Britishpoetry Anthologies of the Second World War: Selection, Mediation and Cultural Standing

Britishpoetry anthologies of the Second World War: selection, mediation and cultural standing

Philippa Lyon

Abstract

The article presents an analysis of the marginal cultural positioning of Britsh Second World War poetry by contrast with that of the First World War. It considers this positioning in the context both of longstanding cultural interest in historical and dramatic representations of the 1939-45 war and the extensive post-war use of war poetry in British education and commemorative practices. Taking processes of editorial selection and organization as an additional layer of meaning-making to that of the poetry itself, it briefly identifies taxonomical groupings within the large and varied corpus of war poetry anthologies published during and after the Second World War. An account of the post-war reactions to and constructions of this work is given and the article concludes with the argument that such work represents a rich, important and under-appreciated resource for the understanding of Second World War literature and culture.

Keywords

Second World War poetry; war representation; war culture; anthologies; war poetry; poetry in film.

Biography

Philippa Lyon researched literary and cultural analyses of Second World War poetry for her DPhil thesis and published a critical guide on Twentieth Century War Poetry (2005), as well as teaching English Literature in both continuing and higher education. She has been Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Brighton since 2008, during which time her research interests and publications have diversified and developed. She has co-edited a history of the Brighton School of Art, organized an exhibition on the artist MacDonald Gill and her book Design Education: learning, teaching and researching through design has just been published by Gower.

Addresses

Centre for Research and Development, Faculty of Arts, Grand Parade, University of Brighton, BN2 0JY

01273 642946

This article draws on work from the author’s PhD thesis and subsequent research,which began with the question of why Second World War poetry tends to have been positioned as marginal and lower in quality than that of the First World War. This research developed into an examination of the definition, extent and nature of Second World War poetrythrough a concentration on the anthology format, which focussed the field of study and enabled both poetic and editorial preoccupations to be explored. The first section of this article, then, sets out and illustrates the premise of the argument that Second World War poetry is at the margins of contemporary cultural awareness, making reference to dominant conceptions of the ‘war poetry’ genre and representations of the two world wars still in circulation. The secondsection of the article offers in outline form a taxonomical analysis of a defined group of Second World War anthologies,as a means of opening up andhighlighting elements ofthe literary and cultural-historical value of these works. Noting an unusual case of the popular cinematic mediation of a Second World War poem, the third section of the article describes some of the critical responses in the post-war period, and ends with a case for the re-appreciation of Second World War poetry.

Introduction: representations of war and constructions of war poetry

War poetry in contemporary British culture is often deeply connected with the recording and commemorating of war events and with the way particular wars are remembered and acknowledged.Andrew Motion, for example, (Poet Laureate 1999-2009)describedtravelling to France with his father, a D-Day veteran, in an article on the D-Day commemorations of 2004. Motion visited Keith Douglas’s grave and saw that a poppy and card bearing the inscription ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ had been placed there[1]. This is the title of one of Douglas’s best-known and most anthologised war poems, translating as ‘Forget me not’. The sight of this card on the graveleads Motion not only to reflect on his father’sexperiences, but also on Douglas’s brief life and poetic career and the relationship between poetry and the Second World War: ‘That’s the authentic, cool Douglas note, in his poems as well as his prose, and it would have captured a time of the war that produced strikingly few good poems. Why so? Partly because the soldier-poets that survived were too busy fighting and driving forward into Germany’ (Motion 2004: 4).Motion’s musings gravitate towards what Douglas might have experienced and written about after the Normandy invasion, had he lived to be part of it. Douglas’s voice was needed in this phase of the war, Motion writes, as it was a period that ‘produced strikingly few good war poems’.It is a comment that reveals an underlying expectationnot just in the contiguity of war and poetry, but in a relationship of causality: war begets poetry about war. Just as evident in this quotation is the interest in the poet’s biographical and artistic personality, ‘the authentic, cool Douglas note’. Whilst concern with a poet’s style or stamp of personality is a common preoccupation for those who mine the sedimentary layers of meaning in poetry professionally, there is an additional importance for the reader of war poetry. As Rawlinson (2000) points out, for the war poet figure ‘as it has been constructed since about 1914, cultural and moral authority is founded in an agent-centred and engaged perspective on combat’ (Rawlinson 2000:13). Whilst there is a range of critical approaches within the academic war poetry field, there is still a common perception that the authenticity of a war poet is marked by their involvement in active war service, particularly through their combat experiences. Another implied relationship of causality, then, is that ‘true’ war poets emerge from direct experience of war.

