war poetry and the realm of the senses In his essay ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, Adorno refers to the lyric as
‘themost delicate, the most fragile thing’, and observes that ‘the ideal of lyric
poetry, at least in the traditional sense, is to remain unaffected by the bustle
and commotion’^113 —an assumption he then goes on to dismantle. First World
War verse was one of the major realignments of this traditional relation as lyric
poetry—that most intimate of genres—was not only refashioned as social protest
but made to register the ‘bustle and commotion’ of the most terrifying forms of
violence. Yet, in the works of both Owen and Rosenberg, there is a persistence
of what Adorno calls ‘the priority of linguistic form’^114 as the chaotic cry of
the senses—interpenetrated, as we have seen, by the social and the personal—is
evolved into the sensuousness of verse. ‘The highest lyric works’, Adorno continues,
‘are those in which the subject, with no remaining trace of matter, sounds forth
in language until language itself acquires a voice.’^115 Unsurprisingly, Sassoon
remembers Owen by the timbre of his voice, which, in the account, blends
seamlessly with his lyric gift as well as with his literary heritage: ‘[there was] the
velvety quality of his voice, which suggested the Keatsian richness of his artistry
with words. It wasn’t a vibrating voice. It had the fluid texture of soft consonants
and murmurous music.’^116 His comments on Rosenberg are an illuminating
contrast: ‘His experiments were a strenuous effort for impassioned expression;
his imagination had a sinewy and muscular aliveness; often he saw things in
terms of sculpture, but he did not carve or chisel; he modelled words with fierce
energy and aspiration.’^117 Sassoon’s accounts are at once affective and critically
astute. Coming from two distinct literary-religious backgrounds—Owen with
his decadent aestheticism and Evangelical upbringing, and Rosenberg with his
metropolitan wit and Hebraic sensibility—they remain not only two of the most
extraordinary of the First World War poets, but take English poetry in two highly
original and powerful, yet wholly different, directions in the early years of the
twentieth century. In one, we have the strength and sweetness of the Romantic-
Decadent lyric tradition, being brought tobear witness to the horrors of industrial
modernity and pouring forth as an aria for the death of the European bourgeois
consciousness; the other reaches beyond Romanticism to the Metaphysical poets,
and tries to forge a radical modernist aesthetic to suit his playful imagination and
record the ‘extraordinary conditions of this life’.^118 Yet, by the end of the War,
both were dead, and it was left to Sassoon, Graves, and Blunden to mourn and
ruminate.
(^113) Theodor Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, inNotes to Literature, trans. Shierry Weber
Nicholson, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, i (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 37.
(^114) Ibid. 43. For an illuminating discussion of how ‘the story of form at the wartime moment is
the story of how traditional forms internalize history’, see Longley, ‘The Great War, history and the
English lyric’, 77. 115
117 Adorno, ‘On Lyric Poetry and Society’, 43.^116 Sassoon,Siegfried’s Journey, 62.
118 Sassoon, ‘Foreword’, in Rosenberg,Collected Works,p.ix.
Rosenberg to Laurence Binyon, n.d. [Autumn 1916], inCollected Works, 248.