fran brearton
some of Owen’s homoerotic, perhaps masochistic celebrations of male bonding in
wartime:‘Show me the two so closely bound|As we, by the wet bond of blood,|By
friendship blossoming from mud,|By Death: we faced him, and we found|Beauty
in Death,|in dead men, breath.’^42 Owen described Graves’s technique inFairies and
Fusiliersas ‘perfect’.^43 ‘I should never stop if I started to rejoice over these poems,’
he wrote to Sassoon in November 1917: ‘You read many to me: but, wisely, not the
best:—or the most charming.’^44 This is not to make claims for Graves’s early war
poems beyond their merits, but to note that his presence and influence complicate
the wartime picture in ways not always fully acknowledged. Graves’s poetic voice
in the war years is by no means as easily identifiable as Sassoon’s satirical one; nor
does it have at this stage the maturity of Owen’s. But it was a familiar voice to both
Owen and Sassoon, one that both pre-empts some of their thematic concerns and
finds some stylistic echoes in their poems.
In the decades after 1918, Graves became a major (if eccentric) poetic figure,
whose influence on British and Irish poetry has been far-reaching. Sassoon, on the
other hand, has remained trapped in the mode of ‘war poet’, at least in terms of
critical reception, the Georgian who was temporarily shell-shocked into satirical
mode, and whose new lyrical poems from the 1930s to the 1950s cast few ripples
on the water. Perhaps the reason, as Adrian Caesar has suggested, lies in their
different attitudes to the war, and the differences these engendered in a post-war
aesthetic. The quality of Graves’s war poems is by no means consistent, but his
inconsistencies are not those of attitude towards the war. War may be, for Graves,
‘silly’ or ‘Mad’; but soldiering is a contract entered into that cannot be questioned.
In ‘The Next War’, a poem in which history is seen to repeat itself without end, the
speaker describes the men as ‘bound’ by ‘fate’ to ‘serve’. His advice, therefore, is:
‘So hold your nose against the stink|And never stop too long to think.|Wars don’t
change except in name;|The next one must go just the same.’^45 The poem bears out
Graves’s later claim that he was ‘both more consistent and less heroic than Siegfried’,
who is famously described by Graves as alternating ‘between happy warrior and
bitter pacifist’.^46 It is in the tension between these two modes that Sassoon’s
best—because most ambiguous—poems come to rest. They are poetic modes too,
as the satirical meets the lyrical Sassoon. Alongside ‘Blighters’, with its apparent
certainties and underlying tensions, we might also set such poems as ‘The Kiss’,
which could be interpreted as an ironic comment on the ‘homicidal eloquence’ of
the training Sassoon received, as he describes it inMemoirs of an Infantry Officer,^47
but which aesthetically cannot but delight in its weaponry (‘She glitters naked,
(^42) Graves, ‘Two Fusiliers’, ibid. 31.
(^43) Wilfred Owen to Leslie Gunston, 8 Jan. 1918, inCollected Letters,ed.HaroldOwenandJohnBell
(London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 526. 44
45 Owen to Siegfried Sassoon, 27 Nov. 1917, ibid. 511.
Graves, ‘The Next War’, inComplete Poems, 46.^46 Graves,Goodbye to All That, 339.
(^47) Sassoon,Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, 289–90.