America and the War in Poetry

Although ‘The New Elizabethans and the Old’ never found its way into The Sacred Wood and scholars have disregarded it, the essay was important for T. S. Eliot. A few weeks following its publication in The Athenæum he mentioned to his mother an upcoming lecture on 31 May at London University. Eliot either abandoned it or we have lost the manuscript, but Eliot planned, he said, to cover the younger generation of poets. It may well have been a version of the lecture he finally gave to the Arts League in October 1919, discussed later in this chapter. However, given Eliot wagered his London University lecture was to be on a delicate subject it is unlikely it merely attacked the Georgians. Poetries of war were the especially delicate subject in London during 1919. It was a society marked by the mass demobilisation of its armies, the tending of its wounded and the commemoration of its dead.

On 9 July Eliot sent ‘The New Elizabethans and the Old’ to John Quinn. He recommended it for inclusion in the volume Alfred Knopf would eventually publish as Poems (February 1920). Initially this was to be a volume entitled A Book of Verse and Prose. Eliot told Quinn that the essay might address the interest of the American public in the war. Although the combined volume of prose and poetry never happened, Eliot ensured the link to the war in Poems (1920) via its dedication to Jean Verdenal. Eliot had originally published the same dedication in Prufrock and Other Observations but felt it was unnecessary in Ara Vos Prec, the English edition of Poems, where he used Dante instead. The reference to Dante differentiated, as in ‘In silent corridors of death’, between those souls forced to suffer and those souls wishing to suffer as penitents as they journeyed through purgatory.

What American interest was Eliot referring to when he sent ‘The New Elizabethans and the Old’ to Quinn? There was certainly no straightforward evidence of that interest in the internationalist oriented Little Review. There is a clear shallowness to the single blank page that Margaret Anderson inserted into the April 1917 edition of the magazine as the United States entered the war. Anderson’s caveat that the Little Review might be censored for this non-statement is not redemptive.

This series of monographs on selected topics in modernism is designed to reflect and extend the range of new work in modernist studies. The studies in the series aim for a breadth of scope and for an expanded sense of the canon of modernism, rather than focusing on individual authors. Literary texts will be considered in terms of contexts including recent cultural histories (modernism and magic; sonic modernity; media studies) and topics of theoretical interest (the everyday; postmodernism; the Frankfurt School); but the series will also reconsider more familiar routes into modernism (modernism and gender; sexuality; politics). The works published will be attentive to the various cultural, intellectual and historical contexts of British, American and European modernisms, and to inter-disciplinary possibilities within modernism, including performance and the visual and plastic arts.

Tim Armstrong and Rebecca Beasley

In 1929 T. S. Eliot told E. M. Forster that his analysis of The Waste Land had exaggerated the impact of the war. Eliot’s denial of that influence reflected a position the modernists nurtured from the beginning of the war in August 1914 through to the summer of 1919. There was no looking back. It was a position consolidated in A Survey of Modernist Poetry (1927) where ‘war-poetry’ became no more than ‘Georgianism’s second-wind’. There was no place for the genre at all in Principles of Literary Criticism (1924), just a single index entry, ‘Sentimental, and the war’, where the trope is introduced by I. A. Richards as ‘the pathetic and terrible change that can too often be observed in the sentiments entertained towards the War by men who suffered from it and hated it’. In New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) F. R. Leavis’s ‘“war-poets”’ are in scare quotes. W. B. Yeats’s ‘distaste’ of 1936, whilst infamous, was then somewhat belated and it has always seemed in any case a little contorted. It is hard to untangle from Yeats’s nationalism. It is also prey to both a potential misreading of the ‘passive suffering’ Yeats took from Matthew Arnold’s Empedocles on Etna ([1852]) and the accusation of hypocrisy given the terms on which Yeats rejected Sean O’Casey’s The Silver Tassie (1929). Eliot’s original position became for him a creed, evidenced by his Harvard lecture notes of 1933, the occasional poem ‘A Note on War Poetry’ (1942) and the essay ‘T. S. Eliot on Poetry in Wartime’ (1942). In these texts Eliot claimed that we need to distinguish between two types of poets: the real poet who finds himself thrown into war and the soldier who finds himself prone to poetry. Eliot remained unpersuaded that poetry could ever be written from within the experience of war.

