were challenging old ways of conceiving the human mind and religion; empire, migration, and city life were forcing together peoples of diverse origins. This dizzying pace of change, this break with tradition, this eruption of modernity can also be seen in the cutting-edge art and literature of the time. Avant-garde modernism caught fire in Europe in the decade before World War I. The Spanish expatriate artist Pablo Picasso's landmark cubist painting of 1907, Les Demoiselles d Avignon (see the color insert), shattered centuries of artistic convention. Two years later the Italian poet F. T. Marinetti published his first futurist manifesto in the French journal Le Figaro, blasting the dead weight of "museums, libraries, and academies," glorifying "the beauty of speed." Written from 1911 to 1913, the Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky's ballet Le Sacre du Printemps (The Rite of Spring) marked such a daring departure from harmonic and rhythmic traditions in Western classical music that its first performance, in Paris, sparked a riot. Like Picasso, Marinetti, and Stravinsky, other avant-garde modernists� advocates of radical newness in the arts�exploded conventions in music, painting, fiction, poetry, and other genres, opening up new formal and thematic possibilities for the twentieth century.

In just a few years the rebellious energies and convention-defying activities of avantgarde modernism swept through the major European cities, from Moscow and Milan to Munich, Paris, and London. Some of the leading figures of avant-garde modernism published manifestos, public declarations explaining, justifying, and promoting their ambitions and revolutionary views. The modernists were not the first artists to adapt the manifesto from the political sphere, but they used manifestos widely and vociferously, trumpeting iconoclastic ideas in terms that were meant not only to rally but also, in some cases, to shock. These documents were so influential that they have become an integral part of the history of modernism.

London, where the startling impact of cubism and futurism was felt almost immediately, became a central site in the formation of anglophone modernism. London's publishing opportunities and literary ferment attracted an array of visiting and expatriate writers. The American poet Ezra Pound arrived there in 1908, at twenty-three, and soon ignited London's literary avant-garde, his apartment in Kensington a magnet for like-minded innovators. He befriended the English philosopher poet T. E. Hulme, who led an avant-garde literary group. Like the cubists and futurists, these modernists advocated a radical break with artistic convention. In lectures Hulme influentially denounced Romanticism as so much moaning and whining and proposed a "hard, dry" literature in its stead�a notion Pound echoed in his call for "harder and saner" verse, "like granite." After T. S. Eliot came to England in 1914, astonishing Pound by his having "modernized himself on his own," he also composed essays marked by Hulme's influence. Aggressively asserting new form and subject matter while holding up the standard of classic texts, the modernists repudiated what they saw as the slushy, self-indulgent literature of the nineteenth century�"blurry, messy," and "sentimentalistic," in Pound's words. This desire to break decisively with Romanticism and Victorianism�often realized more in theory than in practice� became a recurrent feature in their public declarations. The 1914 manifesto of the

1996

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MODERNIST MANIFESTOS / 1997

journal Blast thunders, "BLAST / years 1837 to 1900": like other avant-garde manifestos, this one damns the middle class for perpetuating Victorian taste and conven

tional mores.

The agitations, declarations, and poetic experiments of Hulme, Pound, and others resulted in the formation of imagism. Leaders of this London-born movement advocated clear and immediate images, exact and efficient diction, inventive and musical rhythms. The imagist poem was to be brief and stripped down, presenting an image in as few words as possible without commenting on it. In his lecture "Bomanticism and Classicism" Hulme said the poet must render "the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind." Having arranged for the nascent movement to be announced by the English poet and critic F. S. Flint in a brief article/ interview entitled "Imagisme" (spelled in the French manner), Pound demanded, through Flint's introductory synopsis of imagism's precepts, "Direct treatment of the 'thing,' whether subjective or objective." The principles of imagism and Pound's further recommendations in "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" had a profound transatlantic influence long after the movement had petered out.

The American poet H. D. (then called Hilda Doolittle) arrived in London in 1911, just in time to become a major figure in the imagist movement. Her poems, written under the influence of ancient Greek lyrical fragments, so impressed Pound that he sent them, signed "H. D. Imagiste" at his insistence, to Harriet Monroe, the founding editor of Poetry, a Chicago clearinghouse for modern verse. He told Monroe that

H. D.'s poems were "modern" and "laconic," though classical in subject: "Objective� no slither; direct�no excessive use of adjectives, no metaphors that won't permit examination. It's straight talk, straight as the Greek!" Eventually H. D. and Pound wrote ambitious long poems that broke the mold of the imagist lyric, but even in their more capacious work, imagist compression, immediacy, and juxtaposition remained generative principles. As early as 1914 Pound was tiring of imagism as too static and insufficiently rig

orous. Together with the London-based English painter and writer Wyndham Lewis,

he helped found a new modernist movement in the arts, vorticism, which emphasized

dynamism of content. Pound conceived the vortex�an image of whirling, intensify

ing, encompassing energy�as the movement's emblem. Like imagism, vorticism

lasted for only a few years. Its most raucous embodiment was the 1914 vorticist

manifesto in Wyndham Lewis's journal Blast, and its main aesthetic achievements

were Lewis's paintings and the London-based French artist Henri Gaudier-Brzeska's

sculptures.

The Blast manifesto is clearly influenced by continental modernism, most visibly

Italian futurism in the experimental layout and the fire-breathing rhetoric of destruc

tion: the vorticists blast conventions, dull people, and middle-class attitudes. The

English-born poet Mina Loy became closely involved with the leaders of the futurist

movement, including Marinetti, while in Florence from 1906 to 1916. She was

excited by futurism's embrace of modernity and its violent rebuke of tradition, but

her typographically experimental "Feminist Manifesto" also marks a break with the

movement's misogyny and jingoism. Marinetti, Pound, and Lewis�despite their pro

gressive prewar views on many social and artistic matters�later embraced fascism,

believing it would help advance their cultural ideals.

Modernist manifestos take on a variety of different forms. Some are individual statements, such as Hulme's lecture "Romanticism and Classicism." Others are meant to be declarations on behalf of an emergent group or movement, such as "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste" or the Blast manifesto. Occasionally, and paradoxically, a manifesto is a nonpublic declaration, unpublished in the author's lifetime, as in the case of Loy's "Feminist Manifesto." Although the manifesto is not an art form in the same sense as a poem or painting is, manifestos became an important literary genre in the modernist era, and some are more than mere declarations of doctrine. The vorticist manifesto and Loy's "Feminist Manifesto," for example, cross poetry with

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1998 / MODERNIST MANIFESTOS

poster art, creatively manipulating words on the page for maximum effect. In their jagged typography, wild energy, and radical individualism turned to a collective purpose, these modernist manifestos helped advance and now exemplify elements of innovative art through the twentieth century.

For more documents, images, and contexts related to this subject, see "Modernist Experiment" at Norton Literature Online.

T. E. HULME Although he published only six poems during his brief life, T. E. Hulme (1883�1917), English poet, philosopher, and critic, was one of the strongest intellectual forces behind the development of modernism. In this essay, probably composed in either 1911 or 1912 and probably delivered as a lecture in 1912, Hulme prophesies a "dry, hard, classical verse" that exhibits precision, clarity, and freshness. He sharply repudiates the "spilt religion" of Romanticism, responsible for vagueness in the arts. Hulme sees human beings as limited and capable of improvement only through the influence of tradition. These ideas were an important influence on the thought and poetry of T. S. Eliot. Hulme's views of conventional language, the visual image, and verbal exactitude also shaped the imagism and vorticism of Ezra Pound and others.

Hulme was born in Staffordshire, England, and attended St. John's College, Cambridge, from which he was expelled for rebellious behavior in 1904 without finishing his degree. He lived mainly in London, where, befriending Pound and other poets and artists, he became a central figure of the prewar avant-garde. A critic of pacifism, Hulme enlisted as a private in the army when World War I broke out in 1914, and was killed in battle in 1917. First published posthumously in Speculations (1924), this essay is excerpted from The Collected Writings ofT. E. Hulme (1994), ed. Karen Csengeri.

