dawn bellamy
aware of the dual burdens of public expectation and personal anxiety, he answers
the‘Where are the War Poets?’ cry thus:
There are such poets, but they do not write. They do not write because there is nothing new,
from a soldier’s point of view, about this war except its mobile character. There are two
reasons:hellcannotbeletloosetwice:itwasletlooseintheGreatWaranditisthesame
old hell now....Almost all that a modern poet on active service is inspired to write, would
be tautological.^2
Despite his desire to avoid repetition and to write something new, Douglas is
unable wholly to deny the influence of the soldier-poets of 1914–18. Their legacy
is an inevitable part of the consciousness of an aspiring Second World War poet.
Alun Lewis, similarly, links himself with Edward Thomas, for, as John Pikoulis puts
it, ‘like Thomas the war has become an integral part of his life experience, not a
violent thought-slaying wound as it was to Owen’.^3 And John Jarmain begins his
pre-war sonnet ‘Thinking of War’ with the words ‘If I must die’, echoing Brooke’s
diction in ‘The Soldier’—‘If I should die’—but ultimately advocating personal
forgetfulness as opposed to national remembrance.^4 The influence of the First
World War manifests itself in a variety of ways in the soldier poetry of 1939–45,
ranging from the naming of specific Great War poets to the presence of symbols
which acquired a new literary significance during the war of 1914–18. InThe Great
War and Modern Memory(1975), Paul Fussell identifies the emergent iconography
of twentieth-century war literature, and explores those aspects of poetry which
either originated in the poetry of the time or took on a new significance during
the conflict, such as floral imagery, references to crucifixion and sacrifice, and
homoeroticism. His investigation of that iconography’s influence since 1918 is
based on his theory that ‘At the same time the war was relying on inherited myth,
it was generating new myth, and that myth is part of the fibre of our own lives.’^5
The most distinct icon of the First World War is the poppy, with its connotations
of bloodshed and remembrance. Immortalized by such poems as Isaac Rosen-
berg’s ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’ and John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’, its
presence has a range of associations. McCrae portrays the flower as a symbol of
remembrance—‘In Flanders fields the poppies blow|Between the crosses, row on
row,|That mark our place’^6 —whereas Rosenberg’s ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’
makes explicit the connection between the flowers’ redness and the colour of blood:
‘Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins|Drop, and are ever dropping.’^7 Nourished
(^2) Keith Douglas, ‘Poets in This War’, 352.
(^3) John Pikoulis,Alun Lewis: A Life(Bridgend: Poetry Wales Press, 1984), 115.
(^4) John Jarmain, ‘Thinking of War’, inPoems(London: Collins, 1945), 43; Rupert Brooke, ‘The
Soldier’, inThe Poetical Works of Rupert Brooke, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (London: Faber, 1960), 23.
(^5) Paul Fussell,The Great War and Modern Memory(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. ix.
(^6) John McCrae, ‘In Flanders Fields’, in Jon Silkin (ed.),The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 85.
(^7) Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, inThe Poems and Plays of Isaac Rosenberg,ed.
Vivien Noakes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 128.