THE LAKES, THE PATRIOTS AND THE WAR POETS

THE LAKE POETS

The most famous poets who lived in England’s Lake District around the turn of the nineteenth century are William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who met in their early twenties, formed an intense friendship, fell out badly and made up a couple of years later (though it was never quite the same again).

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH (1770-1850)

Wordsworth was an early supporter of the French Revolution (indeed, he pinned his political colours to the mast by impregnating a French girl called Annette Vallon on a cross-Channel trip), wrote some wonderful poems – ‘Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’, ‘Composed Upon Westminster Bridge’, ‘The Solitary Reaper’ and (with Coleridge) Lyrical Ballads – and then went all small-c-conservative and ended up as Poet Laureate. While it would be difficult, nay a little stupid, to argue that Wordsworth is anything but one of the major English poets, should anyone deny that the quality of Wordsworth’s poetry trailed off significantly in later years, you can state with absolute certainty that they are talking out of their hat. Or postman’s cap. In 1813 Wordsworth accepted the post of Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland (to the tune of £400 per annum) – hardly the stuff of radicals (and indeed young guns Shelley, Byron and Keats all accused Wordsworth of apostasy) – and was unable to recapture the freshness and newness of his earlier work.

SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE (1772-1834)

Coleridge led a more interesting life, albeit with the help of opium, but wrote less revered poetry than Wordsworth. Nowadays, people only tend to remember ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ (the longest poem in Lyrical Ballads, the radical collection of poetry which he and Wordsworth jointly contributed to) and ‘Kubla Khan’. As young men, Coleridge and Southey devoted themselves to Pantisocracy, which sounds dirty but was in fact a form of communism which they intended to practise on the banks of the Susquehanna River in Pennsylvania, where, presumably, no one would see them. The project never got off the ground.

Of Coleridge’s less-well-known works, you may want to familiarise yourself with ‘Christabel’, a two-part Gothic fantasy spanning the worlds of psychopathology and the supernatural. There was to be a third part but Coleridge never wrote it; he also did not finish ‘The Wanderings of Cain’ and his excuse for ‘Kubla Khan’ being a mere fragment of what would have been a longer poem was that his recollection of the (opium-fuelled) dream, which the poem was to be an account of, was disturbed by a ‘person on business from Porlock’. Have no truck with any of this bluff and bluster; most poets are slackers who overindulge in the drugs of choice of their particular age.

Poetry buffs are very fond of backing their man in the eternal Wordsworth v Coleridge debate. You can afford to assume a distant look of ennui if you ever have the misfortune to be caught up in this particular stalemate. If you can be bothered to take part in the discussion, you might consider suggesting a compromise option: that both men were geniuses but in very different ways. Such even-handedness is beyond all so-called experts and academics and, after dropping this seemingly innocuous but bomb-like assertion, you should withdraw at your earliest convenience.

JINGO LINGO

The nineteenth century is crammed with poets fighting to declaim their patriotic fervour: Macaulay, Tennyson, Newbolt, Austin, Kipling and scores of other lesser-known and even worse poets.

THOMAS BABINGTON MACAULAY (1800-1859)

Another MP and poet, Macaulay’s poems are all about heroes and heroines, and battles, some of them amazingly awful:

They are here! They rush on! We are broken! We are gone!

Our left is borne before them like stubble on the blast.

O Lord, put forth thy might! O Lord, defend the right!

Stand back to back in God’s name, and fight it to the last.

Maybe he was a good MP.

ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON (1809-1892)

Not all of Tennyson’s poetry is awful, which is surprising when you realise that:

a) he became Poet Laureate

b) he was given a pension of £200 by Sir Robert Peel

c) Queen Victoria thought he was wonderful.

Try to forget ‘The Revenge’, ‘The May Queen’ and ‘The Defence of Lucknow’, and concentrate on ‘Crossing the Bar’, ‘Locksley Hall’ (‘In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love’), ‘Morte d’Arthur’ and the incomparable ‘In Memoriam’. Some lines from this 133-stanza poem, which was written in response to the sudden death of his closest friend, Arthur Hallam, have passed into the fabric of the language (for example, ‘Nature, red in tooth and claw’; ‘Tis better to have loved and lost / Than never to have loved at all’).