Has Modernist War Poetry then followed Forster and exaggerated the importance of the war in the genealogy of modernist poetics? It has argued that the modernist long poem arose, in part, as a response to the arrival of the twentieth century’s moral witness, to the combatant’s absolute claim on the representation of an increasingly traumatic modernity, a claim epitomised by, but not exclusive to, the trench lyric.

Combat Gnosticism: Henri Barbusse, C. R. W. Nevinson, Isaac Rosenberg

In Kangaroo (1923) D. H. Lawrence perfectly captured the changing mood as the appalling events of 1915 gave way to the widespread recognition of an unfolding disaster:

Lawrence had in mind quite specific personal circumstances in these lines: the ongoing suppression of his work, his eventual retreat to Cornwall and fear of conscription. The image still suggests a more generalised emptiness, a cultural vacuum at the eye of the storm. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound would fill the space created by war. Eliot finished his delayed postgraduate dissertation in April 1916 and, after the publication of work on Gottfried Leibniz in October, his focus turned to literature with the first in a series of lectureships. Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was dead. Henry James died in February 1916. Ford Madox Ford was on the Somme by the summer of that year, Richard Aldington with the Expeditionary Force by December. Both T. E. Hulme and Wyndham Lewis either returned from or began military training in March 1916 and they both embarked for France in May. By the summer of 1917, the stage was clear for Eliot and Pound to work through what was common and different in their approaches. In a much later essay of 1932, Pound termed the resulting period a ‘“movement to which no name has ever been given”’. Pound soon became Foreign Editor at the Little Review and Eliot the Assistant Editor at The Egoist. Together they held the means to write the blank agenda left by the vortex. Unlike their conscripted European peers, until well into 1918 they sat beyond the coercive reach of their own governments.

The English public first heard the distraught voice of the moral witness in the summer of 1916. We need to be precise in the dating of this event. As the first evidence take Henri Barbusse’s Le Feu, the novel Jay Winter identifies as the seminal account of moral witnessing in modernity.

Rupert Brooke, Modernist Piñata

The war’s vicious turn in the months leading up to Easter 1915 left an indelible imprint on modernist cultures. The deaths of Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, Jean Verdenal and then Henri Gaudier-Brzeska occurred within the space of six weeks in that spring. Those months also marked the first use of chlorine gas, the sinking of the Lusitania and an escalation of atrocity stories. Public confidence in the war effort waned and the military finally broke ranks from government policy. Sir John French, the British Expeditionary Force’s Commander-in-Chief, collaborated with the editorial team at The Times on 14 May to describe how British casualties at Aubers Ridge resulted from a series of shell shortages. The question of institutional culpability accelerated a week later with the Quintinshill rail disaster. Following a signalling problem, five trains collided and became engulfed by a gas fire in what is still the worst rail accident in British history. Over 200 victims, including troops, were trapped alive or splintered by shrapnel. Charlotte Mew’s ‘May, 1915’ (first published 1929), composed the day after Quintinshill, the day also of Ezra Pound’s first concrete reference to the evolution of his long poem, captured this historical moment. The poem implores readers to hold on to the hope that the natural world, marked by the arrival of spring, will provide some rearrangement to the order of things. Despite this, its opening confidence progressively leaks away into melancholia. We can see the idea that the war might be quick or civilised leeching out of English society in ‘May, 1915’, especially when the unavoidable reality of the body in pieces stood in the way of poetry.

It was within this mood of mounting anxiety and anger that Brooke rose to public fame and poetic ignominy. There was an element of fortuity in this. Although Brooke drafted his series of famous war sonnets, ‘1914’, in the autumn and finished them in early 1915, the January edition of New Numbers in which they first appeared was not in circulation until February 1915 at the earliest. The TLS published several sonnets under Walter de la Mare’s patronage although not until 11 March. This set the stage for Dean Inge’s famous canonisation of Brooke’s (alleged) religiosity in his Easter Day sermon at St Paul’s Cathedral. The Times duly recorded Inge’s sermon and established Brooke’s fame in the popular imagination.

