148 chapter 5
shed / Alike immortalize the dead” (219). Fussell’s dismissal of Cowper’s
meter misses the way that Blunden’s meter references the social world and
comments on how the soldier’s relationship to those communities beyond the
war (the prewar schoolroom, hearth, and home) will be irrevocably altered.
“What husbandry could outdo this? / With flesh and blood he fed / The
planted iron that nought amiss / Grew thick and swift and red, / And in a
night though ne’er so cold / Those acres bristled a hundredfold” (205). An
expansion of hymn meter, the final two lines of the sestet stanza are a repeated
third rhyme (ababcc); Blunden’s poem subverts the pastoral into a harvested
graveyard, and Cowper’s heroic poem becomes a plot, too, out of which
Blunden can dredge poetic tradition in order to make it morbidly his own.
Fussell, Samuel Hynes, and Jay Winter have shown how the “literariness” of
the First World War promoted the use of typical romantic images in soldier
poetry, with each critic careful to point out the privileged class education
available to the officer-poets who produced the now famous poetic images of
the Great War. In the classic The Great War and Modern Memory, Fussell ar-
gues that pastoral tropes and intertextual references to the great works of En-
glish literature “signal a constant reaching out towards traditional signifi-
cance . . . an attempt to make some sense of the war in relation to inherited
tradition” (57). He cites specific symbols to make his point: “Intact and gen-
erative are the traditional values associated with traditional symbols—white
blossoms, stars, the moon, the nightingale, the heroes of the Iliad, pastoral
flowers” (61). Indeed, Fussell’s influential assertion that soldiers were not
“merely literate” but were “vigorously literary” (157), is reinforced by Samuel
Hynes’s A War Imagined. Hynes writes that, “it was clear by the end of 1914
that this war would be different—it would be the most literary and the most
poetical war in English history.”^4 Fussell and Hynes agree that English litera-
ture gave soldiers a sense of pride, purpose, and value; the heroic themes of
their literary traditions provided a justification for their activities. Jay Winter,
in Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, is dismissive of any poetic function of
war poetry save the tropological: “[s]ome poems were experimental; others
were written in conventional forms. Much of it arose out of the perceived need
not to reject out of hand traditional languages about the dead, but rather to
reformulate and reinvigorate older tropes about loss of life in wartime.”^5 Both
Winter and Fussell briefly acknowledge the consolatory function of hymns,
but their main points relate to remembered Biblical imagery that the hymns
conjure, evoking familiarity and comfort. These scholars show us how English
and classical literary education influenced officers and provided comfort for
them; I hope to build on their work and complicate it by showing how actively
soldier-poets recognized their relationship to poetry and poetic form as equiv-
ocal, volatile, and distressing.
Though critical discourses about First World War poetry showed how pop-
ular anthologies like Palgrave’s Golden Treasury and the Oxford Antholog y of