was there a scottish war literature? monument or in the inscriptions of a reassuring,familiar phrase repeated endlessly
on the gravestones in a war cemetery.
This quality of reassuring commonplaceness, in which even the most personal
poetic expression is subject to the conventions of a common style and a settled
frame of reference, is fundamental to much of the popular poetry of war—among
which this British public school or university verse can be placed. This is to conceive
of popular poetry not so much as an unimaginative practice desperately in need of
the shake-up of a self-appointed avant-garde (in the way Pound or Eliot might look
at it), but as a social practice that works with the consent and shared consolation of a
wider readership—a poetry that is less the expression of extraordinary individuality
than the statement of a commonplace social and experiential communality.
The poetry examined so far is, admittedly, governed by the concerns and par-
ticular experiences of a narrow class grouping that qualify any claim it might make
to be popular in any fully meaningful sense. It might be argued, in particular,
that the commonplaceness of the verse, and its manifest lack of a distinct Scottish
perspective in the way of diction, setting, and form, can be explained simply by the
fact of the relative immaturity and overwhelmingly Anglocentric formation of the
poets featured so far. But in moving to the popular poetry published in Scottish
newspapers and journals, one sees a perhaps unexpected congruence. There is, it
should be said, a little more dialect poetry in these types of publication, but there is
also a surprisingly large amount of the kinds of rather normative standard English
poetry already discussed. What this suggests, perhaps, is that the argument about
commonality versus particularity can be extended tentatively into the sphere of
national expression: that in the prevailing climate of the war the need to express
Scottish exceptionalism or particularity was less pressing than the demands of
articulating a wider British solidarity.
Newspapers and Popular Poetry
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It is not surprising that the Edinburgh-based, UnionistScotsmannewspaper greeted
the war with poetry in English that stressed British unanimity. Printed on the
paper’s leader page a week and a half into the conflict, ‘British Bugles’ is a standard
piece of imperial trumpeting in the manner of Alfred Austin or Henry Newbolt,
employing the usual high diction and heavily rhymed quatrains of that genre. The
poem’s message was one of reassurance that the subaltern nations (even perfidious
Ireland) looked set to answer the call of the British bugle. The poem concludes:
Every island, every last stretch,
Where the ancient banner flies,
Hears the braying of the bugles,
And with one accord replies—