women’s poetry of the two world wars provided ample evidence of women’s poetic activity during the wars, but response
tothat activity, on the whole, was limited to an acknowledgement of its presence
rather than a sustained engagement with the poetry itself.
This essay takes a different tack, and argues that women’s war poetry requires a
revision of the category of war poetry itself. Its most challenging poems are at odds
with the conventions of male war poetry, and, because of that, they often don’t
seem to be war poetry at all. The First World War work of the emigr ́ee writers Mina
Loy and Gertrude Stein, and the Second World War poetry of E. J. Scovell, are
formally very different, the first pair determinedly avant-garde, and the latter part
of an English lyrical tradition. All three, though, reject a public poetry of ‘women’s
war experience’. Their work is notaboutwar in the way that a poem by Wilfred
Owen or Keith Douglas or, indeed, Vera Brittain is about war. Each refuses the
subordination of poetic discourse to male experience. Instead, their work articu-
lates an exploratory aesthetics and politics that develop through unexpected, often
understated experiences of wartime change. The different strategies of these poets
have value, in part, in their very divergence from the norms that Reilly’s influential
anthologies implicitly accept. Stein, Loy, and Scovell suggest that the project for
critics of women’s poetry of both World Wars should involve a questioning of
the assumption that war poetry is necessarily concerned with extreme personal
experience on the one hand or the politics of national culture on the other.
Gertrude Stein’s ‘Lifting Belly’ is a useful starting-point because of its quirky,
provocative challenge to the norms of a war poetry of experience. Stein began the
poem in the summer of 1915 in Majorca, where she stayed for a year after leaving
Paris when the city was threatened by German attack. On first reading it seems an
elusive private dialogue between lovers, a text that dwells upon mundane details of
life on the island and contains some of Stein’s most winning evocations of domestic
and sexual intimacy. The title phrase, which is repeated throughout the text, comes
to mean variously, sometimes simultaneously, a belly in the act of raising another
person, a swelling (consuming, pregnant) body, having sex, and, in the childish
love-talk of the piece, a name for one or both of the lovers. The childlike malleability
of language and body, and the delight it both evokes and expresses, are at the centre
of the odd dialogue. War and refugee experience seem the last things on its speakers’
minds as they play their sensual and linguistic games. Yet the First World War does
make a brief appearance in the first part of the poem:
Dare I ask you to be satisfied.
Dear me.
Lifting belly is anxious.
Not about Verdun.
Oh dear no.
The wind whistles that means it whistles just like any one. I thought it was a whistle.