helen goethals
narrative of G. M. Trevelyan’s highly influentialSocialHistory of Englandwas organ-
ized in chapters centred on the ‘English’ poets. The patriotic aspect of literary history
lent itself well to cinematic treatment, as evidenced in films such as Humphrey
Jennings’sWords for Battle(1941) and Michael Powell’sA Canterbury Tale(1944).
The Oxford Book of English Versehad been conceived during the Boer War, it had
pervaded the poetic atmosphere of the First World War, and the poems between
its covers were now pressed into service for the Second. The preface to the 1939
edition explained how the long tradition of poetry in the English language offered
evidence of the peculiar stoicism of the English:
The reader, turning the pages of this book, will find this note of valiancy—of the old Roman
‘virtue’ mated with cheerfulness—dominant throughout, if in many curious moods. He
may trace it back, if he care, far behind Chaucer to the rudest beginnings of English Song. It
is indigenous, proper to our native spirit, and it will endure.^15
A backward-looking view was not incompatible with a forward-looking one. The
same preface defined the role of poetry in wartime as to ‘hearten the crew with
auspices of daylight’. This became the self-appointed task of poets on the Left,
particularly with the advent of a national government which included Labour and
the entry of the Soviet Union on the side of the Allies. Socialism, by definition,
implied the notion of brotherhood, and tended to express itself in choral work, an
idea to be found in John Jarmain’s poem, ‘Embarkation, 1942’:
Then in a callow dawn we stood in lines
Like foreigners on bare and unknown quays,
Till someone bravely into the hollow of waiting
Cast a timid wisp of song;
It moved along the line of patient soldiers
Like a secret passed from mouth to mouth
Andslowlygaveusease;
In our whispered singing courage was set free,
We were banded once more and strong.
So we sang as our ship set sail,
Sang our own songs, and leaning on the rail
Waved to the workmen on the slipping quay
And they again to us for fellowship.^16The theme ofTheOldWorldandtheNewSociety, the title of a Labour Party policy
statement published in February 1942, was given many a poetic variation, most
famously in John Pudney’s elegy ‘For Johnny’:
Fetch out no shroud
For Johnny-in-the-cloud;(^15) Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, ‘Preface to New Edition’, inidem(ed.),The Oxford Book of English
Verse 1250–1918(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940), p. xiii.
(^16) John Jarmain, ‘Embarkation, 1942’, in Victor Selwyn (ed.),More Poems of the Second World War
(London: Dent, 1989), 74.