sarah cole
for ‘bodying forth the reality of pain’. Often halting, oblique, and fragmentary,
sometimestaking recourse to a kind ofprimal expressionism, indebted to literary
traditions like the elegy and the war epic, those texts that consider pain, and
modern war poetry in particular, might be said to generate their own aesthetics. I
hope, in this brief discussion, to develop the lineaments of such an aesthetics, or,
if we invoke the conventional metaphor of song, to listen to the melody of pain
sung—perhaps quietly, sometimes angrily, at times with a sense of deep futility—in
war verse.^9
In considering how and where and in what form that pain is figured, I will turn
to a canonical site of origin for Western literary conceptions of war, Homer’sIliad.
To make such a move from history to literary history as a guiding discourse is, of
course, a consequential choice, yet one, I hope, that will open up some interesting
perspectives on modern war verse. Auden’s gesture towards the Old Masters in my
epigraph poem, ‘Musee des Beaux Arts’, ́^10 is a serious one that we might consider:
if his particular suggestion is that Breughel’s painting of Icarus falling into the
sea demonstrates how suffering occurs as a matter of indifference to the rest of
humankind, a broader insight embedded in the poem is that aesthetic monuments
from earlier periods have something essential to teach the modern viewer/reader
about the vulnerable body’s place in the world. The point in invoking Homer, I want
to stress, is not to recapitulate and revalidate the canon, nor to search for literary
allusions and references in the twentieth-century poetry that is our primary concern
in this volume, but rather to recognize that Homer’s epic mined the experience
of war in such depth and detail as to provide a rich and complex template for a
study of war’s literary products.^11 Though modern war literature has often taken
shape precisely in opposition to the classical ideal—with its emphasis on leadership
and glory, its heroizing and celebrating of military masculinity, and its narrating
of war as the central fulcrum for consolidating national and cultural values—the
aesthetic principles of modern war verse nevertheless converge in illuminating ways
with Homer. Indeed, this fact alone warrants reflection: ideology and descriptive
power appear to be able to move in opposite directions in war narratives, as if
the figuration of bodily experience at times slips out of the seemingly totalizing
belief structures underlying the works. Literary engagements with combat seem to
generate special properties, and it is these properties, which we might think of as
(^9) For discussion of the representation of pain in the visual arts, see Nigel Spivey,Enduring Creation:
Art, Pain, and Fortitude(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); and Susan Sontag,Regarding
the Pain of Others(New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003).
(^10) W. H. Auden, ‘Mus ́ee des Beaux Arts’, inThe English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings
1927–1939 11 , ed. Edward Mendelson (London: Faber, 1977), 237.
A number of contemporary writers—critics and scholars, as well as poets and novelists—have
found in Homer a rich source for contemplating war in the modern world. For especially rewarding
examples, see Christopher Logue,Logue’s Homer: War Music(London: Faber, 2001); and James Tatum,
The Mourner’s Song: War and Remembrance from theIliadto Vietnam(Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2003).