themusethatfailed In the final stages of the War, the feeling that war was somehow ‘unreal’ combined
withthe poets’ sense of powerlessness, to produce a poetry which was fatally self-
regarding. Alun Lewis’s ‘All Day It Has Rained’ is often quoted to illustrate the
feeling of depression that overcomes the deracinated and disorientated recruit in
a training camp, but it becomes a far more frightening poem if it is read as an
expression of the extent to which training for war effects the extinction of all
fellow-feeling:
AndwetalkedofgirlsanddroppingbombsonRome,
And thought of the quiet dead and the loud celebrities
Exhorting us to slaughter, and the herded refugees;
—Yet thought softly, morosely of them, and as indifferently
As of ourselves or those whom we
For years have loved, and will again
Tomorrow maybe love; but now it is the rain
Possesses us entirely, the twilight and the rain.^31Like Tolkien’s elves, a whole generation of poets was retreating into the twilight,
into a private self-referential world which absolved their writing from the need
for moral judgement and political action. Poetry was not only to be written, but
also read, in an autarkic world of splendid isolation. New Criticism—a critical
trend begun before the War—returned in triumph in 1947, with Cleanth Brooks’s
The Well-Wrought Urn. Clear moral judgement was to be replaced byambivalence,
ambiguity,tension,irony,andparadox, all words which theorized the refusal to
take a moral stand. In the face of the moral problems posed by the terrifying new
discoveries of science, the non-interventionist position of the poets contributed to
the moral vacuum denounced by C. P. Snow inThe Two Cultures(1959) and Al
Alvarez in his preface toThe New Poetry(1962).
The poets’ silence has often been excused by the argument that the sheer
magnitude of the pain caused by the Second World War beggared description.
Ronald Blythe in the introduction to his anthologyThe Components of the Scene
(1966) expressed it thus: ‘Perhaps the uniquely barbarous way in which World
War II ended—Belsen and the atom bomb—suddenly drove the whole subject
beyond...the artist’s comment.’^32 The convoluted style of this sentence hides the
plain truth expressed in its punctuation. Belsen and the bomb were put between
dashes, as things which, because they had not been known, were unknowable,
because they had not been comprehended, were therefore incomprehensible. But
that very separation, the barriers carefully constructed by nationalist governments
and the intelligentsia who support them, are in fact the problem. In the first two
(^31) Alun Lewis, ‘All Day It Has Rained’, inCollected Poems, ed. Cary Archard (Bridgend: Seren,
1994), 23.
(^32) Ronald Blythe, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),The Components of the Scene(Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1966), 24.