The Problem with Combat Gnosticism

A recurrent claim in combatant narratives of the First World War is that direct experience of battle, the mud and blood of it all, separated participants from civilians. At its core, the claim is that the phenomenology of trench combat was so profoundly alien that it occupied a realm beyond the abilities of the ordinary imagination. ‘I would that war were what men dream,’ wrote Francis Brett Young in ‘The Pavement’ (1919), ‘A crackling fire, a cleansing flame, / That it might leap the space between / And lap up London and its shame.’ According to this combatant, a discharged medical officer who served in East Africa, the gap between the fronts of battle was so large that only a combatant could walk in another combatant’s shoes. Young graphically illustrates the point in a poem which contrasts the act of pounding London’s pavements with marching into the hell of Passchendaele. One cannot it seems be knee-deep in a traumatising horror such as this: knowledge of the most grotesque aspects of human existence, the intimate and violent realms of the real, would appear to require that we be up to the neck in it all.

As literary scholars, we naturally recoil from these claims. We recognise the specificity of the suffering they document, but we recoil from the suggestion that the projective abilities of the sympathetic apparatus might face a limit. In recent years epistemologies of combat and veterancy such as those of Young have become especially contentious. The notion of a space between fronts, and its consequent valorisation of one side of that space, runs counter to the expansionist impulses within modernist studies. James Campbell has provided us with the most complete rebuttal of such claims. Analysing the war’s principal poetic genre, the trench lyric developed by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon amongst others, Campbell gave the combatant’s claims the label ‘combat gnosticism’:

Modernist Poetics on the Eve of War

In The Problems of Philosophy (1912) Bertrand Russell suggested an ethical imperative to his examination of the basic principles of matter. If we are unable to verify the existence of a material object, Russell proposed, then all other material objects, including other people’s bodies and minds, necessarily collapse into a void, leaving us alone in a desert. Russell’s call for a cogent philosophy of matter in support of an ethics of otherness serves as a graphic reminder that the inevitably inward pilgrimage of early-twentieth-century aesthetics harboured a deeper strategy. Fredric Jameson has termed this work a ‘literature of inwardness and introspection’. However, in The Problems of Philosophy we can take note of the desperate need to break the legacies of what Walter Pater described in The Renaissance (1888) as ‘that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced’. Russell’s modernism is a modernism negotiating with, to take Toril Moi’s apt phrase, ‘the death of idealism’. In David Perkins’s A History of Modern Poetry (1976) and Leon Surette’s The Birth of Modernism (1993) we discover a modernism grappling with the legacies of scepticism rather than a modernism inventing scepticism. As James Longenbach argues in Modernist Poetics of History (1987), it was Pater’s Plato and Platonism (1893) with its search for a form of permanent common sense independent of each personality which greatly influenced the early work of W. B. Yeats. As Russell intuited, to doubt the Other’s mind, to doubt our ability to conceptualise it in the same terms as we understand our own mind, is to believe certain things about the world with potentially horrifying consequences.

The established pre-war genealogy of modernist aesthetics has made the divisive and unstable impact of this encounter with epistemological scepticism abundantly clear. Take the broadly established genealogy of Ford Madox Ford’s literary impressionism for example. In the work of Joseph Conrad and Henry James this very distinctive fictional style turned to the investigation of subjectivity as the means to more accurately express how an individual truly experiences real events. In A Genealogy of Modernism Michael Levenson describes how, in the months leading up to the war, Ford’s early demand – most memorably in ‘Impressionism – Some Speculations’ (1913) – to register a public history in personal terms had eventually begun to give way under the weight of egoism.

Transmutations into Poetry

The problems raised by Wallace Stevens’s sequence were already widely clear within modernist cultures. In 1918 Poetry awarded the Helen Haire Levenson Prize to John Curtis Underwood for his Serbian war poem, ‘The Song of the Cheechas’ (Poetry: June 1918). It appeared with a group of poems entitled ‘War Times’ which gave vent to Underwood’s antagonism towards the Central Powers. Methodologically, it followed the process Underwood developed in the 1917 collection War Flames and took as its source material poems covering each of Europe’s main theatres of war that relied on the first-hand experience of soldiers and other combat witnesses. Underwood went to great lengths to make this method clear. He highlighted reuse of material from a range of sources which included May Sinclair’s A Journal of Impressions in Belgium. Harriet Monroe singled out this approach when praising War Flames, calling it ‘a crowded frieze showing the marching of all nations through the terrors and agonies of the cataclysmic struggle’.