Ourexperience and understanding of war poetry, as of other genres of poetry, is selected, packaged and mediated. An audiobook anthology, Best of Second World War Poetry (2005), incorporating over 100 poems written by servicemen and women, was published and promoted by a bookseller as ‘a unique testament to the brutal experience of war’ (Alibris 2011). To this statement was added a quotation from Denis Healey, describing the anthology as ‘history with a thousand eyes’ (Alibris 2011)[2]. This comment implicitly proposes a conflation: the poems are not justhistorically relevant, they area literary embodiment of ‘history’. The ‘thousand eyes’ image alsometaphorically references a well-established cultural construction of the Second World War as a mass, popular phenomenon. If the First World War, in popular imagination, is trench warfare, a war of land and mud, remote and incompetent leaders and pitiful slaughter, then the Second World War is participation, shared danger, a civilian as much as a forces’ conflict. Paul Fussell in Wartime: Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War(1989) contrasts the representative visual iconography and discourses of the two world wars, noting a preoccupation in Second World War culture with soldierly slang, grousing against authority andresentment ofpetty mindedofficialdom.The Second World War is often represented in terms of democratic and quotidian preoccupations;through the views and experiences of the many, a notion notably foregrounded and critically examined by Angus Calder in The People’s War: Britain 1939-1945 (1992). It is this critical and popular idea of the war as essentially an experience of the many that finds an echo in Healey’simage of the multitude of eyes.

Collections of Second World War poetry have been published in the post-war period, with a scattering of new anthologies appearing over the last 20 years: from Hudson and Cheshire’s Poetry of the Second World War (1990), five anthologies edited by Victor Selwyn including The Voice of War. Poems of the Second World War: The Oasis Collection (1996)[3], to Graham’s Poetry of the Second World War: An International Anthology (1998) and Haughton’s Poetry of the Second World War (2004). In addition, critical analyses of Second World War literature such as those by Gill Plain (1996, 1997, 2005, 2008), Simon Featherstone (1995), Adam Piette (1995) and Mark Rawlinson (2000) have demonstrated a continued presence of specialist scholarly interest and activity in the field. The nichethat Second World War poetry occupies within the poetry publishing sector and in the scholarly war literature community contrasts strongly, however, withthe powerful attraction the Second World War holds as a subject for dramatists, documentary-makers and historians. In 1999, the then German Culture Minister, Michael Naumann, remarked ruefully that the British seemed still to be obsessed with the Second World War, and that, in fact, ‘There is only one nation in the world that has decided to make the Second World War a sort of spiritual core of its national self, understanding and pride.’ (Young 1999: 16). Considering the quantity of Second World War documentary and fictional material available over a decade after Naumann’s comment,such as can be seen scheduled on popular history-oriented television channels, the point still stands today. Yet the status and impact of different art forms that explore and representthe war vary greatly. WhilstSaving Private Ryan (Spielberg 1998) became a popular (albeit contentious) cultural reference point in exploring a particular military operation and experience of combat, for example, it would be very difficult to claim that thepublication of any new anthology of Second World War poetry has sparked similar ‘watercooler’ interest. Despite broad-based and popular Britishfascination with the Second World War, efforts by editors and publishers to select, reorganise and represent the poetry by theme in order to reach wider contemporary readerships do not seem to have raised its profile.

Some contemporarywar poetry anthologies are particularly interesting in the way they revealthe methodological and ideological problems of selection and mediation. In Hollis and Keegan’s 101 Poems Against War(2003), for example, the unambiguously pacifist editorial stance attempts to constitute the entire poetic offering (taken from several wars) as an articulation of protest: ‘This extraordinary anthology gathers together the most startling poems against war ever written…’ as the book jacket promotional text expresses it. Yet a relatively small number of the poems contained within this anthology display a primary concern with evoking the misery, waste or immorality of war. In particular, Second World War poet Sorley Maclean’s ironic, anti-Nazi poem ‘Death Valley’ fits uneasily beneath this banner, and Second World War poems such as those by Keith Douglas’s‘How to Kill’and Dylan Thomas’s ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’ are, at best, offbeat companions to the more polemical pacifist poems. Douglas’s work displays a fascination with the ‘sorcery’ of the act of killing and observations of the moment and processes of death. To depict Douglas, in the words of the anthology title, as ‘against’ war, underplays the pragmatism and emotional and analytical distance of his poetry, in which, for example, a dead soldier is calmly surveyed as both the lost lover and successfully dispatched enemy. Thomas’s poem, in dealing with the death of a child, is concerned far more with its philosophical significance and with general cultural responses both to childhood and to death, than in presenting a case against war. Indeed, the rootedness of the poem in the conditions of war is not explicit: it can only be construed metonymically. The choice of these Second World War poems in the anthology illustrates a tension between the post-1960s liberal construction of the war poetry genre as broadly anti-war and an interest in poems that elude easy moral or ideological categorisation.

