notes to chapter 5 237
- Graves, Fairies and Fusiliers (ll. 1–22), 14.
- Specifically the erratic verse form of John Skelton, or “Skeltonics.” Graves has
two more poems in this meter, “Oh, and Oh” and “John Skelton” in Over the Brazier.
As part of the prosody wars and general metrical discourse of the era, the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth century saw a resurgence in studies of Skelton’s satires, es-
pecially around 1914–15. Day, in Swifter than Reason, has noted the Skeltonic influ-
ence on Graves’s poems (6). - Graves, Over the Brazier (ll. 32–48), 14–15.
- Cf. Cole, “The Poetry of Pain,” 483–503, for a reading of Owen’s “The Poet in
Pain” along these lines. - Robert Graves, Goodbye to All That, 125.
- In an unpublished 1917 poem written in twenty-three sections (each represent-
ing one mile of a sustained march), Graves himself writes: “Why are we marching? No
one knows / Why are we marching? No one cares.” “Night March” was first printed in
Hibberd “’The Patchwork Flag’ (1918) an Unrecorded Book by Graves” (1990). - http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/document/1124/1070?REC=1
(last accessed June 5, 2011), The Robert Graves Collection: MS 141 Box 85, Univer-
sity Archives, University at Buffalo. - Owen, “The Poet in Pain,” The Complete Poems and Fragments of Wilfred Owen,
ll. 1–2. - Young, “W.H.R. Rivers and The War Neuroses,” 368.
- Rivers, Conflict and Dream, 93–94.
- Young, “W.H.R. Rivers and The War Neuroses,” 359.
- Rivers, “The Repression of War Experience.”
- “Dreamers” (September 1917), “Wirers” (September 1917), “Thrushes” (No-
vember 1917), and “Break of Day” (December 1917) were all published in The Hydra. - Sassoon, Sherston’s Progress, 84–85.
- All quotations from Sassoon’s poetry are taken from the collection, Hart-Davis,
Sassoon’s War Poems, 132–33. Sassoon objected to the publication of this letter in
Robert Graves’s 1929 edition of Goodbye to All That, and it was subsequently
withdrawn. - Brock, “The Re-education of the Adult,” 29; henceforth cited as REA.
- Brock, Health and Conduct, 146. This idea of “outrance” previews Shoshana
Felman’s definition of testimony as the fragmentary product of a mind “overwhelmed
by occurrences that have not settled into understanding or remembrance . . . events in
excess of our frames of reference” (quoted in Gilbert and Gubar, No Man’s Land, 187).
Rivers’s methods seem to coax the patient into renarrating his testimony into a new
“frame of reference” or happier memory, whereas Brock’s methods recognize the frag-
mentary nature of the patient’s mind, seeing all forms of “speech” as “speech-acts,” both
expressing an experience and replicating that experience in the very fragmented act of
speaking. In reference to Brock’s characterization of “aboulia,” it is interesting to recall
that T. S. Eliot was diagnosed with “aboulie” by Dr. Roger Vittoz in Lausanne, Swit-
zerland. Coincidentally, The Waste Land and the Army Report to the War Office Com-
mittee Enquiry into “Shell Shock” both appeared in 1922. Eliot composed The Waste
Land while under psychiatric care in Lausanne. - Brock, Health and Conduct, 146.
- Brock, REA, 35.