a war of friendship ‘‘faction’’ ’.^1 Jointreadings by Barker, and by one of Graves’s biographers, Miranda
Seymour, in the mid-1990s, contributed to a package deal of interwoven ‘fact’ and
‘fiction’. Praised for its ‘authenticity’ and its ‘vivid evocation[s]’,Regenerationhas
since become an educational resource, and has been made into a successful film, its
shaping of the relations between Graves, Sassoon, and Owen now one of the primary
sourcesofinformationforagenerationdiscovering the‘warpoets’forthe first time.^2
Whether it is deemed a work of postmodern brilliance, or of authentic, realist
representation(adivergenceincriticalresponsesnoteasilyreconciled),itistoo often
assumed to offer a reliable insight into the historical figures at its centre. It contrib-
utes, too, to a tendency to bring to the war poets a critical perspective not so readily
acceptedoutsidewhatisseentobetheir‘special’case:thatis,theextenttowhichtheir
poetry is to be judged against the uniquely terrible circumstances of its production.
In this essay, I will suggest ways in which the relation between Graves and
Sassoon may be reinterpreted (and in the process question the ‘integrity’ as well
as the implications of imaginative appropriations and critical evaluations of the
war poets). To rethink the terms of their relationship, and of their habitual
quarrels—which resulted in a complete breakdown of the friendship in 1933—is
also to rethink the significance of their contribution to, or revision of, a genre of
‘war poetry’, and to an English tradition of poetry more generally. The wartime
friendship of Graves, Sassoon, and Owen has become the stuff of myth—and not
myth in its Gravesian sense (‘reliable enough as history’) but in the more popular
sense of the mythical as ‘fanciful’ or fictional that Graves eschews.^3 Yetthat‘myth’of
the war poets sometimes omits consideration of what was central to the friendships
and, in the case of Graves and Sassoon, to the disintegration of that friendship:
that is, their aesthetic similarities and differences. As Adrian Caesar notes, in his
important studyTaking It Like a Man, ‘different artistic directions’ as well as political
and sexual issues are vital in understanding the strained relations between the two.^4
Yet the ‘one size fits all’ approach to war poetry still found in circulation (war poetry
is soldier poetry; war poetry is always anti-war poetry; war poetry is experiential;
war poetry, if it is to be any good, speaks from disillusionment, not patriotism;
war poetry is meant to shock the complacent public; the war poets have some kind
of shared agenda) tends to obscure the fact that, in the years following the First
(^1) SharonOuditt, ‘Myths, memories, and monuments: reimaginingthe Great War’, inVincent Sherry
(ed.),The Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War(Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2005), 249.
(^2) See reviews quoted in Pat Barker,Regeneration(London: Penguin, 1991).
(^3) See Robert Graves,The White Goddess, 4th edn. (London: Faber, 1999), 9.
(^4) Adrian Caesar,Taking It Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets(Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1993), 207.