vincent sherry
these activities, this ancient compact is both invoked nostalgically and disclaimed
rhetorically.And in the imaginative fabric of the poem, in the verbal possession and
representation of the meaning of Jones’s experience, this conceit is not foregone
but deployed in an extraordinary compound of criticism and mythopoesis, each
rhythm lifting and reinforcing the other—as in this depiction of the ground in
front of Mametz Wood, the target of assault for Jones’s division on the Somme
front:
And you saw the whole depth of the advance and gauged the nature of the contest yard
by yard, and made some estimate of the expenditure and how they’d bargained for each
hundred feet with Shylock batteries. You marked how meshed intricacies of wire and
cunning nest had played sharp tricks on greenand eager plaintiffs. They lay heaped for this
bloody suing. (IP, 148)
‘You’, the everyman-speaker in Jones’s chronicle of modern mass war, takes note
appropriately of the dimensionality of this eventand, in a sort of inverse ratio
to that, elaborates the pathos of the individual suitors slain in their courting of
this all-too-huge contemporary Mars. This passage might be taken to focus the
main interpretive problem in Jones’s poem, at least in the major challenge of its
modernist ambitions. In his attempt to recover a framework perspective on the
present from the ‘tradition’, does he implement a resonant critique of the new
conditions, or does he indulge some desperate pretence in maintaining the foregone
order? Whatever response one makes to such questions, it may be affirmed that an
imaginative energy is being directed centrally to an intellectual questioning of the
relation of past and present, of Now to Then.
This heightening of the identity of the modern moment in contrast to or
collusion with precedent is the quintessentially modernist awareness. One may thus
emphasize the obvious in the word and meaning of modernism: to the experience
of being chronologically modern the suffix adds a sense of self-consciousness about
the experience of being ‘modern’. Most accurately, then, the word conveys a feeling
of belonging to a particular moment of history, a specified Now, aspecialpresent,
which is made more intense by virtue of some self-conscious difference from what
went before. And where this Great War inscribed a manifold line of divide between
centuries new and old, it will not be surprising to find the other major modernists
defining the differences in ways that enable and enrich the most timely poetry of
the event, even if it comes from the civilian war.
II
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••Political London presents one of the liveliest sites in the global picture of this World
War. A crisis internal to the governing party of Britain defined this moment in
local political time. English Liberals had to maintain support for a war which, by