Where are the war poets? - Defence Academy of the United Kingdom

We now think of a Victorian era redolent of poetry suffused with glory and victory. Preservation
and expansion of Empire called for patriotism, selfless duty and sacrifice – a noble Christian duty to
fight, and if necessary die, in the defence of one’s belief system, when called upon to do so; a theme
which appears to be broadly reflected in the art of the times. 15 But perhaps there was a more subtle
undercurrent at play. We are now challenged to see the ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, the
great Victorian epic of duty and honour, as an event that is both ‘ennobling and horrifying’. 16 In
the same essay, Matthew Bevis goes on to cite Trudi Tate’s observation that this epic poem is ‘often
regarded as a simple-minded piece of patriotism, [but that] it is in fact a subtle and even anguished
reflection upon the Crimean War’. 17 And as that century comes to a close, Kipling’s work gives an
authentic voice to the everyman British soldier, Tommy Atkins, (an occupation considered fit only
for the dregs of society in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries), and the reader is seduced into
taking both heart and comfort from Tommy’s humour, stoicism and bravery as he defends the outer
edges of the Empire. 18 But again we must be careful of our first impressions, because Kipling also
makes clear that being a soldier brings with it fear, pain and a lonely, unheroic death - ‘When
you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains, / And the women come out to cut up your
remains, / Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains / An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.’ 19
Yet when the Great War begins, once again the over-riding atmosphere is one of patriotic zeal, the
opportunity to test oneself, a delight in being able to defend King and Country and this is reflected
in the verse of the time 20 – Jon Stallworthy describes this extraordinary elation at going to war as
‘the appallingly anachronistic concept of war as a game’ and emphasises the impact of a classical
public school education on the war poetry of 1914 and 1915 with ‘countless references to sword and
legion, not a few to chariot and oriflamme, but almost none to gun and platoon […] the poems of
these young men move us…..they illustrate the hypnotic power of a long cultural tradition; the
tragic outcome of educating a generation to face not the future, but the past’. 21 But by 1916 the
poetry from the front is markedly different. John H Johnston’s study into this genre from 1964
perhaps best summarises what has happened – ‘Never before in literature had war been described
with this painful compression of action and incident, with this narrowing of focus, this
fragmentation of reality, this obsessive emphasis on isolated and irrelevant sensory details’ with the
war poet’s role ‘to communicate his sense of the reality of war to the millions at home who would
not or could not appreciate the magnitude of the experiences and sacrifices of the common
soldier’. 22 By the close of the Great War, the poet has moved from being an observer to being a
victim. His poems make uncomfortable reading. They are filled with the paradox of destruction
and creation - anger, joy, frustration, futility, despair, exaltation, betrayal, humour, disillusionment,
pity, joy, camaraderie, isolation – all of which relate back to Wordsworth’s description of ‘powerful
15 In a lecture at the Royal Military Academy Woolwich in 1865, John Ruskin told his audience that ‘There is no great
art possible to a nation but that which is based on battle’, John R. Reed, ‘The Victorians and War’, The Cambridge
Companion to War Writing, ed Kate McLoughlin, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), page 135.
16 Matthew Bevis, The Oxford Handbook of British & Irish War Poetry, ed Tim Kendall (Oxford University Press,
2009), page 14. (Author’s italics and underlining)
17 Trudi Tate, ‘On Not Knowing Why: Memorialising the Light Brigade’ , in Helen Small and Trudi Tate (eds)
Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830-1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer, (Oxford University Press, 2003),
page 166. Cited by Matthew Bevis, Ibid, page 15.
18 ‘The soldier comes of age in Victorian poetry and culture as the methods of warfare themselves reach a terrifying
maturity, and the figure now enjoys a new kind of privilege as he completes the metamorphosis from scapegoat to
underdog’. Matthew Bevis, ibid, page 25.
19 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Young British Soldier’, in Rudyard Kipling’s Verse, page 418. For a more detailed analysis of
Kipling, see Daniel Karlin’s ‘From Dark Defile to Gethsemane’, The Oxford Handbook of British & Irish War Poetry,
ed Tim Kendall (Oxford University Press, 2009), pages 51-69.
20 See in particular Rupert Brooke – ‘Now God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour…’, ‘Peace’, sourced
from Michael Wylie (ed.), ‘The War Poets: An Anthology’, (Pitkin Publishing, 2010), page 18.
21 Jon Stallworthy, ‘The death of the hero’, Survivors’ Songs, (Cambridge University Press, 2008), pages 12-13.
22 John H Johnston, English Poetry of the First World War: A Study in the Evolution of Lyric and Narrative Form,
(Princeton University Press, 1964), pages 12-13.
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