From Romanticism and Classicism

I want to maintain that after a hundred years of romanticism, we are in for

a classical revival, and that the particular weapon of this new classical spirit,

when it works in verse, will be fancy. * * *

I know that in using the words 'classic' and 'romantic' I am doing a danger

ous thing. They represent five or six different kinds of antitheses, and while I

may be using them in one sense you may be interpreting them in another. In

this present connection I am using them in a perfectly precise and limited

sense. I ought really to have coined a couple of new words, but I prefer to use

the ones I have used, as I then conform to the practice of the group of polem

ical writers who make most use of them at the present day, and have almost

succeeded in making them political catchwords. I mean Maurras, Lasserre

and all the group connected with L'Action Frangaise.'

At the present time this is the particular group with which the distinction

is most vital. Because it has become a party symbol. If you asked a man of a

1. Charles Maurras (1868-1952) and Pierre Las-ported the Catholic Church as a force for order. serre (1867�1930) were intellectuals associated (T. S. Eliot also fell under the movement's influwith I'Action Frangaise, a reactionary political ence.) movement that denigrated Romanticism and sup

.

HULME: ROMANTICISM AND CLASSICISM / 1999

certain set whether he preferred the classics or the romantics, you could deduce from that what his politics were.

The best way of gliding into a proper definition of my terms would be to start with a set of people who are prepared to fight about it�for in them you will have no vagueness. (Other people take the infamous attitude of the person with catholic tastes who says he likes both.)

About a year ago, a man whose name I think was Fauchois gave a lecture at the Odeon on Racine,2 in the course of which he made some disparaging remarks about his dullness, lack of invention and the rest of it. This caused an immediate riot: fights took place all over the house; several people were arrested and imprisoned, and the rest of the series of lectures took place with hundreds of gendarmes3 and detectives scattered all over the place. These people interrupted because the classical ideal is a living thing to them and Racine is the great classic. That is what I call a real vital interest in literature. They regard romanticism as an awful disease from which France had just recovered.

The thing is complicated in their case by the fact that it was romanticism that made the revolution.4 They hate the revolution, so they hate romanticism.

I make no apology for dragging in politics here; romanticism both in England and France is associated with certain political views, and it is in taking a concrete example of the working out of a principle in action that you can get its best definition.

What was the positive principle behind all the other principles of '89? I am

talking here of the revolution in as far as it was an idea; I leave out material

causes�they only produce the forces. The barriers which could easily have

resisted or guided these forces had been previously rotted away by ideas. This

always seems to be the case in successful changes; the privileged class is

beaten only when it has lost faith in itself, when it has itself been penetrated

with the ideas which are working against it.

It was not the rights of man�that was a good solid practical war-cry. The

thing which created enthusiasm, which made the revolution practically a new

religion, was something more positive than that. People of all classes, people

who stood to lose by it, were in a positive ferment about the idea of liberty.

There must have been some idea which enabled them to think that something

positive could come out of so essentially negative a thing. There was, and here

I get my definition of romanticism. They had been taught by Rousseau5 that

man was by nature good, that it was only bad laws and customs that had

suppressed him. Remove all these and the infinite possibilities of man would

have a chance. This is what made them think that something positive could

come out of disorder, this is what created the religious enthusiasm. Here is

the root of all romanticism: that man, the individual, is an infinite reservoir

of possibilities; and if you can so rearrange society by the destruction of oppres

sive order then these possibilities will have a chance and you will get Progress.

One can define the classical quite clearly as the exact opposite to this. Man

is an extraordinarily fixed and limited animal whose nature is absolutely con

2. Jean Racine (1639�1699), French tragic playwright associated with classicism. The riot occurred at a lecture delivered by French playwright Rene Fauchois (1882-1962) at the Odeon Theater, Paris, on November 3, 1910. 3. Police officers (French). 4. The French Revolution (1789-99). 5. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712�1778), Swiss- born French writer and philosopher whose ideas greatly influenced the leaders of the French Revolution and the development of Romanticism.

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2000 / MODERNIST MANIFESTOS

stant. It is only by tradition and organisation that anything decent can be got out of him.

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Put shortly, these are the two views, then. One, that man is intrinsically good, spoilt by circumstance; and the other that he is intrinsically limited, but disciplined by order and tradition to something fairly decent. To the one party man's nature is like a well, to the other like a bucket. The view which regards man as a well, a reservoir full of possibilities, I call the romantic; the one which regards him as a very finite and fixed creature, I call the classical.

One may note here that the Church has always taken the classical view since the defeat of the Pelagian heresy*' and the adoption of the sane classical dogma of original sin.

It would be a mistake to identify the classical view with that of materialism. On the contrary it is absolutely identical with the normal religious attitude. I should put it in this way: That part of the fixed nature of man is the belief in the Deity. This should be as fixed and true for every man as belief in the existence of matter and in the objective world. It is parallel to appetite, the instinct of sex, and all the other fixed qualities. Now at certain times, by the use of either force or rhetoric, these instincts have been suppressed�in Florence under Savonarola, in Geneva under Calvin, and here under the Roundheads.7 The inevitable result of such a process is that the repressed instinct bursts out in some abnormal direction. So with religion. By the perverted rhetoric of Rationalism, your natural instincts are suppressed and you are converted into an agnostic. Just as in the case of the other instincts, Nature has her revenge. The instincts that find their right and proper outlet in religion must come out in some other way. You don't believe in a God, so you begin to believe that man is a god. You don't believe in Heaven, so you begin to believe in a heaven on earth. In other words, you get romanticism. The concepts that are right and proper in their own sphere are spread over, and so mess up, falsify and blur the clear outlines of human experience. It is like pouring a pot of treacle8 over the dinner table. Romanticism then, and this is the best definition I can give of it, is spilt religion.

I must now shirk the difficulty of saying exactly what I mean by romantic and classical in verse. I can only say that it means the result of these two attitudes towards the cosmos, towards man, in so far as it gets reflected in verse. The romantic, because he thinks man infinite, must always be talking about the infinite; and as there is always the bitter contrast between what you think you ought to be able to do and what man actually can, it always tends, in its later stages at any rate, to be gloomy. I really can't go any further than to say it is the reflection of these two temperaments, and point out examples of the different spirits. On the one hand I would take such diverse people as Horace, most of the Elizabethans and the writers of the Augustan age, and on the other side Lamartine, Hugo, parts of Keats, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Swinburne.9

6. Controversial Church doctrine denying the (1509�1564), Protestant theologian who stressed transmission of original sin, named after the the-the predestination and the depravity of humanologian Pelagius (ca. 354�after 418). kind. 7. Puritan members of the Parliamentary Party 8. Molasses (British). during the English Civil War (1642�51), named 9. Horace (65-8 B.C.E.), Roman poet. "The Elizfor their short haircuts. Girolamo Savonarola abethans": English poets and playwrights (such as (1452�1498), Dominican monk who denounced Shakespeare) writing during the reign of Queen the extravagance of the Renaissance. John Calvin Elizabeth I (1558-1603). "The Augustan age": the

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HULME: ROMANTICISM AND CLASSICISM / 2001

What I mean by classical in verse, then, is this. That even in the most imaginative flights there is always a holding back, a reservation. The classical poet never forgets this finiteness, this limit of man. He remembers always that he is mixed up with earth. He may jump, but he always returns back; he never flies away into the circumambient gas.

You might say if you wished that the whole of the romantic attitude seems to crystallise in verse round metaphors of flight. Hugo is always flying, flying over abysses, flying up into the eternal gases. The word infinite in every other line.

In the classical attitude you never seem to swing right along to the infinite nothing. If you say an extravagant thing which does exceed the limits inside which you know man to be fastened, yet there is always conveyed in some way at the end an impression of yourself standing outside it, and not quite believing it, or consciously putting it forward as a flourish. You never go blindly into an atmosphere more than the truth, an atmosphere too rarefied for man to breathe for long. You are always faithful to the conception of a limit. It is a question of pitch; in romantic verse you move at a certain pitch of rhetoric which you know, man being what he is, to be a little high-falutin. The kind of thing you get in Hugo or Swinburne. In the coming classical reaction that will feel just wrong. * * *

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I object even to the best of the romantics. I object still more to the receptive attitude.1 I object to the sloppiness which doesn't consider that a poem is a poem unless it is moaning or whining about something or other. I always think in this connection of the last line of a poem of John Webster's which ends with a request I cordially endorse:

'End your moan and come away.'2

The thing has got so bad now that a poem which is all dry and hard, a properly classical poem, would not be considered poetry at all. How many people now can lay their hands on their hearts and say they like either Horace or Pope? They feel a kind of chill when they read them.

