The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (4 page)

Underlying these readings is the perception that war poetry is somehow more authentic than other kinds of poetry. ‘The true Poets must be truthful' wrote Owen,
⁸⁶
and all too often war poems are read not as poetry, but as being realistic, accurate reportage – ‘the truth untold', as it were.
⁸⁷
This belief in authenticity has a long pedigree, going back as it does to the war itself and the claims made by Kyle and Osborn for their anthologies, but in recent years there's been a worrying tendency to value war poetry solely for the reality it apparently portrays. One curious side effect of this tendency is the way in which the seeming authenticity of Wilfrid Gibson's early war poems has led to the widespread misconception that he must have served on the Western Front, when all his time in uniform was actually spent on Home Service.
⁸⁸
Another more serious consequence is that children are more likely to first encounter the poetry of the First World War not in English lessons, but as part of their History curriculum. A handful of poems, mostly by Owen and Sassoon, have become central to the study of the war as history at school level, with students being asked to analyze them not for their literary qualities, but for what they reveal about the experience of the war – in other words, as historical evidence.

Because of a lack of contextualization and the limited range of the poems on offer, this merely serves, as Ian Beckett has noted in his examination of how the war is taught in British schools, to reinforce ‘stereotypes of the Western Front as a theatre of unrelieved terror, deprivation and disillusionment lacking all meaning'.
⁸⁹
Small wonder, then, that the historian Richard Holmes should find that ‘whenever I go into schools, I always find myself up against Wilfred Owen.'
⁹⁰

This selection of the poetry of the First World War actively addresses these issues. Edmund Blunden evoked the shape-hanging god Proteus when trying to describe the complexity of his wartime experiences and
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry
reflects this idea in that it offers a much wider range of poems than is usually found in modern selections of war poetry. More importantly, it presents them not in the usual narrative, but rather as a series of thematic groupings. As such, it's probably closer to wartime anthologies such as Osborn's and Kyle's than to more recent collections, in that it tries to illustrate the sheer diversity of First World War poetry without arranging that poetry so that it tells a particular story. Instead, I've tried to organize the contents of this book so that the reader is offered a variety of different perspectives on the same common wartime experiences, not merely though the mingling of different voices in each
section, but also through the juxtaposition of different sections.

I've tried to be more protean than most recent editors of war poetry, but aesthetic and practical considerations have meant that some kinds of poems have had to be omitted. To give the selection some coherence, I've only included poems by combatants which deal with the realities of trench warfare in Northern France and Flanders; although other theatres of war such as the Eastern Front and the Dardanelles also had their fair share of poets, it's the Western Front which was and still remains the primary imaginative focus of the First World War. Similarly, I've also chosen not to include any extracts from two of the most sustained poetic responses to the war, T. S. Eliot's
The Waste Land
, and David Jones's
In Parenthesis
;
⁹²
given their scale and complexity, these two poems really need to be read whole in order to be properly appreciated. In the case of some long sequences of individual poems, however, I've taken the liberty of selecting parts of them on the grounds that these extracts stand alone as complete poems in their own right.

The main part of the anthology is divided into five major sections, each exploring a particular area of wartime experience. The first, ‘Your Country Needs You', takes its title from the caption to the famous wartime recruiting poster and brings together the poetic response to the outbreak of the war and the experiences of those ordinary men who ‘answered the call' and quickly found themselves in khaki. Within this section, ‘Let the foul Scene proceed' presents a selection of reactions to England's
declaration of war on Germany in August 1914 and is followed by ‘Who's for the khaki suit', which examines the drive for recruitment and the pressures placed on ordinary men to enlist. Finally, ‘In Training' deals with the basic training undergone by these men as they prepared for active service: the fatigues, the route marches, the process of embarkation and then the journey to the war zone.

