war poetry, or the poetry of war? the spirit wrote.|Fordelight, or to escape hunger, or of war’s worst anger.’^68 Like
Rosenberg, his wish had been to use his experiences by crystallizing them into works
of art—both poetry and music—so that others could understand what thoughts
had haunted the minds of men in those desolate days. But in peacetime England he
found a country that had no comprehension of what men had endured and no wish
to understand, that took for granted the suffering and sacrifice it had demanded. In
France he had found ways to sustain his spirit, but now the balance shifted beyond
his control. In 1922 he was confined in an asylum where he remained until his
death in 1937, ‘a silent witness to the hideous crime perpetrated upon the spirit of
manbymodernwar’.^69
So what of war poetry? Hibberd and Onions have said that the ‘more conventional
authors’ of 1914 ‘were in no doubt that the war poet’s duty was the ancient one
of calling men to the colours, celebrating the character of the Happy Warrior,
and commending the national cause’.^70 As the war progressed that responsibility
shifted, and as it did so it became more complex, spread out along a continuum of
response. Whilst some poets had a new and powerful message about the nature of
modern warfare that must be swiftly and urgently understood by those at home,
others pursued a more abstract quest for its meaning. Possibly it was because they
served in the ranks that neither Rosenberg nor Jones nor Gurney believed that they
could influence the course of events, or perhaps it was because this had never been
their purpose in writing. Jones made it clear that he ‘hadno intentionwhatever to
‘‘philosophise’’ about the rights and wrongs of war’.^71 He believed that ‘the artist
does not determine the nature of his society, he accepts whatever is to hand from
his environment and conditions, he ‘‘illustrates’’ in the strict meaning of that word
[making illumined, bringing light to bear upon], and keeping in mind its origin,
what his particular culture and time makes available to him’.^72 What sets these three
writers apart from some others of the war poets is that they did not move from the
war to the poetry. Poetry, as a way of thought and expression through which they
could search for abstract, universal beauties, was their starting-point. What war
did was to offer them awesome material in their quest for new understandings of
timeless truths.
(^68) Gurney, ‘War Books’, ibid. 258.
(^69) William Curtis-Hayward, quoted in Jon Silkin,Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War(Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1972), 122.
(^70) Dominic Hibberd and John Onions, ‘Introduction’, inidem(eds.),Poetry of the Great War: An
Anthology(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1986), 27.
(^71) Jones, quoted in Miles,Backgrounds to David Jones, 80.
(^72) Jones, ‘Art in Relation to War’, 127; the definition is on p. 137.