The dry hardness which you get in the classics is absolutely repugnant to them. Poetry that isn't damp isn't poetry at all. They cannot see that accurate description is a legitimate object of verse. Verse to them always means a bringing in of some of the emotions that are grouped round the word infinite.

The essence of poetry to most people is that it must lead them to a beyond of some kind. Verse strictly confined to the earthly and the definite (Keats is full of it) might seem to them to be excellent writing, excellent craftsmanship, but not poetry. So much has romanticism debauched us, that, without some form of vagueness, we deny the highest.

In the classic it is always the light of ordinary day, never the light that never

late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, (1837-1909), English poets.

when English writers such as John Dryden (1631� 1. Elsewhere in the essay, Hulme claims that

1700) and Alexander Pope (1688-1744)embraced every sort of verse has an accompanying receptive

a classicism likened to the Augustan Age of Rome. attitude by which readers come to expect certain

Alphonse Lamartine (1790�1869), French poet qualities from poetry. These receptive attitudes, he

and politician. Victor Hugo (1802-1885), French explains, sometimes outlast the poetry from which

poet and novelist. John Keats (1795-1821), Sam-they develop.

uel Taylor Coleridge (1772�1834), George Gordon 2. From The Duchess of Malfi (1623) 4.2, by the

(Lord) Byron (1788-1824), Percy Bysshe Shelley English dramatist John Webster (ca. 1580-ca.

(1792�1822), Algernon Charles Swinburne 1625).

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2002 / MODERNIST MANIFESTOS

was on land or sea. It is always perfectly human and never exaggerated: man is always man and never a god. But the awful result of romanticism is that, accustomed to this strange light, you can never live without it. Its effect on you is that of a drug.

� # *

* * * It is essential to prove that beauty may be in small, dry things.

The great aim is accurate, precise and definite description. The first thing is to recognise how extraordinarily difficult this is. It is no mere matter of carefulness; you have to use language, and language is by its very nature a communal thing; that is, it expresses never the exact thing but a compromise� that which is common to you, me and everybody. But each man sees a little differently, and to get out clearly and exactly what he does see, he must have a terrific struggle with language, whether it be with words or the technique of other arts. Language has its own special nature, its own conventions and communal ideas. It is only by a concentrated effort of the mind that you can hold it fixed to your own purpose. I always think that the fundamental process at the back of all the arts might be represented by the following metaphor. You know what I call architect's curves�flat pieces of wood with all different kinds of curvature. By a suitable selection from these you can draw approximately any curve you like. The artist I take to be the man who simply can't bear the idea of that 'approximately'. He will get the exact curve of what he sees whether it be an object or an idea in the mind. I shall here have to change my metaphor a little to get the process in his mind. Suppose that instead of your curved pieces of wood you have a springy piece of steel of the same types of curvature as the wood. Now the state of tension or concentration of mind, if he is doing anything really good in this struggle against the ingrained habit of the technique, may be represented by a man employing all his fingers to bend the steel out of its own curve and into the exact curve which you want. Something different to what it would assume naturally.

& fc 3

This is the point I aim at, then, in my argument. I prophesy that a period of dry, hard, classical verse is coming. I have met the preliminary objection founded on the bad romantic aesthetic that in such verse, from which the infinite is excluded, you cannot have the essence of poetry at all.

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* * * Poetry 4 * * is a compromise for a language of intuition which would hand over sensations bodily. It always endeavours to arrest you, and to make you continuously see a physical thing, to prevent you gliding through an abstract process. It chooses fresh epithets and fresh metaphors, not so much because they are new, and we are tired of the old, but because the old cease to convey a physical thing and become abstract counters. A poet says a ship 'coursed the seas' to get a physical image, instead of the counter word 'sailed'. Visual meanings can only be transferred by the new bowl of metaphor; prose is an old pot that lets them leak out. Images in verse are not mere decoration, but the very essence of an intuitive language. Verse is a pedestrian taking you over the ground, prose�a train which delivers you at a destination.

.

F. S. FLINT AND EZRA POUND / 2003 * * * The point is that exactly the same activity is at work as in the highest verse. That is the avoidance of conventional language in order to get the exact curve of the thing.

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* * * A powerfully imaginative mind seizes and combines at the same instant all the important ideas of its poem or picture, and while it works with one of them, it is at the same instant working with and modifying all in their relation to it and never losing sight of their bearings on each other�as the motion of a snake's body goes through all parts at once and its volition acts at the same instant in coils which go contrary ways.

A romantic movement must have an end of the very nature of the thing. It may be deplored, but it can't be helped�wonder must cease to be wonder.

I guard myself here from all the consequences of the analogy, but it expresses at any rate the inevitableness of the process. A literature of wonder must have an end as inevitably as a strange land loses its strangeness when one lives in it. Think of the lost ecstasy of the Elizabethans. 'Oh my America, my new found land,'3 think of what it meant to them and of what it means to us. Wonder can only be the attitude of a man passing from one stage to another, it can never be a permanently fixed thing.

1911-12 1924

3. Line 27 of John Donne's "To His Mistress Going to Bed." F. S. FLINT AND EZRA POUND In the March 1913 issue of Poetry magazine, the English poet and translator F. S. Flint published an article summarizing an interview with an unidentified "imagiste"� surely Ezra Pound. The article, partly dictated and rewritten by Pound, famously states the three principles of imagism�directness, economy, musical rhythm�which Pound later said he and the poets H. D. and Richard Aldington had agreed on in 1912. Flint's prefatory piece was followed in the same issue by Pound's manifesto, "A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste." There Pound defines the image and issues injunctions and admonitions to help poets strip their verse of unnecessary rhetoric and abstraction. Poets, he argues, should write direct, musically cadenced, image-grounded verse.

Born in London, F. S. Flint (1885�1960) worked in the British civil service, translated poetry (mostly French), and eventually published volumes of his own imagist poetry. Ezra Pound (1885�1972) was born in Hailey, Idaho, and was educated at the University of Pennsylvania and Hamilton College. During his twelve years in London, from 1908 to 1920, where he became closely associated with W. B. Yeats and T. E. Hulme, he was the most vigorous entrepreneur of literary modernism, helping James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, and other writers launch their careers. In London he also began working on material for his major work, the massive poem The Cantos. Living briefly in Paris and then for twenty years in Italy as an ardent supporter of the Fascist regime, he was arrested for treason in 1945, having made Rome Radio broadcasts against the

U.S. war effort. He spent twelve years, from 1946 to 1958, in a Washington, D.C., asylum for the criminally insane before returning to Italy, where he fell into an almost complete silence until the end of his life.

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Imagisme1

Some curiosity has been aroused concerning Imagisme, and as I was unable to find anything definite about it in print, I sought out an imagiste, with intent to discover whether the group itself knew anything about the "movement." I gleaned these facts.

The imagistes admitted that they were contemporaries of the Post Impressionists and the Futurists; but they had nothing in common with these schools. They had not published a manifesto. They were not a revolutionary school; their only endeavor was to write in accordance with the best tradition, as they found it in the best writers of all time,�in Sappho, Catullus, Villon.2 They seemed to be absolutely intolerant of all poetry that was not written in such endeavor, ignorance of the best tradition forming no excuse. They had a few rules, drawn up for their own satisfaction only, and they had not published them. They were:

1. Direct treatment of the "thing," whether subjective or objective. 2. To use absolutely no word that did not contribute to the presentation. 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in sequence of the musical phrase, not in sequence of a metronome. By these standards they judged all poetry, and found most of it wanting. They held also a certain 'Doctrine of the Image,' which they had not committed to writing; they said that it did not concern the public, and would provoke useless discussion.