Underwood did not however cite a source for his poem on the Cheechas and in January 1919 Paul Fortier Jones alleged Underwood had unduly paraphrased his memoir With Serbia into Exile (1916). Jones went to Serbia in September 1915 as part of a humanitarian relief effort and was the only American with the local army as it catastrophically retreated through the Albanian mountains. As Jones explained, cheecha means uncle, and in Serbia it was a term given to men over the age of thirty. Jones found however that many of the cheechas were well over forty. He felt that Underwood had taken his core point, that the Serb seems never too old to fight, without due attribution. Jones complained that Underwood had ‘contrived to add so little to the original source of his verse that only simple honesty must have impelled him to give due credit to that source’. Without that acknowledgement, Jones concluded, Underwood wanted to deceive the reading public about his own combat credentials.

The accusation was not entirely unfounded. Underwood’s poem lifted whole phrases and images verbatim from Jones’s text. Monroe defended Poetry’s award of the Prize on the administrative ground that it was irrevocable, and that in any case Underwood had already donated his prize money to the United War Work Campaign. The most crucial element of her defence however was the reassertion of the evolving modernist poetic of the magus.

Introduction

Some of the historians of Visigothic Iberia had a well-developed appreciation of the boundaries of the historiographical genres within which they were writing and may even have had their own philosophies of history. Isidore of Seville’s theoretical writings on history, for instance, clearly had some influence on his practice as an historian. Yet, it is necessary to extend our analysis beyond purely theoretical matters if we are to understand better how and why Isidore and his peers in sixth- and seventh-century Hispania wrote about the past. If they wanted to see how others had written about the past and what they had written, Visigothic-era writers also had access to a wide range of historiographical sources, produced within the Iberian Peninsula and beyond, in addition to the theoretical works of Isidore and his predecessors. The historical productions of the period cannot easily be separated from the immediate historical contexts in which they were written either. John of Biclarum wrote his Chronicle to celebrate the conversion of the Goths to Nicene Christianity at the Third Council of Toledo in 589. Isidore of Seville rewrote his Chronicle and Histories in the aftermath of the expulsion of the Byzantines from Hispania in the mid-620s. Julian of Toledo composed the History of King Wamba to record Wamba’s triumph over the rebel Paul in the mid-670s.

Pretest self-assessment question (answer at the end of the case)

This chapter explores the role of violent pedagogic practices in the formation of elite males in the later Roman Empire. It draws on the work of the sociologists Pierre Bourdieu and Basil Bernstein to inform an analysis of education’s key role in social and cultural reproduction. Focusing on selected writings of two late-fourth century contemporaries, Libanius and Basil of Caesarea, the chapter suggests that violence of various sorts played a pivotal role in the formation of elite male subjects, whether in the school of the teacher of rhetoric (Libanius) or in monastic training (Basil). Violence played a pivotal role in both the form and content of late Roman education – as well as suffering and inflicting violence on others, students read about and performed violent narratives. The considered cultivation of feelings of fear was viewed as maintaining the pedagogic order and helping to form ideal masculine subjects. Through such experiences and by reflecting on them in pedagogic contexts, students learnt to understand the parameters of legitimate and illegitimate violence, enabling them to protect themselves and their community in a competitive social context.

The studies in Part III explore how the Christian preachers and writers of late antiquity used a wide range of pedagogical and literary techniques to evoke empathetic responses in their audiences. Deployed effectively, such techniques could prove pivotal in cultivating both empathy and an imaginative apparatus for thinking about the relationship between individuals and the community to which they belonged, at the same time establishing the authority of the teacher within their particular small worlds, from classroom to monastery and beyond. Yet, making a success of this intermediary position was not easy and, as we shall see, such victories were often hard won in the face of interference from superiors, competition from peers, and the recalcitrance of audiences.