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‘THIS IS PLENTY.
THIS IS MORE
THAN ENOUGH’:
POETRY
AND THE MEMORY
OF THE SECOND
WORLD WAR
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••gareth reeves
Most of the poetry discussed in this essay is by non-combatants, those too young
to have been directly involved in the Second World War, but whose world was
irrevocably altered by the conflict and its aftermath. This in itself raised, and raises,
questions of conscience and responsibility. What right have non-participants to
speak of agonies they have not experienced directly? Yet to maintain silence is an act
of wilful ignorance, to be blind to the altered terrain one finds oneself inhabiting,
is to be, however unknowingly, complicit. Yet again, to dwell on past atrocity, to
keep its memory alive, however meant as an act of humility and homage to the dead
(‘lest we forget’) can, on the contrary, turn into an affront to the dead (‘what right
have you?’), or into a mangling of the past, or into an act of hubris, or—and this in
some contexts is the most pernicious danger—into a way to ‘make germinate’, in