The second section, ‘Somewhere in France', takes its title from a phrase commonly used in soldiers' letters and explores some key aspects of everyday life on the Western Front. ‘In Trenches' deals with the experience of being in the front line, and has been loosely arranged to create a picture of a typical day in the trenches. ‘Behind the Lines' examines those times when soldiers were in reserve or on rest, and thus had the luxury of observing the delights or otherwise of military life in wartime France. The final subsection, ‘Comrades of War', explores one of the central experiences of the Great War for most men: the bonds of friendship and love that were formed between serving men of all ranks. Familiar as this concept may be from the work of officer poets, I've here tried to show that such powerful ties permeated all ranks and were, for many, the most significant of their lives.

‘Action' examines the harsh realities of armed conflict. ‘Rendezvous with Death' is a selection of poems giving an insight into what went through soldiers' minds when faced with the possibility of their own impending deaths. As the title suggests, ‘Battle' deals with the experience of active warfare; it's arranged so as to give an overview of
what happened in any given action, from the laying down of bombardments through the actual fighting itself to its immediate cessation. ‘Aftermath' explores the repercussions of any given battle: the sense of relief felt by many at having survived, the experience of the wounded and shell-shocked and, of course, the presence of the newly dead. This latter theme is approached not merely through the writing of those who fought, but also through the poetry of those back home in Britain who could only sit and wait for news of their loved ones.

The introduction of the civilian experience of the war in this section forms a bridge with the next, ‘Blighty', which looks at serving soldiers' bonds with home and the experience of returning to Britain after active service. ‘Going Back' focuses on the conflicts of emotions felt by soldiers returning from the Front, whether on leave or because of wounding, whilst the sense of alienation that some felt is developed in the next section, ‘The Other War'. Much of this section explores the sensation that many serving soldiers had of being a race apart when in Blighty, but also emphasizes the point that the war at home was similarly traumatic and difficult for those left behind too. ‘Lucky Blighters' is used ironically as the title for the final subsection, of course: whilst getting ‘a Blighty one' was something many soldiers craved, the poems here show just what the reality was for those so seriously wounded that they could not return to France.

The last major section, ‘Peace', examines the end of the war and its aftermath, both short-term and long-term. ‘Everyone Sang' explores the personal and political
implications of the Armistice, two themes which are developed further in the next section, ‘The Dead and the Living'. Here, both public and private commemorations of ‘the Million Dead' are juxtaposed with the experience and emotions of those who survived – the widows, the grieving parents and the demobilized. ‘Have you forgotten yet?' explores the long-term impact of the war on its survivors, showing the variety of ways in which the war and its experience continued to permeate the work of these veterans throughout the twenties and thirties.

The anthology as a whole is framed by two single poems. A. E. Housman's ‘On the idle hill of summer' serves as a kind of prelude, introducing not only the major themes of the collection, but also the rhetoric and stylistic patterning present in so much First World War poetry; Housman's
A Shropshire Lad
⁹³
was a wartime bestseller and its influence, in terms of both form and content, can be found everywhere in the poetry of the period. For a coda, I've included Edmund Blunden's ‘Ancre Sunshine'; written in 1966, this seems to be the last poem that Blunden wrote and also the last war poem to be published by any survivor of the war. As such, it seems to me to be a highly fitting way to end this selection.

The last word should perhaps be left to Charles Carrington. A survivor of both the Somme and Passchendaele Offensives, he lived to see the war he had fought in become distorted almost out of all recognition:

Just smile and make an old soldier's wry joke when you see yourself on the television screen, agonised and woebegone, trudging
from disaster to disaster, knee-deep in moral as well as physical mud, hesitant about your purpose, submissive to a harsh, irrelevant discipline, mistrustful of your commanders. Is it any use to assert that I was not like that, and my dead friends were not like that, and the old cronies I meet at reunions are not like that?
⁹⁴

I hope that he would've found the protean war depicted in this selection of poems more familiar.

George Walter

1.
Edmund Gosse, ‘War and Literature',
Inter Arma: Being Essays Written in Wartime
(London: William Heinemann, 1916), pp. 3–32.

