‘many sisters to many brothers’ speaker recounts activities of a year ago before ellipses mark a break in the poem:
‘...You...‘‘diedof wounds’’...they told me|...yet your feet|Pass with the
others down the twilit street.’^44 The enclosing of the cause of death in quotation
marks reminds us of the formalities of the war death, yet also introduces an ironic
tone, one which is aggravated by the use of ellipses. These moments of anger and
sorrow punctuate poems which often, otherwise, sound a note of resignation and
Christian sacrifice. Even May Wedderburn Cannan’s ‘Lamplight’—in which, as
Khan points, the ‘private empire has to make way to the stronger claims of the
national empire’^45 —and which is both sentimental and imperialistic, has one quiet
line which speaks to a broader experience: ‘And I think my heart was broken by
the war.’^46 While these poems often draw upon the traditional forms of the English
elegy and, for Janet Montefiore, rarely escape ‘theVictorian and Georgian tradition,
itself deeply imbricated with patriotic ideology’,^47 the ways in which the gender
politics of the early twentieth century both enabled and constrained these woman
poets must form the focus of more research.
Trauma and Loss: Endings
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It is precisely the reliance upon these traditional forms of poetry that Plain is
talking about when she argues that the critical resistance to women’s war poetry
can be ascribed to the fact that it ‘fails to conform to a cultural demand for
ahistorical, transcendent, and ‘‘difficult’’ writing’.^48 That women’s war poetry does
not fit within the parameters of what is expected of the genre makes a compelling
argument for the processes of canonization. In his work on the male poets of the
war, Johnston claims that the new kinds of technological violence available in this
war had, as a ‘natural consequence’, a ‘tentative, episodic, disconnected, emotional
kind of writing, a desperate insistence on the shocking facts of life and death, a
compulsive focus on the obscene details of crude animal needs and reactions, on
wounds, death, and decomposition’.^49 This emphasis on the ‘episodic’ and the
‘disconnected’ is best understood within the context of the debates surrounding
modernist versus Georgian poetics. It is well known that the war marked the demise
of the positive reception of the Georgian poet; the post-war emphasis was on
(^44) Nora Griffiths, ‘The Wykhamist’, in Reilly (ed.),Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry and Verse,
- 45
Khan,Women’s Poetry of the First World War, 168.
(^46) May Wedderburn Cannan, ‘Lamplight’, in Reilly (ed.),Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry and
Verse 47 , 16.
Janet Montefiore, ‘ ‘‘Shining Pins and Wailing Shells’’: Women Poets and the Great War’, in
Dorothy Goldman (ed.),Women and World War,i:The Written Response(Basingstoke: Macmillan,
1993), 55. 48
Plain, ‘Great Expectations’, 26.^49 Johnston,English Poetry of the First World War, 13.