The devices whereby they persuaded approaching poetasters to attend their instruction were:

1. They showed him his own thought already splendidly expressed in some classic (and the school musters altogether a most formidable erudition). 2. They re-wrote his verses before his eyes, using about ten words to his fifty. Even their opponents admit of them�ruefully�"At least they do keep bad poets from writing!" I found among them an earnestness that is amazing to one accustomed to the usual London air of poetic dilettantism. They consider that Art is all science, all religion, philosophy and metaphysic. It is true that snobisme may be urged against them; but it is at least snobisme in its most dynamic form, with a great deal of sound sense and energy behind it; and they are stricter with themselves than with any outsider.

F. S. Flint A Few Don'ts by an Imagiste

An "Image" is that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time. I use the term "complex" rather in the technical sense

]. In response to many requests for information prescribed form ["Editor's Note" from original]. regarding Imagism and the Imagistes, we publish "Vers libre": free verse (French). this note by Mr. Flint, supplementing it with fur-2. Francois Villon (1431-after 1463), French ther exemplification by Mr. Pound. It will be seen poet. Sappho (fl. ca. 610�ca. 580 B.C.E.), Greek from these that Imagism is not necessarily associ-poet. Catullus (ca. 84�ca. 54 B.C.E.), Roman poet. ated with Hellenic subjects, or with vers libre as a

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POUND: A FEW DON'TS BY AN IMAGISTE / 2005

employed by the newer psychologists, such as Hart,1 though we might not agree absolutely in our application.

It is the presentation of such a "complex" instantaneously which gives that sense of sudden liberation; that sense of freedom from time limits and space limits; that sense of sudden growth, which we experience in the presence of the greatest works of art.

It is better to present one Image in a lifetime than to produce voluminous works.

All this, however, some may consider open to debate. The immediate necessity is to tabulate A LIST OF DONT'S for those beginning to write verses. But I can not put all of them into Mosaic negative.2

To begin with, consider the three rules recorded by Mr. Flint, not as dogma�never consider anything as dogma�but as the result of long contemplation, which, even if it is some one else's contemplation, may be worth consideration.

Pay no attention to the criticism of men who have never themselves written a notable work. Consider the discrepancies between the actual writing of the Greek poets and dramatists, and the theories of the Graeco-Roman grammarians, concocted to explain their metres.

Language

Use no superflous word, no adjective, which does not reveal something.

Don't use such an expression as "dim lands of peace." It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. It comes from the writer's not realizing that the natural object is always the adequate symbol.

Go in fear of abstractions. Don't retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don't think any intelligent person is going to be deceived when you try to shirk all the difficulties of the unspeakably difficult art of good prose by chopping your composition into line lengths.

What the expert is tired of today the public will be tired of tomorrow.

Don't imagine that the art of poetry is any simpler than the art of music, or that you can please the expert before you have spent at least as much effort on the art of verse as the average piano teacher spends on the art of music.

Be influenced by as many great artists as you can, but have the decency either to acknowledge the debt outright, or to try to conceal it.

Don't allow "influence" to mean merely that you mop up the particular decorative vocabulary of some one or two poets whom you happen to admire. A Turkish war correspondent was recently caught red-handed babbling in his dispatches of "dove-gray" hills, or else it was "pearl-pale," I can not remember.

Use either no ornament or good ornament.

Rhythm and Rhyme

Let the candidate fill his mind with the finest cadences he can discover, preferably in a foreign language so that the meaning of the words may be less likely to divert his attention from the movement; e.g., Saxon charms, Hebri

1. British psychologist Bernard Hart (1879-1966) analysis. discusses "the complex" in The Psychology of Insan-2. Reference to the Ten Commandments delivity (1912), a book that helped popularize psycho-ered to Moses (Exodus 20).

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dean Folk Songs, the verse of Dante, and the lyrics of Shakespeare�if he can dissociate the vocabulary from the cadence. Let him dissect the lyrics of Goethe3 coldly into their component sound values, syllables long and short, stressed and unstressed, into vowels and consonants.

It is not necessary that a poem should rely on its music, but if it does rely on its music that music must be such as will delight the expert.

Let the neophyte know assonance and alliteration, rhyme immediate and delayed, simple and polyphonic, as a musician would expect to know harmony and counterpoint and all the minutiae of his craft. No time is too great to give to these matters or to any one of them, even if the artist seldom have need of them.

Don't imagine that a thing will "go" in verse just because it's too dull to go in prose.

Don't be "viewy"�leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophic essays. Don't be descriptive; remember that the painter can describe a landscape much better than you can, and that he has to know a deal more about it.

When Shakespeare talks of the "Dawn in russet mantle clad'M he presents something which the painter does not present. There is in this line of his nothing that one can call description; he presents.

Consider the way of the scientists rather than the way of an advertising agent for a new soap.

The scientist does not expect to be acclaimed as a great scientist until he has discovered something. He begins by learning what has been discovered already. He goes from that point onward. He does not bank on being a charming fellow personally. He does not expect his friends to applaud the results of his freshman class work. Freshmen in poetry are unfortunately not confined to a definite and recognizable class room. They are "all over the shop." Is it any wonder "the public is indifferent to poetry?"

Don't chop your stuff into separate iambs. Don't make each line stop dead at the end, and then begin every next line with a heave. Let the beginning of the next line catch the rise of the rhythm wave, unless you want a definite longish pause.

In short, behave as a musician, a good musician, when dealing with that phase of your art which has exact parallels in music. The same laws govern, and you are bound by no others.

Naturally, your rhythmic structure should not destroy the shape of your words, or their natural sound, or their meaning. It is improbable that, at the start, you will be able to get a rhythm-structure strong enough to affect them very much, though you may fall a victim to all sorts of false stopping due to line ends and caesurae.

The musician can rely on pitch and the volume of the orchestra. You can not. The term harmony is misapplied to poetry; it refers to simultaneous sounds of different pitch. There is, however, in the best verse a sort of residue of sound which remains in the ear of the hearer and acts more or less as an organ-base. A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure; it need not be bizarre or curious, but it must be well used if used at all.

3. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749�1832), Shakespeare's Hamlet: "But look, [he morn in rus- German Romantic poet, playwright, and novelist. set mantle clad / Walks o'er the dew of yon high 4. From Horatio's speech in the opening scene of eastern hill" (1.1.147�48).

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AN IMAGIST CLUSTER: T. E. HULME, EZRA POUND, H. D. / 200 7

Vide further Vildrac and Duhamel's notes on rhyme in "Technique Poetique."5

That part of your poetry which strikes upon the imaginative eye of the reader will lose nothing by translation into a foreign tongue; that which appeals to the ear can reach only those who take it in the original.

Consider the definiteness of Dante's presentation, as compared with Mil- ton's rhetoric. Read as much of Wordsworth6 as does not seem too unutterably dull.

If you want the gist of the matter go to Sappho, Catullus, Villon, Heine when he is in the vein, Gautier when he is not too frigid; or, if you have not the tongues, seek out the leisurely Chaucer.7 Good prose will do you no harm, and there is good discipline to be had by trying to write it.

Translation is likewise good training, if you find that your original matter "wobbles" when you try to rewrite it. The meaning of the poem to be translated can not "wobble."

If you are using a symmetrical form, don't put in what you want to say and then fill up the remaining vacuums with slush.

Don't mess up the perception of one sense by trying to define it in terms of another. This is usually only the result of being too lazy to find the exact word. To this clause there are possibly exceptions.

The first three simple proscriptions8 will throw out nine-tenths of all the bad poetry now accepted as standard and classic; and will prevent you from many a crime of production.

". . . Mais d'abord ilfaut etre un poete,"9 as MM. Duhamel and Vildrac have said at the end of their little book, "Notes sur la Technique Poetique"-, but in an American one takes that at least for granted, otherwise why does one get born upon that august continent!

