sarah cole
a regrettable consequence. More generally, though, theIliadfiguresgrief in terms
of the loss of friends in combat, and this male/male structure of love and loss,
which is at once homoerotic, devastating, and productive, generated a powerful
afterlife in British war literature, particularly in the poetry of the First World
War.^33 Indeed, comradeship in war, with its high valorization in English culture, its
complex erotics, and its connection with bereavement, represents a broad category
in cultural history, and one with especially strong literary affiliations. More than
the other motifs on which I have focused up to now, that is, the topic of grief in war
comes with a long literary pedigree for English poets, in the form of the elegy for the
dead male beloved, a tradition with such canonical high points as Milton’sLycidas,
Shelley’s ‘Adonais’, and Tennyson’sIn Memoriam. Many twentieth-century war
poets recognized, and at times imitated, these important literary precursors; yet they
also worked to articulate a sense of uniqueness in the characterizing of war losses,
and these efforts to construct a field of loss particular to war recall the structure
of the Achilles/Priam example as much as the Achilles/Patroclus one, in the sense
that the exposure of modes of grief that challenge cultural norms and break apart
war’s sustaining oppositions represents a potentially innovative development of
war.^34 As Robert Graves declared of war intimacies, ‘there’s no need of pledge or
oath|To bind our lovely friendship fast,|By firmer stuff|Close bound enough’
(‘Two Fusiliers’);^35 such war-charged masculine bonds, when broken by death,
created an opening for an intricate language of grieving.
Let me isolate three aspects of this language, which are particularly germane
to the larger poetics of pain at issue here: an emphasis on the corpse, a will to
forget, and a spur to anger. The corpse, it need hardly be said, is an ever present
and at times traumatizing reality in war, and its permeation of war’s landscape
takes many shapes, many forms. It may arouse disgust, horror, terror, pity, anger,
a blank impassivity, or all of these. But from the point of view of grieving,
the dead body becomes a precious site, the very ground of memorialization. In
(^33) For discussion of the theme of friendship and loss in First World War literature, see my
Modernism, Male Friendship, and the First World War(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
esp. ch. 3.
(^34) The subject of mourning practices in war is a rich one for cultural historians, especially with
reference to the First World War, out of which many of the century’s commemorative conventions
were developed. A canonical starting-point for many critics is Freud’s discussion in ‘Mourning and
Melancholia’ (1917) and later inThe Ego and the Id(1923). For discussion of mourning in the
First World War, see David Cannadine, ‘War and Death, Grief and Mourning in Modern Britain’,
in Joachim Whaley (ed.),Mirrors of Mortality: Studies in the Social History of Death(New York: St
Martin’s Press, 1981), 187–242; Thomas Laqueur, ‘Memory and Naming in the Great War’, in John
Gillis (ed.),Commemorations: The Politics of National Identity(Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994), 150–67; and Jay Winter,Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in the European
Imagination(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Accounts of mourning in later wars of
the century have tended to merge with the burgeoning fields of trauma and memory studies, and are
hence too numerous for inclusion here.
(^35) Robert Graves, ‘Two Fusiliers’, inThe Complete Poems, ed. Beryl Graves and Dunstan Ward
(London: Penguin, 2003), 32.