SURVIVORS SONGS From Homer to Heaney, the voices of men and women have seldom been more piercing, more poignant, than in time of conflict. For fifty years, has been attuned to such voices. In Survivors Songs he explores a series of poetic encounters with war, with essays on Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and others. Beautifully written, this moving book sets the poetry and prose of the First World War and its aftermath in the wider context of writing about warfare from prehistoric Troy to Anglo- Saxon England; from Agincourt to Flanders; from El Alamein to Vietnam; from the wars of yesterday to the wars of tomorrow. jon stallworthy is a poet and a Fellow of the British Academy. Formerly Professor of English Literature at Wolfson College, Oxford, he is the author of prize-winning biographies of Wilfred Owen and Louis MacNeice, the editor of Owen s Complete Poems and Fragments and of The Oxford Book of War Poetry. He has published many volumes of poems, works of literary criticism, anthologies of poetry, and a memoir, Singing School: The Making of a Poet.
SURVIVORS SONGS from Maldon to the Somme JON STALLWORTHY
cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo, Delhi Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 8ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521727891 2008 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2008 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library isbn 978-0-521-89906-2 hardback isbn 978-0-521-72789-1 paperback Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.
WITH A POPPY for Macnair 11.11.01 What was it for, that War to End Wars? It was for us. It was for you and yours.
Contents Voice over Acknowledgements page ix xi 1. The death of the hero 1 2. Survivors songs 18 3. England s epic? 35 4. Who was Rupert Brooke? 42 5. Christ and the soldier 55 6. Owen s afterlife 68 7. Owen and his editors 81 8. The legacy of the Somme 98 9. The iconography of the Waste Land 109 10. War and peace 128 11. The fire from heaven 146 12. Henry Reed and the Great Good Place 162 13. The fury and the mire 178 Notes 196 Index 213 vii
Voice over When W.H. Auden, acknowledging the powerlessness of the unacknowledged legislator to alter the events of 1 September 1939, wrote All I have is a voice, he articulated a general truth about his calling, his mystery. All any poet has is a voice. Apart from the finger-print, the human voice-print is arguably our most distinctive feature and one that alters less than most from youth to age. Some voices do not then fall silent but continue, from age to age, speaking to an everincreasing audience Of what is past or passing or to come. By 1939, Auden had lost his belief in the poet s voice as an agent of effective political change: poetry makes nothing happen, his elegy In Memory of W.B. Yeats declared. He would not have dared say that to the living Yeats, who saw painters, poets, playwrights, sculptors as the architects of civilization, generally, and in his own time and place, specifically, those who made the 1916 Easter Rising happen, When Pearse summoned Cuchulain to his side. History suggests that the voices of Auden and Yeats each articulate a truth. In the short term, poetry makes nothing happen. British, French, Spanish, German, and Italian poets of Auden s low dishonest decade could not avert the Spanish Civil War or the Second World War. In the longer term, however, the writers of the Irish Renaissance can be credited with educating and energizing the freedom-fighters ix
x Voice over of 1916 and after; much as the poets of the First World War the principal subject of the essays in this book can be credited with kindling the anti-war fury that blazed through the streets of London in February 2003. I have spent many of the most rewarding hours of my life listening to the voices of absent friends Thomas Hardy, William Yeats, Wilfred Owen, David Jones, Wystan Auden, Keith Douglas, and Old Uncle Tom Eliot and all singing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; and I think of the essays in this book as thank-you letters expressing gratitude in terms that, I hope, may lead other readers to listen to their voices and hear in them what I have heard. Good poets are survivors even if, like Keats and Owen, they die at twenty-five and it pleases me to remember a poem I learnt as a boy, one of the few to break the sound-barrier of translation, William Cory s version of Callimachus s 2,000- year-old epigram: They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead, They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed. I wept as I remembered how often you and I Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky. And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest, A handful of grey ashes, long, long ago at rest, Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake; For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take. Wolfson College, Oxford
