johnlee
1914–18 ,devotes the first of the book’s four sections to dismissing previous ages’
writing on war as the more or less fantastic product of armchair soldiers; never,
it seems to Blunden, prior to the Great War, had the soldier in the emplacement
‘noticeably sung himself’. The only other place that Blunden can begin to hear
the true voice of the soldier is in ‘Elizabethan plays and poems here and there’.
He names Tourneur, Webster, and Sidney, but above all Shakespeare; although his
army identity disc has never been found, ‘the author ofKing Henry V,Cymbeline,
Coriolanus,MacbethandOthelloknew very well what happens to men and round
them in real war; he is exact in all points’.^29 So exact, in fact, that one may consider
Shakespeare not only a war poet, but a poet of the Great War: ‘Captain William
Shakespeare’.
Blunden’s commissioning of Shakespeare comes at the end of his book, and
is intended mainly as a way of elevating the literary value of the soldier-poets;
he has little interest in exploring the analogy he sets up. Others had been less
reticent. E. B. Osborn, the literary critic and editor of, among other works, the
very successful 1917 war anthologyTheMuseinArms, published, in 1919,The New
Elizabethans: A First Selection of the Lives of Young Men who Have Fallen in the Great
War. For Osborn, all the fallen, and those that remain, are Elizabethans, but the
most explicitly Elizabethan of the fallen, due to their articulacy, turn out to be the
soldier-poets; in their lives and writing Osborn detects an Elizabethan instinct of
brotherliness which made them insist onremaining regimental officers with their
men, an Elizabethan worship of Gloriana, here figured as England herself, and an
Elizabethan and classless sense of adventure.
Osborn’s literary judgement of others’ writings and his own writing are poor; he
believes that Robert Nichols is clearly the greatest of the war poets, and turns circles
in the effort to portray the pre-war society of poets such as Brooke as morally clean.
His points, though, are valid, as might be expected from their very generality. As has
been mentioned, the homosocial element, bordering on the homoerotic, in Great
War poetry is extremely marked, does ask to be compared with similarly intense
male–male relationships depicted in the Elizabethan period, and may be a factor
in the popularity of the sonnet as a form. Similarly, much war poetry, especially
given its Georgian heritage, does focus on celebrations of and laments for England
and the English countryside. It is Osborn’s belief in the classless nature of the Great
War, however, that drives his use of the Elizabethan analogy. He points, with some
measure of truth, to ‘the arrival, by every social path, of the New Elizabethans.
These golden lads...come from every class and vocation, are of all ranks in the
new army’.^30 He hopes, when those still alive return from the war, that middle-aged
and old men will get out of their way, and let them build something ‘more like than
(^29) Edmund Blunden,War Poets: 1914–1918(London: British Council, 1958), 10–11.
(^30) E. B. Osborn,The New Elizabethans: A First Selection of the Lives of Young Men Who Have Fallen
in the Great War(London: John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1919), 1.