Ezra Pound

5. Charles Vildrac (1882-1971), French poet, worth (1770-1850), English poets. playwright, and critic, and Georges Duhamel 7. Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1342-1400), English (1884�1966), French novelist and critic, cowrote poet. Heinrich Heine (1797�1856), German poet. Notes sin la Technique Poetique (1910). "Vide": Theophile Gautier (1811 � 1872), French poet. consider. 8. Noted by Mr. Flint [Pound's note]. 6. John Milton (1608-1674) and William Words-9. But first it is necessary to be a poet (French). AN IMAGIST CLUSTER:

T. E. HULME, EZRA POUND, H. D. At the inception of imagism in London, the key imagists included the English poet philosopher T. E. Hulme and the expatriate American poets Ezra Pound and H. D. The paths of these three writers were densely interconnected at this juncture. In his poetry volume Ripostes (1912), Pound published an appendix of five poems, "The Complete Poetical Works of T. E. Hulme," prefaced by a note that printed the term imagistes for the first time. That year, in a London teashop, Pound had announced to the English poet Richard Aldington and the American poet H. D. that they were "imagistes," and two years later he included their and his work in the first imagist anthology, Des Imagistes. Although imagism began in London, with a French-styled name, the American poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925), derided by Pound for watering

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down imagism's principles, helped disseminate its ideas in the United States, where she publicized and promoted imagism in anthologies, lectures, and readings.

In spare, hard-edged poems the imagists sought to turn verse away from what they saw as the slack sentimentality and fuzzy abstraction, the explanatory excess and metrical predictability of Victorian poetry. Imagism owed a debt to the symbolism of Yeats and nineteenth-century French poets, but it shifted the emphasis from the musical to the visual, the mysterious to the actual, the ambiguously suggestive symbol to the clear-cut natural image. The imagists looked to models from East Asia (haiku for Pound's "In a Station in the Metro") and classical Europe (Greek verse for H. D.'s "Oread"). Their poetry is compressed, achieving a maximum effect with a minimum of words. It is often centered in a single figurative juxtaposition, conjoining tenor and vehicle without explanation. And it typically relies not on strict meters but on informal rhythms or cadences.

H. D. (1886�1961) was born Hilda Doolittle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, and educated at Bryn Mawr College. In 1911 she went to Europe for what she thought would be a brief visit but became a lifelong stay, mainly in England and in Switzerland. After her initial imagist phase she wrote more expansive works, including the three long, meditative poems that make up Trilogy (1973), precipitated by the experience of the London bombings in World War II. T. E. HULME: Autumn A touch of cold in the Autumn night�

I walked abroad,

And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge

Like a red-faced farmer.

5 I did not stop to speak, but nodded,

And round about were the wistful stars

With white faces like town children.

1912

EZRA POUND: In a Station of the Metro

The apparition of these faces in the crowd; Petals on a wet, black bough.1

1913,1916

1. Pound describes this poem's genesis in Gaitdier-Brzeska (1916): "Three years ago in Paris I got out of a 'metro' train at La Concorde, and saw suddenly a beautiful face, and then another and another, and then a beautiful child's face, and then another beautiful woman, and I tried all that day to find words for what this had meant to me, and I could not find any words that seemed to me worthy, or as lovely as that sudden emotion. And that evening .. . I was still trying and I found, suddenly, the expression. I do not mean that I found words, but there came an equation . . . not in speech, but in little splotches of colour. . . . The 'one-image poem' is a form of super-position, that is to say, it is one idea getting out of the impasse in which I had been left by my metro emotion. I wrote a thirty-line poem, and destroyed it. . . . Six months later I made a poem half that length; a year later I made the following hokku-Vike sentence." "Hokku": another term for haiku.

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BLAST / 2009

H. D.: Oread1 Whirl up, sea� Whirl your pointed pines, Splash your great pines On our rocks,

s Hurl your green over us, Cover us with your pools of fir.

1914

H. D.: Sea Rose Rose, harsh rose, marred and with stint of petals, meagre flower, thin, sparse of leaf,

5 more precious than a wet rose, single on a stem� you are caught in the drift.

Stunted, with small leaf,

10 you are flung on the sands, you are lifted in the crisp sand that drives in the wind.

Can the spice-rose 15 drip such acrid fragrance hardened in a leaf?

1916

1. Greek nymph of the mountains. BLAST

The journal Blast was published only twice�on June 20, 1914, though released on July 2, one month before Great Britain entered World War I, and a year later, during the war that would bring its short life to an end. But its initial preface and two-part manifesto, printed in the first pages of the first number and excerpted below, are among the most important documents in the history of modernism. They rhetorically and typographically embody the violent iconoclasm of vorticism, an avant-garde movement in the literary and visual arts centered in London. The English writer and painter Wyndham Lewis founded and edited Blast, whose title he said, "means the blowing

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away of dead ideas and worn-out notions" (it also suggests ^ire, explosion, and damn!). He drafted much of the vorticist manifesto and fashioned its shocking visual design, likening Blast to a "battering ram." Ezra Pound became a vorticist after abandoning imagism, because he felt that the vortex, "the point of maximum energy," offered a more dynamic model for art than the static image of the imagists. The French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1891�1915), killed in World War I and memorialized both in the "War Number" of Blast and in Pound's book named for him, was another key vorticist leader. In the pages of Blast 1 and 2, artworks by Lewis, Gaudier-Brzeska, and other visual artists appeared alongside writings by Lewis, Pound, T. S. Eliot, and other avant-gardists.

The vorticist manifesto, signed by Lewis, Pound, and Gaudier-Brzeska, among others, reflects the London modernists' competitive anxiety about European avant-gardes such as cubism and especially futurism. Under the charismatic leadership of F. T. Marinetti, the futurists celebrated speed, modernization, and the machine, while calling for the destruction of the museums, the libraries, all such bastions of the past. The vorticists�in lists of things and people to "BLAST" and "BLESS" compiled at group meetings�similarly blast convention, standardization, the middle class, even the "years 183 7 to 1900. " And yet despite their cosmopolitan enthusiasms, the vorticists also assert their independence, repeatedly criticizing the futurists. For all their antipathy toward England, they also "BLESS" it, revaluing, for example, English mobility (via the sea) and inventiveness (as the engine of the Industrial Bevolution).

Wyndham Lewis (1882�1957) studied for several years at London's Slade School of Art before exploring the avant-garde visual arts in Paris. On returning to London in 1909, he began to write fiction and exhibit his paintings. During World War I he served as an artillery officer and then as a war artist, and afterward he continued to paint and publish essays, poetry, and fiction, including his first novel, Tarr (1918). Like Ezra Pound, he alienated many friends because of his subsequent support of fascism.

The excerpts below are taken from Blast: Review of the Great English Vortex, No. 1 (1914). For the complete two-part Blast manifesto and more on futurism and cubism, see "Modernist Experiment" at Norton Literature Online.

Long Live the Vortex!

Long live the great art vortex sprung up in the centre of this town!1

We stand for the Reality of the Present�not for the sentimental Future, or the sacripant2 Past

We want to leave Nature and Men alone.

We do not want to make people wear Futurist Patches, or fuss men to take to pink and sky-blue trousers.3

l. London and dynamism of the modern age and sought to 2. Boastful of valor. break with the past and traditional forms. 3. The futurists celebrated the technology, power,

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BLAST / 2011

We are not their wives or tailors.

The only way Humanity can help artists is to remain independent and work unconsciously.

WE NEED THE UNCONSCIOUSNESS OF HUMANITY�their stupidity, animalism and dreams.

We believe in no perfectibility except our own.

Intrinsic beauty is in the Interpreter and Seer, not in the object or content.

We do not want to change the appearance of the world, because we are not Naturalists, Impressionists or Futurists (the latest form of Impressionism),4 and do not depend on the appearance of the world for our art.

WE ONLY WANT THE WORLD TO LIVE, and to feel it's crude energy flowing through us.

It may be said that great artists in England are always revolutionary, just as in France any really great artist had a strong traditional vein.

Blast sets out to be an avenue for all those vivid and violent ideas that could reach the Public in no other way.

Blast will be popular, essentially. It will not appeal to any particular class, but to the fundamental and popular instincts in every class and description of people, TO THE INDIVIDUAL. The moment a man feels or realizes himself as an artist, he ceases to belong to any milieu or time. Blast is created for this timeless, fundamental Artist that exists in everybody.

The Man in the Street and the Gentleman are equally ignored.

Popular art does not mean the art of the poor people, as it is usually supposed to. It means the art of the individuals.

Education (art education and general education) tends to destroy the creative instinct. Therefore it is in times when education has been non-existant that art chiefly flourished.

But it is nothing to do with "the People."

It is a mere accident that that is the most favourable time for the individual to appear.