Acknowledgements I am indebted to many friends who, over many years, have helped in many ways with the preparation of this book: in particular, the late Mr John Bell, Dr Sarita Cargas, Dr Santanu Das, Dr Christopher Dowling, Ms Angela Godwin, Mrs Sue Hales, Professor Seamus Heaney, Dr Dominic Hibberd, Mrs Jenny Houlsby, the late Professor Gwyn Jones, the late Sir Geoffrey Keynes, Dr Stuti Khanna, Dr Nancy Macky (my hawk-eyed editor), Dr Jane Potter, Mrs Gail Purkis, Mr Michael Ramsbotham, Dr Ray Ryan, Dr Maartje Scheltens, Professor Vincent Sherry, Mr Dennis Silk, Ms Jennifer Speak (my exemplary indexer), Ms Sue Usher, and those others whose work is acknowledged in my notes. I also wish to thank the ever-obliging staff of the following institutions: Bodleian Library, British Museum, Britten Pears Library (Aldeburgh), English Faculty Library (Oxford), Humanities Research Center (University of Texas at Austin), Imperial War Museum, Kings College (Cambridge) Library and Wolfson College (Oxford) Library. Some of the essays collected here have been revised since their first appearance in the following publications: The Death of the Hero in my Oxford Book of War Poetry (Oxford University Press, 1984); Survivors Songs in my Gwyn Jones Lecture, Survivors Songs in Welsh Poetry (University College Cardiff Press, 1982); xi
xii Acknowledgements England s Epic? in Slightly Foxed, 15 (autumn 2007); Who was Rupert Brooke? in Critical Survey, 2, 2 (autumn 1990); Owen s Afterlife in my selection of Wilfred Owen s Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2004); Henry Reed and the Great Good Place in Henry Reed s Collected Poems (Oxford University Press, 1991, and Manchester: Carcanet Press Ltd, 2007); and The Fury and the Mire in my Laurie Lee Memorial Lecture, War and Poetry (Cheltenham: The Cyder Press, 2005). I am grateful to the editor and publishers of these; also for permission to reproduce copyright materials from the following sources: W.H. Auden: The Shield of Achilles, from Collected Poems. Copyright 1952 by W.H. Auden. Used by permission of Random House, Inc., and of Faber and Faber Ltd. John Balaban: In Celebration of Spring, from Locusts at the Edge of Summer: New and Selected Poems. Copyright 1997 by John Balaban. Reprinted with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org. Rupert Brooke: quotations from The Letters of Rupert Brooke, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Faber and Faber Ltd, 1968). Copyright 1968 by The Rupert Brooke Trustees; and poems from The Poetical Works, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Faber and Faber Ltd, 1946). James Dickey: The Firebombing, from Poems 1957 1967. Copyright 1967 by James Dickey. Reprinted by permission of Wesleyan University Press. James Fenton: Dead Soldiers, from The Memory of War and Children in Exile: Poems 1968 1983.Copyright 1983 by James Fenton. Reprinted by permission of PFD on behalf of James Fenton.
Acknowledgements xiii Anthony Hecht: More Light! More Light!, from Collected Earlier Poems. Copyright 1990 by Anthony E. Hecht. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., and Carcanet Press Ltd. Ted Hughes: Snake Hymn, from Collected Poems. Copyright 2003 by The Estate of Ted Hughes. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd and Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Randall Jarrell: The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, from The Complete Poems. Copyright 1969, renewed 1997 by Mary von S. Jarrell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, and Faber and Faber Ltd. Robert Lowell: Women, Children, Babies, Cow, Cats and Fall 1961, from Collected Poems, ed. Frank Bidart and David Gewanter. Copyright 2003 by Harriet Lowell and Sheridan Lowell. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC, and Faber and Faber Ltd. Wilfred Owen: quotations from The Collected Letters, ed. Harold Owen and John Bell (Oxford University Press, 1967). Copyright Oxford University Press 1967; and poems from The Complete Poems and Fragments, ed. (Chatto & Windus, The Hogarth Press and Oxford University Press, 1983). Copyright The Executors of Harold Owen s Estate 1963 and 1983. Siegfried Sassoon: Glory of Women, from Collected Poems of Siegfried Sassoon. Copyright 1918, 1920 by E.P. Dutton. Copyright 1936, 1946, 1947, 1948 by Siegfried Sassoon. Reprinted by permission of the Estate of George Sassoon, and of Viking Penguin, a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Louis Simpson: The Heroes, from Selected Poems. Copyright 1966 by Louis Simpson.