war poetry, or the poetry of war? souls of those who witnessed and experienced it. Some poets—in particular those
whobelieved that they had a responsibility to try to influence the course of
events—responded with the irony and satire of anger; Owen did so with pity. Many
survived through a philosophy of resignation touched with humour: these were
not the ‘smiling Tommies’ of the newsreels so disliked by the fighting soldiers, but
men whom F. W. Harvey—a subaltern in the Gloucestershire Regiment and Ivor
Gurney’s closest friend—described in his poem ‘To the Makers of Laughter’ as
‘seeing, clear, life’s sorrow,|Yet [they] mock it down, and borrow|Strong courage
of despair’.^2 Others drew this courage from interior worlds of imagination and
memory, from the beauties they could still find in the world around them, and
from the respect and admiration they felt for the men in whose lives they shared.
In his preface toIn Parenthesis, Jones writes that ‘We find ourselves privates in
foot regiments. We search how we may see formal goodness in a life singularly
inimical, hateful, to us.’^3 He served for long periods on the Western Front, and he
loathed war and its destructive consequences; but he was not alone among the war
poets in believing that, for all its horror, there was in war a vitality, even a beauty,
that could transcend the immediate experience. This reaching for transcendence is
not a characteristic that one normally associates with war poetry, but it was central
to the work of the three poets whose work I shall be considering.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose poetry Isaac Rosenberg admired for being ‘always
near a brink of some impalpable idea, some indefinable rumour of endlessness’,^4
believed that ‘within man is the soul of the whole...the universal beauty’.^5 This
idea is less remote from the experience of war than might at first appear. Jones
suggests in his essay ‘Art in Relation to War’ that the soldier is more able to perceive
war’s hidden beauties than those who are ignorant of its realities:
I believe it can be said that all art, as such, has beauty for its end, without qualification, both
the art of war and the arts of peace....It...is left to the soldier...to keep his charity and to
practise his art...[B]oth art and charity behave themselves in an analogous manner: they
tend, both of them, to nose out the abstract ‘goods’ and ‘beauties’ behind the detestable
accidents.^6
But this beauty does not present itself easily. It must be searched for, as Ivor Gurney
suggests in a letter to Marion Scott from France in December 1916:
The Artist must learn to feel the beauty of all things, and the sense of instant communion
with God that such perception will bring. ‘To feel Eternity in an hour.’ Blake knew
(^2) F. W. Harvey, ‘To the Makers of Laughter’, quoted in Anthony Boden,F. W. Harvey: Soldier, Poet
(Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1988), 340.
(^3) Jones, ‘Preface’, p. xiii.
(^4) Isaac Rosenberg, ‘Emerson’, inTheCollectedWorksofIsaacRosenberg, ed. Ian Parsons (London:
Chatto & Windus, 1979), 289.
(^5) Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The Over-Soul’, inEmerson’s Prose and Poetry, ed. Joel Porte and Saundra
Morris (New York: Norton, 2001), 164.
(^6) David Jones, ‘Art in Relation to War’, inThe Dying Gaul, ed. Harman Grisewood (London: Faber,
1978), 143 and 147.