stacy gillis
modernist experimentation. That modernism has been considered a keystone of
innovativeand ground-breaking literary work throughout the twentieth century has
surely played a part in how the more traditional forms of women’s war poetry have
been excluded from histories of the war. Furthermore, as Deborah Tyler-Bennett
argues, ‘recognized ideas of what constitutes a ‘‘war poem’’ do not appear to be
geared to embrace abstract or allegorical poems by women’.^50 The categories of war
and women sit uncomfortably together in the critical and lay consciousness; adding
the category of poetry exacerbates the tension even more.
The question of the quality of these poems has been a matter of some concern
even for feminist critics. Discussing Reilly’s anthology inFeminism and Poetry
(1987), Montefiore criticized the poems for ‘their often uncritical handling of
War, Sacrifice, Poetry, and Religion: there is no professional finish to disguise
thought and feeling’.^51 In a later work, she qualified this, claiming that although
women’s war poetry is ‘incompetent and/or reactionary’ and she is concerned
with ‘problems of value that this sets for the feminist critic’,^52 she is wary of
outright dismissal. Indeed, she goes on to say that ‘such a dismissal means leaving
unasked and unthought the ways in which the poems are problematic, which is
only partly a matter of amateurishness and conventionality’. Dorothy Goldman
struggles with the same conundrum—how not to dismiss these poems on the basis
of their apparent conventionality: ‘It was not simply their lack of first-hand military
experience that inhibited women’s poetry, but the inheritance of worn-out and
inappropriate modes and language without the catalyst which the experience of the
War provided in forcing more shocking and brutal forms of expression.’^53 Indeed,
while, as I have shown, many of these poems use traditional motifs and styles and
do not engage with the new poetic forms circulating in other arenas during the war,
they are all engaging with theconditionsof war. To put in another way, as Plain
argues, many of these poems should be understood in terms of grief psychology:
‘This process is evident in the considerable number of wartime and postwar poems
that revisit places previously shared with a lost lover, or which focus on an activity
or ideal associated with the lost person.’^54 A more complex interrogation of these
poems provides a broader understanding of the relationship between women and
war, as well as literature and war.
(^50) Deborah Tyler-Bennett, ‘ ‘‘Lives Mocked at by Chance’’: Contradictory Impulses in Women’s
Poetry of the Great War’, in Patrick J. Quinn and Steven Trout (eds.),TheLiteratureoftheGreatWar
Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001), 68.
(^51) Montefiore,Feminism and Poetry: Language, Experience, Identity in Women’s Writing(London:
Pandora, 1987), 69. See Dowson for more on these debates: ‘Such verdicts universalize the poetry from
the weakest work and imply that realist modes, the intersection of historical and literary relevance or
the wrong ideology were pertinent only to women’s poems’ (Dowson,Women, Modernism and British
Poetry: 1910–1939 52 , 37).
53 Montefiore, ‘ ‘‘Shining Pins and Wailing Shells’’ ’, 54.
Dorothy Goldman, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),Women and World War,i.7.
(^54) Plain, ‘Great Expectations’, 30.