a war of friendship the vast|Sadness that darkens with the fall of day.’^21 In that sense, Sassoon’s
war poems—abrasive, and, as suggested below, often experimental in style and
form—can seem an aberration in hisœuvre, as if the time away from home in
the Great War is mirrored by his temporary occupation of a stylistic ‘elsewhere’.
In Graves’s early poems, on the other hand, a more ambiguous relation to his
time and place, and a certain anti-authoritarianism, are already in evidence. In the
pre-war poem ‘In Spite’, his mischievous rhythms take issue with a late Victorian
form and idiom: ‘My rhymes no longer shall stand arrayed|Like Prussian soldiers
on parade|That march|Stiff as starch,|Foot to foot,|Boot to boot.’ ‘How petty’,
he concludes, to take a rhyme, ‘Pleat it with pleats,|Sheet it with sheets|Of
empty conceits....And weld it into a uniform stanza.’^22 Only a few years later,
in 1917, he makes what appears to be the opposite case in ‘To an Ungentle
Critic’:
Must winds that cut like blades of steel
And sunsets swimming in Volnay,
The holiest, cruellest pains I feel,
Die stillborn, because old men squeal
For something new: ‘Write something new:
We’ve read this poem—that one too,
And twelve more like ’em yesterday’?
No, no! my chicken, I shall scrawl
Just what I fancy as I strike it,
Fairies and Fusiliers, and all.
Old broken knock-kneed thought will crawl
Across my verse in the classic way.^23As these poems suggest, Graves can play the Yeatsian patriarch as much as theenfant
terrible. Yet in fact both poems argue for the same thing, and with a consistency
he was to retain throughout his career: the freedom to write without reference to
the literary establishment, or to literary fashion, or to the prevailing political and
culturalZeitgeist. As with Sassoon, there may be anger with ‘old men’ in evidence;
but where Sassoon’s anger is directed at life(military authorities), Graves’s is aimed
at literature (authoritarian critics).
Graves’s ‘Familiar Letter to Siegfried Sassoon’ is written in octosyllabic rhyming
couplets, thereby drawing on what Douglas Dunn, in another context, describes as
‘a solid seventeenth-century pedigree in Ben Jonson, Marvell and Milton’, and a
tradition in which ‘Public statements have often been disguised as private epistolary
poems’.^24 The wartime epistolary exchange between Sassoon and Graves has its
descendants too, in the work of Auden and MacNeice on the eve of the Second
(^21) Sassoon, ‘A Prayer to Time’, inCollected Poems 1908–1956, 255.
(^22) Graves, ‘In Spite’, inComplete Poems, 9–10. (^23) Graves, ‘To an Ungentle Critic’, ibid. 29.
(^24) See Douglas Dunn, ‘Longley’s Metric’, in Alan J. Peacock and Kathleen Devine (eds.),The Poetry
of Michael Longley(Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe, 2000), 21.