2.
Edmund Gosse, ‘The Effect of the War on Literature',
ibid
., pp. 32–38.

3.
Samuel Hynes,
A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture
(London: The Bodley Head, 1990), pp. 40–44.

4.
anon., ‘War Poems from “The Times”',
The Times
, 6 August 1915, p. 7.

5.
Twells Brex, ‘A Serious Outbreak of Poets',
The Daily Mail
, 23 June 1915, p. 11.

6.
Hynes,
op. cit.
, p. 29.

7.
anon., ‘Notice',
The Wipers Times or Salient News
, Volume 2, Number 4 (20 March 1916), unpaginated.

8.
Harold Monro, ‘The Poets are Waiting',
Children of Love
(London: The Poetry Bookshop, 1914), p. 21.

9.
Arthur Clutton Brock, ‘War and Poetry',
The Times Literary Supplement
, Number 664 (6 October 1914), p. 448.

10.
H. G. Wells,
The War That Will End War
(London: F. & C. Palmer Ltd., 1914).

11.
Arthur Marwick,
The Deluge: British Society and the First World War
(London: Macmillan Press, 1991), pp. 237–238, 179, 234–235.

12.
Edmund Gosse, ‘Preface',
Inter Arma
,
op. cit.
, p. x.

13.
Elizabeth A. Marsland,
The Nation's Cause: French,
English and German Poetry of the First World War
(London: Routledge, 1991), p. 44.

14.
C. K. Stead,
The New Poetic: Yeats to Eliot
(London: Hutchinson, 1964), p. 73.

15.
Amy Lowell, ‘Preface',
Some Imagist Poets: An Anthology
(London: Constable & Co., 1915), pp. 1–3.

16.
Edward Marsh, ‘Prefatory Note',
Georgian Poetry 1911–1912
(London: the Poetry Bookshop, 1912), no page number.

17.
Arthur Waugh, ‘The New Poetry',
The Quarterly Review
, Volume 226, Number 449 (October 1916), pp. 365–386.

18.
Rupert Brooke, ‘1914: I. Peace',
1914 and Other Poems
(London, Sidgwick & Jackson, 1915), p. 11.

19.
Edward Thomas, ‘War Poetry',
Poetry and Drama
, Volume II, Number 8 (December 1914), pp. 341–345.

20.
They were actually published in
New Numbers
, Volume 1, Number 4 (December 1914), but it was not until the New Year that they were first noticed.

21.
Walter de la Mare, ‘Thoughts by England Given',
The Times Literary Supplement
, Number 686 (11 March 1915), p. 85.

22.
Nigel Jones,
Rupert Brooke: Life, Death and Myth
(London: Richard Cohen Books, 1999), p. 418.

23.
Jones,
op. cit.
, pp. 426–428.

24.
Christopher Hassall,
Rupert Brooke: A Biography
(London: Faber and Faber, 1964), p. 520. In ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester', Brooke famously wrote: ‘Stands the Church clock at ten to three? | And is there honey still for tea?' See Brooke,
op. cit.
, p. 63.

25.
Jones,
op. cit.
, p. 429.

26.
Harold Hannyngton Child, ‘Some Recent Verse',
The Times Literary Supplement
, Number 555 (29 August 1912), p. 337; Jones,
op. cit.
, p. 429.

27.
Edmund Gosse, ‘Some Soldier Poets',
The Edinburgh Review
, Volume 226, Number 461 (July 1917), pp. 302–303.

28.
Hynes,
op. cit.
, p. 13.

29.
Mildred Huxley, ‘Tribute to England's Deathless Dead',
A Crown of Amaranth: Being a Collection of Poems to the Memory of the Brave and Gallant Gentlemen Who Gave Their Lives For Great and Greater Britain
(London: Erskine Macdonald Ltd., 1915), p. 62.

30.
Israel Gollancz, ‘Lieut. John Richardson',
ibid
., p. 49. The quotation is taken from the Old English poem ‘Deor'.