To make the rich of the community shed their education skin, to destroy politeness, standardization and academic, that is civilized, vision, is the task we have set ourselves.

We want to make in England not a popular art, not a revival of lost folk art, or a romantic fostering of such unactual conditions, but to make individuals, wherever found.

We will convert the King' if possible.

A VORTICIST KING! WHY NOT?

DO YOU THINK LLOYD GEORGE6 HAS THE VORTEX IN HIM?

MAY WE HOPE FOR ART FROM LADY MOND?7

4. Naturalism, a late-nineteenth-century school of and remained the king until 1936. realism, claimed all human life was governed by 6. David Lloyd George (1863�1945), British pol- natural laws. Impressionism emphasized the sub- itician, prime minister 1916�22. jectivity of perspective over any inherent quality in 7. Wife of wealthy industrialist Sir Robert Mond, a represented object. and a prominent member of fashionable London 5. George V ascended the British throne in 1910 society.

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We are against the glorification of "the People," as we are against snobbery. It is not necessary to be an outcast bohemian, to be unkempt or poor, any more than it is necessary to be rich or handsome, to be an artist. Art is nothing to do with the coat you wear. A top-hat can well hold the Sixtine. A cheap cap could hide the image of Kephren.8

AUTOMOBILIS M (Marinetteism)9 bores us. We don't want to go about making a hullo-bulloo about motor cars, anymore than about knives and forks, elephants or gas-pipes.

Elephants are VERY BIG. Motor cars go quickly.

Wilde gushed twenty years ago about the beauty of machinery. Gissing,1 in his romantic delight with modern lodging houses was futurist in this sense.

The futurist is a sensational and sentimental mixture of the aesthete of 1890 and the realist of 1870.

The "Poor" are detestable animals! They are only picturesque and amusing for the sentimentalist or the romantic! The "Rich" are bores without a single exception, en tant que riches!2

We want those simple and great people found everywhere.

Blast presents an art of Individuals.

|6_

BLAST

years 1837 to 1900 Curse abysmal inexcusable middie-ciass

(also Aristocracy and Proletariat).

BLAST

pasty shadow cast by gigantic Boehm (imagined at introduction of BOURGEOIS VICTORIAN VISTAS).

8. Ancient Egyptian pharaoh buried in one of the labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that great pyramids at Giza. "The Sixtine": the Sistine deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant Chapel, in the Vatican. conditions, must be done by machinery . . . . At 9. Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876�1944), Ital-�present machinery competes against man. Under ian writer and founder of Futurism, glorified war proper conditions machinery will seri'e man. ' and technology and invented a "drama of objects" 2. Insofar as they are rich (French). in which human actors play no parts. 1. Queen Victoria reigned from 1837 to 1901. 1. George Gissing (1837-1903), naturalist This sixth list of items in the "BLAST" section English novelist. Oscar Wilde (1854-1900), Irish comes last, before the "BLESS" section. writer and critic; in his 1891 essay "The Soul of Man 2. Joseph Edgar Boehm (1834-1890) sculpted a under Socialism," he writes: "All unintellectual colossal marble statue of Queen Victoria.

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BLAS T / 201 3 WRING THE NECK OF all sick inventions born in that progressive white wake.

BLAST their weeping whiskers�hirsute RHETORIC of EUNUCH and STYLIST

SENTIMENTAL HYGIENICS ROUSSEAUISMS (wild Nature cranks) FRATERNIZING WITH MONKEYS DIABOLICS �raptures and roses

of the erotic bookshelves culminating in PURGATORY OF PUTNEY. CHAOS OF ENOCH ARDENS

laughing Jennys Ladies with Pains good-for-nothing Guineveres.6

SNOBBISH BORROVIAN running after GIPSY KINGS and ESPADAS

bowing the knee to wild Mother Nature, her feminine contours, Unimaginative insult to MAN.

DAMN

all those to-day who have taken on that Rotten Menagerie, and still crack their whips and tumble in Piccadilly Circus, as though London were a provincial town.

3. Hairy. 4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712�1778), French philosopher who argued that humans are good and noble in their natural state, before society and civilization corrupt them. 5. A middle-class London suburb. 6. In late-medieval romance, King Arthur's queen in Camelot; also, the title character in two narrative poems by the English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). "Enoch Arden" (1864) is another narrative poem by Tennyson, rejected here for its sentimentalism. Jenny is the title character of another sentimental poem (1870), by the English poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882).

7. Swords (Spanish). "Borrovian": from George Henry Borrow (1803�1881), English writer of popular gypsy romances, such as The Zincali: An Account of the Gypsies of Spain (1843).

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8. "Circus": here traveling entertainment act with animals and acrobats; also British traffic circle. "Wonder Zoos": traveling exhibition of exotic animals. 9. Marie Corelli, pseudonym of Mary Mackay (1855-1924), best-selling (and royal favorite) English writer of romances and religious novels in which she aimed to reform social ills. "Dickensian clowns": from the novels of English writer Charles Dickens (1812-1870). 1. Suburban district of London. "1/6": 18d, or a shilling and sixpence, then equivalent to about thirty-five cents.

2. Those blasted here range from individuals, such as Charles Burgess Fry, England's star cricket player and a tireless self-promoter, to things blasted seemingly for the thrill of doing so, such as codliver oil. Blasted, too, are institutions or members of the national, literary, or cultural establishment (e.g., the post office, a much-lauded model of Victorian efficiency, and the British Academy, established in 1902 by Royal Charter as the

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MINA LOY / 2015

national academy for humanities and social sciences), including various clergy and public leaders (e.g., Bishop of London; William Ralph Inge, dean of St. Paul's Cathedral; the Reverends Penny- feather and Meyer; R. J. Campbell, English Congregationalist minister in the City Temple of London, and a Pantheist; Cardinal Herbert Vaughan, archbishop of Westminster and superior of the Catholic Missionary Society; Norman Angell, pacifist British economist; Arthur Christopher Benson, schoolmaster at Eton College, author of Edward VII's coronation ode). Critics unfriendly to the avant-garde are also included (e.g., William Archer, drama critic for the Nation; Sir William Robertson Nicoll, biblical editor and sometime literary critic; Lionel Cust, director of the National Portrait Gallery and contributor to

the Dictionary of National Biography, etc.). Also blasted are artists and writers whom the Vorticists believed were meager talents in spite of their popularity (e.g., painter Frank Brangwyn, poet Ella Wheeler Wilcox, actors George Grossmith and Seymour Hicks, composers Joseph Holbrooke and Edward Elgar, etc.), as well as those associated with fads (e.g., Sir Abdul Baha Bahai, leader of the Bahai faith) or idealistic social reform (e.g., author Marie Corelli; Sidney Webb, a leader of the Fabian Socialist organization; Annie Besant, theosophist and suffragist). Some names (e.g., Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore) are misspelled. For a detailed discussion of the cursing and blessing in Blast, see William C. Wees, Vorticism and the English Avant-Garde (1972).

MINA LOY

Mina Loy (1882�1966) was born in London to a Protestant mother and a Jewish father. She began her artistic career in the visual arts, but she later became an experimental poet, writing lyrics and long poems that created a stir because of their poetic, linguistic, and sexual iconoclasm. From 1899 to 1916 she lived and worked mostly in Munich, Paris, and especially Florence. She moved to New York in 1916 and to Paris in 1923, then settled in the United States in 1936.

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201 6 / MODERNIST MANIFESTOS

Loy composed this manifesto, which she considered a rough draft and never published, in November 1914 and sent it to her friend Mabel Dodge (1879-1962), American author and celebrated patron of the arts. In the decade before she wrote it, feminist activism had intensified in England, particularly the militant civil disobedience of Christabel Pankhurst and other suffragettes in the Women's Social and Political Union. Loy's piece, which bears fruitful comparison with the masculine Blast manifesto published a few months earlier, was partly the result of Loy's quarrels with the Italian futurists, with whom she was closely associated despite the movement's misogyny. In the manifesto Loy tries to harness for feminism the radicalism and individualism of the avant-garde, calling for a complete revolution of gender relations. She abandons the suffragette movement's central issue of equality and insists instead on an adversarial model of gender, claiming that women should not look to men for a standard of value but should find it within themselves. First published in The Last Lunar Baedeker (1982), the manifesto is reprinted from The Lost Lunar Baedeker (1996); both volumes were edited by Roger L. Conover.

