shakespeare and the great war combatants, as does his subsequent leading of his ‘ragamuffins where they are pep-
per’d;there’s not three of my hundred and fifty left alive, and they are for the town’s
end, to beg during life’.^26 The danger of invoking tradition lies not in the constraints
that might be placed on the Great War poet, but in the threat that Shakespeare’s
greater sophistication and literary power pose to poetry that so often relies on the
Romantic claim to truth of subjective experience. Hardy, with a masterful humility,
invokes the Shakespearean analogue, and then lets the wind blow.
A Book of Homage to Shakespeareis, and is not, a war work; Shakespeare is seen
both as a support to the war effort and as a symbol of liberal values which see recourse
to war as failure. Such a stance should not be thought to be radical or anti-war in its
large outline; it is, rather, essentially conservative, and typifies how the British sought
to depict the war to themselves and to others.^27 Perhaps here, however, such a con-
servativeliberalismcanbeseenatitsbest,asitinsistsoncelebratingaswellasitcanan
intellectual fraternity in which a love of Shakespeare unifies a diversity of positions
and beliefs. Yet such liberalism is perhaps easier on the Home Front. The poets, the
GeorgiangroupofDrinkwater,Ross,andDavies,withHardyasfatherfigure,flanked
by earlier established figures such as Noyes and Binyon, had little experience of the
war. Binyon is the main exception; famous as the author of ‘For the Fallen’, a poem
written very soon after the war’s outbreak, Binyon had by 1916 had direct experience
of the Front, having left his post at the British Museum and gone to serve, at the age
of 46, as an orderly in France. He was, in fact, a very remarkable man. One of the
foremost experts on Asian art, he presided over a literary circle in London, providing
help to artists such as Pound, who would later, along with Eliot, come to admire
deeply Binyon’s translation of Dante. But then, many amongst Gollancz’s contrib-
utors were remarkable. Ross, for example, was the first British winner of the Nobel
prize for science. This was, in other words, a Home Front of the great and the
good, andA Book of Homageessentially offers us the Establishment’s sense of the
continued relevance of Shakespeare in time of war. But was Shakespeare similarly
present to, and a resource for, the frontline soldier? For the private and the officer?
Probably the fiftieth anniversary of the strange outburst of the ‘Kaiser-War’ will be the
occasion of various retrospects of the ‘Soldier-Poets’ (it was almost a technical term)
who for some reason flourished awhile in England. I have a poor memory, but I believe
one of them had the name and rank Captain William Shakespeare.^28
Looking back from the late 1950s, after a post-war lifetime spent teaching and
writing about literature, Edmund Blunden, opening his short survey,War Poets:
(^26) Shakespeare,1HenryIV,iv.ii. 63 andv.iii. 34–8.
(^27) The difference between an avant-garde and modernist Germany and a conservative Britain
appealing to tradition and international law is one of the fundamental distinctions that Modris
Eckstein seeks to establish in 28 Rites of Spring, esp. 116–17.
Edmund Blunden,War Poets: 1914–1918(London: British Council, 1958), 37.