introduction
is an essential component of sympathy. But the best war poets always know that
theyinvolve themselves in a monstrous negotiation between artistic pleasure and
human suffering, and that there is readerly enjoyment to be elicited from a choking
gas-victim or a three-week-dead enemy corpse. War poetry is attracted to pain, and
makes artistic capital out of it; after all, as David Bromwich pithily argues, ‘what is
simply repellent simply repels’.^3 Small wonder that so much war poetry should be
guilt-ridden. When a distraught fellow soldier tells Ivor Gurney how he had heard
in the distance the ‘infernal, silly’ call of a cuckoo as he held a dying friend in his
arms, the poet finally repents of having sensed an opportunity: ‘I became aware
of shame at the unholy joy that had filled my artist’s mind.’^4 Gurney’s awareness
is conspicuous because, for once, the shame seems to have won out. A war poem
represents the partial victory of unholy joy over shame.
MacNeice’s grandiose (and, it ought to be confessed, almost meaningless) claim
that art is necessarily a homage to life therefore requires careful revision. The war
poem pays homage only to the impulse which, against all odds and at whatever cost,
produced it. During the First World War, Owen, Gurney, and Sassoon wrote poems
explicitly stating the need to forget events on which the poems themselves dwell: ‘I
try not to remember these things now,’^5 Owen states in ‘The Sentry’, having just
lingered lovingly over them. He writes the poem as if against his own volition, not
only to create a drama of self-sacrifice, but because he wants to distance himself
from unholy motives: like the Ancient Mariner, he is (apparently) compelled to
repeat a story from which he wishes to be freed. He cannot be seen to profit, and
must even suffer for his art. Yet, although a war poem may seek to justify itself as
a warning, or a bearing witness, or an act of compassion or catharsis or redress,
its primary motivation is to celebrate (even, as in Owen’s case, at the expense of
healing) its own achievement.
Gurney’s ‘unholy joy’ is especially apt to describe the war poet’s enterprise,
because, like ‘war poetry’ itself, it verges on the oxymoronic, oxymoron being
the natural figure for a poetry which binds opposites. This understanding is not
confined to the soldier-poets. Yeats’s refrain in ‘Easter, 1916’—‘A terrible beauty
is born’^6 —comments on the changed world of Irish politics, but it is also self-
reflexive: the poemisthe terrible beauty, born out of the suppression of the Easter
Rising. War poetry, like Holocaust art of the kind Adorno attacks, beautifies the
terrible. One may cavil at Yeats’s deliberate provocation, in an essay on J. M. Synge,
(^3) David Bromwich, ‘How Moral Is Taste?’, inSkeptical Music: Essays on Modern Poetry(Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2001), 240.
(^4) Ivor Gurney to Catherine Abercrombie,? June 1916, inCollected Letters, ed. R. K. R. Thornton
(Ashington and Manchester: MidNag/Carcanet, 1991), 91. 5
Wilfred Owen, ‘The Sentry’, inTheCompletePoemsandFragments,i:The Poems,ed.Jon
Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University Press, 1983), 188.
(^6) William Butler Yeats, ‘Easter, 1916’, inThe Poems, ed. Daniel Albright (London: Dent, 1990),
228–30.