For a sample of Loy's poetry, see "Modernist Experiment" at Norton Literature Online.

Feminist Manifesto

The feminist movement as at present instituted is

Inadequate

Women if you want to realise yourselves�you are on the eve of a devastating psychological upheaval�all your pet illusions must be unmasked�the lies of centuries have got to go� are you prepared for the Wrench�? There is no halfmeasure� NO scratching on the surface of the rubbish heap of tradition, will bring about Reform, the only method is

Absolute Demolition

Cease to place your confidence in economic legislation, vice- crusades & uniform education�you are glossing over

Reality.

Professional & commercial careers are opening up for you�

Is that all you want ?

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LOY: FEMINIST MANIFESTO / 201 7

And if you honestly desire to find your level without preju

dice�be Brave & deny at the outset�that pathetic clap-trap war cry Woman is the

equal of man

She

NOT!

The man who lives a life in which his activities conform to a social code which is a protectorate of the feminine element�

is no longer masculine The women who adapt themselves to a theoretical valuation of their sex as a relative impersonality , are not yet Feminine

Leave off looking to men to find out what you are no t �seek within yourselves to find out what you ar e As conditions are at present constituted�you have the choice

between Parasitism, & Prostitution �or Negation

Men & women are enemies, with the enmity of the exploited for the parasite, the parasite for the exploited�at present they are at the mercy of the advantage that each can take of the others sexual dependence�. The only point at which the interests of the sexes merge�is the sexual embrace.

The first illusion it is to your interest to demolish is the division of women into two classes the mistress, & the mother every well-balanced & developed woman knows that is not true, Nature has endowed the complete woman with a faculty for expressing herself through all her functions�there are HO restrictions the woman who is so incompletely evolved as to be un-self-conscious in sex, will prove a restrictive influence on the temperamental expansion of the next generation; the woman who is a poor mistress will be an incompetent mother�an inferior mentality�& will

enjoy an inadequate apprehension of Life.

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201 8 / MODERNIST MANIFESTOS

To obtain results you must make sacrifices & the first & greatest sacrifice you have to make is of your "virtue" The fictitious value of woman as identified with her physical purity�-is too easy a stand-by rendering her lethargic in the acquisition of intrinsic merits of character by which she could obtain a concrete value� therefore, the first self- enforced law for the female sex, as a protection against the man made bogey of virtue�which is the principle instrument of her subjection, would be the unconditional surgical destruction of virginity through-out the female population at puberty�.

The value of man is assessed entirely according to his use or interest to the community, the value of woman, depends entirely on chance, her success or insuccess in manoeuvering a man into taking the life-long responsibility of her� The advantages of marriage of too ridiculously ample� compared to all other trades�for under modern conditions a woman can accept preposterously luxurious support from a man (with-out return of any sort�even offspring)�as a thank offering for her virginity The woman who has not succeeded in striking that advantageous bargain�is prohibited from any but surreptitious re-action to Life-stimuli�& entirel y

debarred maternity.

Every woman has a right to maternity� Every woman of superior intelligence should realize her race- responsibility, in producing children in adequate proportion to the unfit or degenerate members of her sex�

Each child of a superior woman should be the result of a definite period of psychic development in her life�& not necessardy of a possibly irksome & outworn continuance of an alliance�spontaneously adapted for vital creation in the beginning but not necessardy harmoniously balanced as the parties to it�follow their individual lines of personal evolution�

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WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS / 201 9

For the harmony of the race, each individual should be the expression of an easy & ample interpenetration of the male & female temperaments�free of stress Woman must become more responsible for the child than

man� Women must destroy in themselves, the desire to be loved�

The feeling that it is a personal insult when a man transfers his attentions from her to another woman The desire for comfortable protection instead of an intelligent curiosity & courage in meeting & resisting the pressure of life sex or so called love must be reduced to its initial element, honour, grief, sentimentality, pride & consequently jealousy must be detached from it. Woman for her happiness must retain her deceptive fragility of appearance, combined with indomitable will, irreducible courage, & abundant health the outcome of sound nerves� Another great illusion that woman must use all her introspective clear-sightedness & unbiassed bravery to destroy�for the sake of her self respect is the impurity of sex the realisation in defiance of superstition that there is nothing impure in sex�except in the mental attitude to it�will constitute an incalculable & wider social regeneration than it is possible for our generation to imagine.

1914 1982

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 1865-1939

William Butler Yeats was born to an Anglo-Irish family in Dublin. His father, J. B. Yeats, had abandoned law to take up painting, at which he made a somewhat precarious living. His mother came from the Pollexfen family that lived near Sligo, in the west of Ireland, where Yeats spent much of his childhood. The Yeatses moved to London in 1874, then returned to Dublin in 1880. Yeats attended first high school and then art school, which he soon left to concentrate on poetry.

Yeats's father was a religious skeptic, but he believed in the "religion of art." Yeats, religious by temperament but unable to believe in Christian orthodoxy, sought all his life to compensate for his lost religion. This search led him to various kinds of mysticism, to folklore, theosophy, spiritualism, and neoplatonism. He said he "made a new religion, almost an infallible church of poetic tradition."

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202 0 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

Yeats's childhood and young manhood were spent between Dublin, London, and Sligo, and each of these places contributed something to his poetic development. In London in the 1890s he met the important poets of the day, founded the Irish Literary Society, and acquired late-Romantic, Pre-Raphaelite ideas of poetry: he believed, in this early stage of his career, that a poet's language should be dreamy, evocative, and ethereal. From the countryside around Sligo he gained a knowledge of the life of the peasantry and of their folklore. In Dublin, where he founded the National Literary Society, he was influenced by Irish nationalism and, although often disagreeing with those who wished to use literature for political ends, he nevertheless came to see his poetry as contributing to the rejuvenation of Irish culture.

Yeats's poetry began in the tradition of self-conscious Romanticism, strongly influenced by the English poets Edmund Spenser, Percy Shelley, and, a little later, William Blake, whose works he edited. About the same time he was writing poems (e.g., "The Stolen Child") deriving from his Sligo experience, with quietly precise nature imagery, Irish place-names, and themes from Irish folklore. A little later he drew on the great stories of the heroic age of Irish history and translations of Gaelic poetry into "that dialect which gets from Gaelic its syntax and keeps its still partly Tudor vocabulary." The heroic legends of ancient Ireland and the folk traditions of the modern Irish countryside helped brace his early dreamlike imagery. "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"� "my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music," said Yeats�is both a Romantic evocation of escape into dream, art, and the imagination, and a specifically Irish reverie on freedom and self-reliance.

Yeats vigorously hybridizes Irish and English traditions, and eventually draws into this potent intercultural mix East and South Asian cultural resources, including Japanese Noh theater and Indian meditative practices. Resolutely Irish, he imaginatively reclaims a land colonized by the British; imposes Irish rhythms, images, genres, and syntax on English-language poetry; and revives native myths, place-names, and consciousness. Yet he is also cosmopolitan, insisting on the transnationalism of the collective storehouse of images he calls "Spiritus Mundi" or "Anima Mundi," spending much of his life in England, and cross-pollinating forms, ideas, and images from Ireland and England, Europe and Asia.

Irish nationalism first sent Yeats in search of a consistently simpler and more popular style, to express the elemental facts about Irish life and aspirations. This led him to the concrete image, as did translations from Gaelic folk songs, in which "nothing . . . was abstract, nothing worn-out." But other forces were also working on him. In 1902 a friend gave him the works of the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, to which he responded with great excitement, and it would seem that, in persuading the passive love-poet to get off his knees, Nietzsche's books intensified his search for a more active stance, a more vigorous style. At the start of the twentieth century, Yeats wearied of his early languid aesthetic, declaring his intentions, in a 1901 letter, to make "everything hard and clear" and, in another of 1904, to leave behind "sentiment and sentimental sadness." He wished for poems not of disembodied beauty but that could "carry the normal, passionate, reasoning self, the personality as a whole." In poems of his middle period, such as "Adam's Curse" and "A Coat," Yeats combines the colloquial with the formal, enacting in his more austere diction, casual rhythms, and passionate syntax his will to leave behind the poetic "embroideries" of his youth and walk "naked." The American poet Ezra Pound, who spent winters from 1913 to

1916 with Yeats in a stone cottage in Sussex, strengthened Yeats's resolve to develop a less mannered, more stripped down style.