Tennyson is equally famous for a short poem which memorialises the bravery of the British cavalry in their defeat at the hands of the Russians. Led into battle by a Lieutenant called Lord Cardigan at a Ukrainian town called Balaclava, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ is by some distance the most moving and impressive poem ever to be inspired by knitwear in the entire poetic canon.

SIR HENRY NEWBOLT (1862-1938)

So bad, he’s essential. Newbolt should have been Poet Laureate, and may well have spent his entire adult life believing that he was. Read all his poems, learn them by heart; they will take away the very breath of any expert or critic. Take ‘Clifton Chapel’:

To set the cause above renown,
To love the game beyond the prize,
To honour, while you strike him down,
The foe that comes with fearless eyes.

Many of Newbolt’s poems have been set to music (‘Drake’s Drum’, ‘The Old Superb’) which makes them even better. You can sing them at the critics and intellectuals.

Robert Bridges thought ‘Drake’s Drum’ wonderful – ‘I wish I had ever written anything half as good’ – which tells you all you need to know about Robert Bridges. Newbolt’s poetry was amazingly popular. Admirals All is said to have run to four editions in a fortnight in 1897.

ALFRED AUSTIN (1835-1913)

Austin was by and large an unsuccessful poet with an understandably wavering faith in his poetic genius. He was a man of forthright political views – he rejoiced in Prussia’s military dominance in 1870, thought Garibaldi ‘an unmitigated nuisance’, and wrote a most unfortunate ode celebrating the Boer War’s Jameson Raid. Austin worked on the principle that no poem could be great unless it was an epic on a theme combining love, patriotism and religion (you’d be amazed how many poems do).

RUDYARD KIPLING (1865-1936)

Many people are astonished to learn that Kipling won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907, but then they probably haven’t read the Polish novels of Henryk Sienkiewicz who won the prize in 1905, or the Italian poems of Giosuè Carducci, who won in 1906. The point is that it’s not essential to write off Kipling’s poetry simply because it scans and rhymes. Point out that his work is all quotations:

For the female of the species is more deadly than the male

What stands if Freedom fall?

Who dies if England live?

It’s clever, but is it Art?

To the legion of the lost ones,
To the cohort of the damned

You’re a better man than I am, Gunga Din!

...the flannelled fools at the wicket or the muddied oafs at the goals

On the road to Mandalay

The Captains and the Kings depart

Brandy for the Parson

Sussex by the Sea

Take up the White Man’s burden...

The whole of the poem If.

The trouble with Kipling is that he lived a reasonably long time and died from natural causes, which precludes him from being a great poet.

OTHER NINETEENTH-CENTURY GENIUSES

Apart from the Brownings and the Rossettis, who came in couplets, most other nineteenth-century poets were part-timers. Novelist poets included William Makepeace Thackeray, Emily Brontë, Charles Kingsley, Matthew Arnold, George Meredith, Thomas Hardy and Robert Louis Stevenson. William Morris wrote poetry when he wasn’t wallpapering. Lewis Carroll wrote poetry when he wasn’t doing sums or taking photographs of young girls. Edward Lear invented the limerick. Oscar Wilde wrote poetry when he wasn’t being delightfully outrageous with a hock and seltzer.

ROBERT BROWNING (1812-1889) AND ELIZABETH BARRETT BROWNING (1806-1861)

Probably the most famous thing the Brownings did was to elope, but Robert Browning also wrote The Pied Piper of Hamelin. Most people know the story of the first two-thirds of the poem but forget that, at the end, the children emerge in Transylvania. There is a great deal of wit in the poems of Robert Browning and a great deal of beauty in the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, especially in her Sonnets from the Portuguese. Unlike most poets, the Brownings lived more excitingly than they died.

DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI (1828-1882) AND CHRISTINA ROSSETTI (1830-1894)

Dante Gabriel Rossetti was a painter and poet who, along with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais, founded the pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Dante Rossetti’s poetry is now overshadowed by his sister Christina’s, which has been compared to Emily Dickinson. This means that it is a) short, b) desperate and c) tremendous.

