themusethatfailed ‘Whatever you prefer’ was to be constructed on two levels, the one political, the
othermystical. On the political level, Churchill’s government insisted that the
first objective was simply to win the War, by whatever means, and continued to
define war aims negatively, in the simple and unobjectionable terms of resisting
fascism. What would happen once the War had been won—indeed, the entire
question of whether the end would justify the means—was conveniently left open.
In this way every point of view—except those of the pacifists and the revolutionary
Left—could be rallied, even the apolitical, anarchist points of view, as argued in
Herbert Read’sPolitics of the Unpolitical(1943) and D. S. Savage’sThe Personal
Principle(1944) and exemplified in the poetry of the neo-Romantics.
Poets on the Right could see the defence of England as literally and figuratively
a defence of her ‘green and pleasant land’. ‘Deep England’, as Angus Calder in
The Myth of the Blitz(1991) and Robert Hewison inCulture and Consensus(1995)
have pointed out, was a patriotic theme common to many forms of propaganda
throughout the 1940s, but poetry had certain advantages over other art-forms. The
visual arts could give only a limited expression to the theme, for the Old Masters
were safely stored away for the duration of the War, and so the actual evidence
of a national tradition of landscape art was rarely on view. Poetry, on the other
hand, was widely published and conveniently portable. Moreover, contemporary
artists were hampered by the actual scene before their eyes—landscapes defaced
by bombs, factories, training camps, and other effects of war. They tended to take
refuge in oblique approaches: John Piper, for example, in abstraction, and Graham
Sutherland in surrealism.
The poet’s eye was able to look beyond the present chaos to a more serene past
and future, hence one of the recurrent images of the 1940s, that of the ‘poet in a
landscape’. It was a point of view which formed a bridge between the neo-Romantic
and the classical schools, involving a return to the pre-industrial age and conjuring
up in words an imaginary landscape, created out of the circumstances of war, which
often produced an exacerbated sensitivity to the phenomenal world. The political
could be written in the form of the personal and the universal, the poet drawing on
inner landscapes, in which feelings for his native land were enriched by personal
memory and an acute awareness of the essential exile of the human condition.
For this reason, celebrations of Welsh and Scottish landscapes were read as no less
patriotic than the more familiar English pastoral.
In addition, poetry had the advantage of being demonstrably part of a tradition
and one, moreover, that could help to define ‘the English spirit’. According to
the historians writing at the time, poetry provided a kind of silver thread running
through English history.The English Spirit, A. L. Rowse’s popular, portable history
which argued that the only vice of the English was to be too peaceful and accommod-
ating a people, was peppered with quotations from English poetry, and the historical