In 1889 Yeats had met the beautiful actor and Irish nationalist Maud Gonne, with whom he was desperately in love for many years, but who persistently refused to marry him. She became the subject of many of his early love poems, and in later poems, such as "No Second Troy" and "A Prayer for My Daughter," he expresses anger over her self-sacrifice to political activism. He had also met Lady Gregory, Anglo-Irish writer and promoter of Irish literature, in 1896, and Yeats spent many

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WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS / 202 1

holidays at her aristocratic country house, Coole Park. Disliking the moneygrubbing and prudery of the middle classes, as indicated in "September 1913," he looked for his ideal characters either below them, to peasants and beggars, or above them, to the aristocracy, for each of these had their own traditions and lived according to them. Under Lady Gregory's influence Yeats began to organize the Irish dramatic movement in 1899 and, with her help, founded the Abbey Theater in 1904. His active participation in theatrical production�confronting political censorship, economic problems of paying carpenters and actors, and other aspects of "theatre business, management of men"�also helped toughen his style, as he demonstrates in "The Fascination of What's Difficult." Yeats's long-cherished hope had been to "bring the halves together"�Protestant and Catholic�through a literature infused with Ireland's ancient myths and cultural riches before the divisions between rival Christianities. But in a string of national controversies, he ran afoul of both the Boman Catholic middle class and the Anglo-Irish Protestant ascendancy, and at last, bitterly turning his back on Ireland, moved to England.

Then came the Easter Bising of 1916, led by men and women he had long known, some of whom were executed or imprisoned by the British. Persuaded by Gonne (whose estranged husband was one of the executed leaders) that "tragic dignity had returned to Ireland," Yeats returned. His culturally nationalist work had helped inspire the poet revolutionaries, and so he asked himself, as he put it in the late poem "Man and the Echo," did his work "send out / Certain men the English shot?" Yeats's nationalism and antinationalism, his divided loyalties to Ireland and to England, find powerfully ambivalent expression in "Easter, 1916" and other poems. Throughout his poetry he brilliantly mediates between contending aspects of himself�late-Bomantic visionary and astringent modern skeptic, Irish patriot and irreverent antinationalist, shrewd man of action and esoteric dreamer. As he said: "We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry." Conceiving consciousness as conflict, he fashioned a kind of poetry that could embody the contradictory feelings and ideas of his endless inner debate.

To mark his recommitment to Ireland, Yeats refurbished and renamed Thoor (Castle) Ballylee, the Norman tower on Lady Gregory's land, in which he lived off and on, and which became, along with its inner winding stair, a central symbol in his later poetry. In 1922 he was appointed a senator of the recently established Irish Free State, and he served until 1928, playing an active part not only in promoting the arts but also in general political affairs, in which he supported the views of the minority Protestant landed class. At the same time he was continuing his esoteric studies. He married Georgie (changed by Yeats to George) Hyde Lees in 1917, when he was fifty- two, and she proved so sympathetic to his imaginative needs that the automatic writing she produced for several years (believed by Yeats to have been dictated by spirits) gave him the elements of a symbolic system that he later worked out in his book A Vision (1925, 1937). The system was a theory of the movements of history and of the different types of personality, each movement and type being related to a different phase of the moon. At the center of the symbolic system were the interpenetrating cones, or "gyres," that represented the movement through major cycles of history and across antitheses of human personality.

He compressed and embodied his personal mythology in visionary poems of great scope, linguistic force, and incantatory power, such as "The Second Coming" and "Leda and the Swan." In poems of the 1920s and 1930s, winding stairs, spinning tops, "gyres," spirals of all kinds, are important symbols, serving as a means of resolving some of the contraries that had arrested him from the beginning�paradoxes of time and eternity, change and continuity, spirit and the body, life and art. If his earliest poetry was sometimes static, a beautifully stitched tapestry laden with symbols of inner states, his late poetry became more dynamic, its propulsive syntax and muscular rhythms more suited to his themes of lust, rage, and the body. He had once screened these out of his verse as unpoetic, along with war, violence, "the mire of

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2022 / WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

human veins." Now he embraced the mortal world intensely. In "A Dialogue of Self and Soul," the self defies the soul's injunction to leave the world behind: "I am content to live it all again / And yet again, if it be life to pitch / Into the frog-spawn of a blind man's ditch." Yeats no longer sought transcendence of the human, but instead aimed for the active interpenetration of the corporeal and the visionary. In his Nietzscheinspired poems of "tragic joy," such as "Lapis Lazuli," he affirmed ruin and destruction as necessary to imaginative creation.

One key to Yeats's greatness is that there are many different Yeatses: a hard-nosed skeptic and an esoteric idealist, a nativist and a cosmopolitan, an Irish nationalist and an ironic antinationalist, a Romantic brooding on loss and unrequited desire and a modernist mocking idealism, nostalgia, and contemporary society. Similarly, in his poetic innovations and consolidations, he is both a conservative and a radical. That is, he is a literary traditionalist, working within such inherited genres as love poetry, the elegy, the self-elegy, the sonnet, and the occasional poem on public themes. But he is also a restless innovator who disrupts generic conventions, breaking up the coherence of the sonnet, de-idealizing the dead mourned in elegies, and bringing into public poems an intense personal ambivalence. In matters of form, too, he rhymes but often in off-rhyme, uses standard meters but bunches or scatters their stresses, employs an elegant syntax that nevertheless has the passionate urgency of colloquial speech; his diction, tone, enjambments, and stanzas intermix ceremony with contortion, controlled artifice with wayward unpredictability. A difficulty in reading Yeats� but also one of the great rewards�is comprehending his manysidedness.

Like Pound, T. S. Eliot, and Windham Lewis, Yeats was attracted to right-wing politics, and in the 1930s he was briefly drawn to fascism. His late interest in authoritarian politics arose in part from his desire for a feudal, aristocratic society that, unlike middle-class culture, in his view, might allow the imagination to flourish, and in part from his anticolonialism, since he thought a fascist Spain, for example, would "weaken the British Empire." But eventually he was appalled by all political ideologies, and the grim prophecy of "The Second Coming" seemed to him increasingly apt.

Written in a rugged, colloquial, and concrete language, Yeats's last poems have a controlled yet startling wildness. His return to life, to "the foul rag-and-bone shop of the heart," is one of the most impressive final phases of any poet's career. In one of his last letters he wrote: "When I try to put all into a phrase I say, 'Man can embody truth but he cannot know it.' . . . The abstract is not life and everywhere draws out its contradictions. You can refute Hegel but not the Saint or the Song of Sixpence." He died in southern France just before the beginning of World War II. His grave is, as his poem directed, near Sligo, "under Ben Bulben." He left behind a body of verse that, in variety and power, has been an enduring influence for English-language poets around the globe, from W. H. Auden and Seamus Heaney to Derek Walcott and A. K. Ramanujan.

The Stolen Child1

Where dips the rocky highland

Of Sleuth Wood2 in the lake,

There lies a leafy island

Where flapping herons wake

5

The drowsy water-rats; There we've hid our faery vats,

1. I.e., a child stolen by fairies to be their com-are in County Sligo, in the west of Ireland, where panion, as in Irish folklore. Yeats spent much of his childhood. 2. This and other places mentioned in the poem

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THE STOLEN CHILD / 2023

Full of berries And of reddest stolen cherries.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than

Where the wave of moonlight glosses The dim grey sands with light,

15 Far off by furthest Rosses We foot it all the night, Weaving olden dances, Mingling hands and mingling glances Till the moon has taken flight;

To and fro we leap And chase the frothy bubbles, While the world is full of troubles And is anxious in its sleep.

Come away, O human child!

25 To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world's more full of weeping than

Where the wandering water gushes From the hills above Glen-Car,

In pools among the rushes That scarce could bathe a star, We seek for slumbering trout And whispering in their ears Give them unquiet dreams;

35 Leaning softly out From ferns that drop their tears Over the young streams.