The award for the most miserable English poet is fiercely contested. Hardy could probably be a contender; Larkin worth a punt; Hopkins must surely be in with a shout. But you would be on safe ground if you were to put in a word for Christina Rossetti for this particular contribution:

I looked for that which is not, nor can be,
And hope deferred made my heart sick in truth
But years must pass before a hope of youth
Is resigned utterly.

GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS (1844-1889)

If not quite the most miserable, you could suggest that the most interesting poet of his time was Gerard Manley Hopkins who wrote such bizarre and original poetry that none of it was published until 30 years after his death, which is a sure-fire but rather disappointing way of becoming a cult figure. Having forsworn the writing of poetry upon becoming a Jesuit priest, he was moved to come out of retirement at the age of 31 by reading of the death of five nuns in a shipwreck. There is no need whatsoever to read the poem itself, the highly baroque and largely incomprehensible ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’. Hopkins is best known for his technique (‘sprung rhythm’) which relates to his sensual poems, not to his sensual life. Refer to ‘inscape’ (the essence of an object) and ‘instress’ (what happens when inscape is understood by the reader). Hopkins’s Terrible Sonnets (‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’) are really very good; written in the last years of his life, their titular adjective refers to their horrifying quality rather than suggesting their inadequacy.

THOMAS HARDY (1840-1928)

Although much better known in his lifetime as a novelist than a poet, Thomas Hardy thought of himself primarily as a poet, the novels being a means to earn a living more than anything. His poetry – whose range is vast in terms of both subject matter and form – is still somewhat overshadowed by his novels, however. Shot through with a wry pessimism, as some of the titles of his poetry collections attest – Satires of Circumstance, for example, and Time’s Laughingstocks and Other Verses – Hardy’s poetry has a rugged honesty which was to become a beacon of clarity for later poets such as Philip Larkin. Famous poems include ‘In Time of “The Breaking of Nations”’ and ‘The Convergence of the Twain’; somewhat less familiar and safer territory for the bluffer are Poems of 1912-1913, the immensely moving sequence of poems, and exploration of grief, which Hardy wrote after the sudden death of his wife, Emma. This sequence is perhaps made all the more remarkable, and poignant, by the fact that he and his wife – despite continuing to share the same house – had hardly spoken for years prior to her death.

Anyway, whatever his relationship with his wife, a mere year after her death, old Hardy was sticking his trumpet major elsewhere: he married his nubile young ‘friend’, Florence Dugdale, who was almost 40 years younger than he. Poets. Tut.

THE WAR POETS: FIRST WORLD WAR

Rupert Brooke, TP Cameron Wilson, Leslie Coulson, Jeffery Day, Julian Grenfell, WN Hodgson, TE Hulme, Thomas Kettle, Francis Ledwidge, EA Mackintosh, RB Marriott-Watson, John McCrae, Wilfred Owen, Nowell Oxland, Robert Palmer, Isaac Rosenberg, Alan Seeger, Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Charles Sorley, EW Tennant and Edward Thomas are just some of the poets who fought and died in the First World War. They were all young, egocentric, talented and almost forced into verse by the horror of their experiences. Some critics have suggested that it was the static nature of their nightmare existence, creating a fruitful routine, that accounts for the excellence of the poetry of this time; fewer poems written in the Second World War are reckoned in the same class.

Edmund Blunden, himself a soldier in the war, thought that the term ‘war poet’ was inaccurately applied to many of his contemporaries. Some (Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Thomas, Robert Graves, David Jones) were poets who happened to be caught in Armageddon but whose work encompassed many other themes. Others, like Wilfred Owen, had time to write only of war.

WILFRED OWEN (1893-1918)

Owen wrote in the preface to his posthumously published collected poems: ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War. The poetry is in the pity.’ Had he lived, however (he was killed a week before Armistice Day at the age of 25), who knows what other poetic feats he may have gone on to? Some might argue that Owen’s death is the single biggest catastrophe to befall poetry since the death of Keats; others may demur and cite the flowery affectation of his pre-war poetry to illustrate why Owen may not have been able to reach the heights of his war poetry in times of peace.

Futility

Move him into the sun –
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it awoke him, even in France,
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.
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?