The significance of the Second World War’s marginal and often uneasy positioning can be appreciated better when contrasted with the fortunes of First World War poetry, an oeuvre deeply woven into British culture, including through compulsory curricula, genealogical activity, memorial objects and commemorative practices. For many years Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Siegfried Sassoon have continued to have a presenceaswar poets in school English Literature texts, and Armistice Day commemorations regularly draw on First World War poems, with ‘For the Fallen’ by Lawrence Binyon(written in 1914) being a particular favourite. Current Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy wascommissioned by the BBC to writea poem in honourof the last British First World War survivors, Henry Allingham and Harry Patch (‘Last Post’, 2009a). Duffy subsequently invited her ‘fellow poets, to bear witness, each in their own way, to these matters of war’ (Duffy, 2009b: 2) and several of the resulting poems quoted or reprised the familiar tropes and images from First World War poetry.At a time when the majority of civilians in the wealthier Western nations are arguably very removed from the realities of war, detached as Haider has arguedin this journal (2010) from war’sscope, viscerality and relentlessness, contemporary poets such as Duffy have attempted to use the deep respect accorded the First World War to challenge the prevalence of distanced, even narcoleptic attitudes to war. The history of the changing status and significance of war memorials also tends to privilege the First World War; very few new memorials were built following the Second World War and in many cases, the names and dates of the Second World War dead were added on to existing First World War plaques. In the last two to three decades, memorials have frequently become a focus for reinscription as public sites of grief and remembrance, as examined by Switzer (2010), yet within the realm of changing ritual practices for the expression of loss, it tends to be the 1914-18 war which functions as the Ur-conflict. In 1985, for example, Second World War poets were excluded from a‘war poet’ memorial unveiled in Westminster Abbey (Bergonzi 1996).

First World War poets and their work have formed the subject of feature films in their own right: the 1993 feature film Regeneration, for example, was based on the eponymous fictional work by Pat Barker that explored the figures of Sassoon and Owen, their relationship to each other,the war and the poetry that appeared in different ways to consume them. There are First World War poems and poets that have become symbolic far beyond their historical moment, with Owenoften mobilised as a symbol of the ‘pity of war’. This was a phrase he himself famously coined in a Preface found posthumously among his papers and used for the 1921 collection Poems by Wilfred Owen. Owen became a figurehead for the need to understand and identify with the human suffering beneath military rhetoric, an image underscored by the use of a romantic and thoughtful portrait photograph in uniform in collections of his poems[4]. Whilst the poetry of the Second World War has been the subject of considerable scholarly and specialist interest, this work does not seem to have led to the poetry being accessed more widely or resonating more strongly. The issue from which this article emerges, then, is this ‘problem’of Second World War poetry and its marginal cultural standing.The critical thought on this falls into different categories: one view is that, bar a small number of excellent poets, the poetry has not provided sufficient quality to sustain interest (Shires 1985). Another view is thatthis tendency to seek a small canon of ‘quality’ Second World War poetsitself rests on problematic assumptions about war poetry being a genre shaped by the First World War and its literary output (Walter 1997; Lyon 2005 a & b)[5]. As thenextsection will explore, a fuller literary-historical contextual accountshows that not only was a great deal of Second World War poetrywritten and published but that it played a significant role inwartime culture. In literary and cultural historical terms, this body of work represents a substantive and meaningful dimension of the British artistic response to the events of 1939-45.

The anthology form and war poetry in Britain during 1939-45

The anthology, as a conglomeration of poems selected and mediated by a supervisory or editorial figure, offered extensive opportunities for meaning-making in wartime. A very large corpus of war poems emergedduring theSecond World War. This can be defined in historical terms as written in the period 1939-1945, although much of this poetry was published after 1945 and much was re-selected, reorganised and republished in post-war anthologies up to the present.This corpus is also defined thematically: the poetry included within it alludes to, describes or metaphorically explores war conditions, experiences and ideology. Many were put together with overt editorial agendas in mind, exposing some of the values and aims underlying the business of poetry publishing and poetry selling during the war. Extensive scholarly work recording and categorising the poetry of both world wars has been published and provides rich bibliographical data for any researcher in the field (Reilly 1978; Reilly 1986), including lists of edited war poetry anthologies.For the purposes of this research, the focus is a subset of approximately 90 anthologies, based on Reilly’s work (1986) but taking into account a number of works published subsequent to her bibliography.