In 2001, as a raw, new teaching fellow at the University of Aberdeen, I was given the task of writing a lecture on First World War poetry for a course on writing and gender. I was already having an absurdly busy year, and I knew almost nothing about war poetry. I remember thinking that this could turn out to be a lot of work. How right I was. A dozen years on, however, I am very grateful to Jeannette King and Flora Alexander for conspiring to set me to work on this subject. Without the groundwork done for that lecture, and the discovery of poems by Mary Borden and Grace Fallow Norton, which instantly caught my imagination, this book would never have happened.
Since then, I have read and traveled widely, and have incurred many debts to individuals and institutions that have facilitated access to print and manuscript sources. I would like to thank: the Beinecke Library, Yale University; Boston Public Library; Cambridge University Library; the Carnegie Trust; the Center for Henry James Studies at Creighton University, especially Katie Sommer and Greg Zacharias; Churchill College Archives, University of Cambridge, especially Sophie Bridges; Jane Conway; Duff Hart-Davis; the Houghton Library, Harvard University, especially Susan Halpert; the Howard Gotleib Archival Research Center, Boston University; the James Graham Leyburn Library, Washington and Lee University, especially Vaughn Stanley; King’s College Archives, University of Cambridge; the National Library of Scotland; the Special Collections Centre, University of Aberdeen; the United States National Archives and Records Administration; University of Chicago Archives. Ellen Weiss is due special thanks for her hospitality and generous sharing of unpublished family papers.
Many friends and contacts offered wisdom and encouragement, corrected stray facts, or pointed me in the direction of new material: Mairi Brunning, Pat Carter, Santanu Das, Alison Fell, Tamara Follini, Christine Hallett, Margaret Higonnet, Philip Horne, Tim Kendall, Tim Lustig, Angela K. Smith, Mark Van Wienen, and Mark Whalan. Eric Brandt at Yale University Press offered excellent advice. Christine Hallett, David Hutchison, Jeannette King, and Mhairi Pooler all read sections of the manuscript and gave very useful feedback. I am grateful to all.
Finally, and most importantly, thanks to my family—David, Carrie, Jamie, and Fraser—who kept their patience with this project, even when I occasionally lost mine.
Certain passages of this book are also published elsewhere, though in very different form, and appear here by permission. Such passages can be found in: “The Art of Living Inward: Henry James on Rupert Brooke,” Henry James Review 29, no. 2 (2008): 132–43; “A Period in Limbo: Placing People and Punctuation in E. E. Cummings’ The Enormous Room,” in War and Displacement, edited by Sandra Barkhof and Angela K. Smith (London: Routledge, 2014), 134–48; “The Theatre of Pain: Observing Mary Borden in The Forbidden Zone,” in First World War Nursing: New Perspectives, edited by Alison Fell and Christine Hallett (London: Routledge, 2013), 139–55.
The poems and photograph of Grace Fallow Norton appear by permission of Ellen Weiss. Correspondence between Grace Fallow Norton and Ferris Greenslet at Houghton Mifflin appears by permission of the Houghton Library. The photograph of Henry James appears by permission of Smith College Archives. Quotations from the poems of Mary Borden appear by permission of Patrick Aylmer.