There is little one can really say about this small but perfectly formed poem. Not that artistic achievement borne of great suffering has ever prevented your average poetry buff from sounding off about the merits of this or that aspect of form or metre, or whatever; and in the case of this poem there’s always the chance that the reverent silence, which is really the only appropriate response to it, will be broken by someone wittering on about Owen’s mastery of pararhyme (a kind of rhyme where the consonant remains the same but the vowel changes – e.g., seeds/sides; tall/toil). ‘My great-grandfather was killed at Ypres, you know’ is always a pretty effective way of shutting up someone who won’t let the poetry of war speak for itself.

SECOND WORLD WAR

Because of the success and fame of the war poets of 1914-1918, a cry went up at the beginning of the 1939-1945 War: ‘Where are the war poets?’. Cyril Connolly’s sharp retort was, ‘Under your nose’, and the dreadful days of death once again produced some of the best poetry of the century. They also brought about the death of scores more poets: Drummond Allison, Brian Allwood, David Bourne, Clive Branson, Timothy Corsellis, Keith Douglas, James Farrar, Keith Foottit, Stephen Haggard, TR Hodgson, John Jarmain, David Geraint Jones, Sidney Keyes, Alun Lewis, David Raikes, Richard Spender, Gervase Stewart, Frank Thompson (publicly executed at the age of 23 in Serbia, after fighting with the Bulgarian partisans) and Nigel Weir. Many of them were young pilots in the RAF, and there is an amazingly calm premonition of death in their work. It should also be remembered that a great many other (sometimes better-known) poets were writing during and after the Second World War – John Arlott, Charles Causley, Paul Dehn, Gavin Ewart, Laurie Lee, John Lehmann, Louis MacNeice, Henry Reed, Stephen Spender, Dylan Thomas and Henry Treece (one of The New Apocalyptics) among them.

Few war poets (or any, for that matter – apart from that Keats fellow) have produced work to rival the precocious maturity of Wilfred Owen. However, this poem by Frank Thompson, published a year after his death in 1944, offers a glimpse of what might have been:

An Epitaph For My Friends

As one who, gazing at a vista
Of beauty, sees the clouds close in,
And turns his back in sorrow,
hearing
The thunderclouds begin.
So we, whose life was all before us,
Our hearts with sunlight filled,
Left in the hills our books and
flowers,
Descended, and were killed.
Write on the stone no word of
sadness –
Only the gladness due,
That we, who asked the most
of living,
Knew how to give it too.

Draw your interlocutor’s attention to the sublime use of the caesura – a pause mid-line (bluffers should remember this word) after ‘Descended’ which makes the tumble of ‘and were killed’, with the landing on the word ‘killed’, even more bleak somehow.

Of course, some war poets did survive. The following poem by the Australian poet Kenneth Slessor (see ‘American Poetry and Some of the Rest’) is work of sublime depth. It has echoes of Owen in both the language (compare, you may consider bluffing, ‘Only the monstrous anger of the guns. / Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle’ from Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and ‘the sob and clubbing of the gunfire’ in Slessor’s poem) and the focus on the pity of warfare.

Beach Burial

Softly and humbly to the Gulf of Arabs
The convoys of dead sailors come;
At night they sway and wander in the waters far under,
But morning rolls them in the foam.

Between the sob and clubbing of the gunfire
Someone, it seems, has time for this,
To pluck them from the shallows and bury them in burrows
And tread the sand upon their nakedness;

And each cross, the driven stake of tidewood,
Bears the last signature of men,
Written with such perplexity, with such bewildered pity,
The words choke as they begin –

‘Unknown seaman’ – the ghostly pencil
Wavers and fades, the purple drips,
The breath of wet season has washed their inscriptions
As blue as drowned men’s lips,

Dead seamen, gone in search of the same landfall,
Whether as enemies they fought,
Or fought with us, or neither; the sand joins them together,
Enlisted on the other front.

It hardly needs repetition but, as a general rule for any discussion of war poetry, feel confident in emphasising that this darkly brilliant and productive period in the history of the genre is proof, if proof were necessary, that great poetry usually comes about as a result of great suffering.