‘this is plenty. this is more than enough’ All this, one may feel with some justification, is mere poetic politics, one fashion
reactingto the previous. But it indicates something of the issues at stake: how was
it possible to react poetically to what was perceived as an experience unprecedented
not only in intensity but also in scope? Even Hughes himself, never one for reticence
or indirection, found that the readiestroute was indirectly via the First World War.
As Neil Corcoran writes, ‘The First World War, the war of the father, does duty
in Hughes, as it were, for the rest of the horrors of the century.’^13 Quoting from
Part I of Hughes’s poem ‘Out’ (1967),^14 which evokes the poet’s father as victim
and guilty survivor of trench warfare and the son as ‘his luckless double’, Corcoran
comments that it is as though the poet ‘has inherited that war genetically’. Part II
of ‘Out’ is a remarkable version of the Beckettian theme, ‘astride of a grave and
a difficult birth’,^15 in which ‘the dead man’ suffers a rebirth, ‘gazing around with
the eyes|Of an exhausted clerk’, into a seemingly dead world. The remarkable
anti-Remembrance Day Part III (called simply ‘Remembrance Day’) begins in
bitter anger (‘The poppy is a wound, the poppy is the mouth|Of the grave...||A
canvas-beauty puppet on a wire|Today whoring everywhere’), goes on to attempt
to get out from under the dead weight of his father’s war experience, and, bidding
‘goodbye to that bloody-minded flower’ and to a whole era (‘the remaindered
charms of my father’s survival’), concludes with a plangent dismissal of his country
and all it fought for: ‘Let England close. Let the green sea-anemone close.’
Hughes’s poem may be a late flowering of the First World War, but its very
bitterness is due in part to the powerful pull of the poetry produced by that war. First
World War ‘trench’ poetry set an awesome precedent. Arguably this situation was
responsible for the fact that some of the finest poetry to show the effects of the Second
World War took longer to germinate than its First World War counterpart, at any
rate in Britain (although a notable exception is David Jones’sIn Parenthesis,pub-
lished nineteen years after the end of the First World War). On this point Douglas,
again, was prophetic: ‘[T]he soldiers have not found anything new to say. Their
experiences they will not forget easily, and it seems to me that the whole body of Eng-
lish war poetry of this war, civil and military, will be created after the war is over.’^16
The issue is not merely that memorial and elegy need the lapse of time before they
can be composed; it is whether memorial and elegy are appropriate or even possible.
This complex of emotions—guilt, complicity, inadequacy, humility, hubris—is
itself the subject of Geoffrey Hill’s most emotionally and intellectually challenging
poetry. Its hard theme is that to write poetry about, even to create great art out of,
mass extermination is to feed off and thus perpetuate it. ‘Arrogant acceptance from
which song derives|Is bedded with their blood, makes flourish young|Roots in
(^13) Neil Corcoran,English Poetry since 1940(London: Longman, 1993), 115.
(^14) Ted Hughes, ‘Out’, inCollected Poems, ed. Paul Keegan (London: Faber, 2003), 165–6.
(^15) Samuel Beckett,Waiting for Godot(London: Faber, 1965), 90.
(^16) Douglas, ‘Poets in This War’, inLetters, 353.