a war of friendship always keep chronological step with its historical counterpart: often a poetic event
anticipatesor succeeds the corresponding physical event by years.’^64
Graves is not necessarily seen as central to a modernist project; but nor is he
remote from it, and as the author with Laura Riding ofA Survey of Modernist Poetry
in 1927 (a book he was originally to write with T. S. Eliot), and of some of the
early psychological readings of literature,he has considerable critical importance
in understanding the developments of modernism. Sassoon, on the other hand,
felt repelled, and ultimately marginalized, by modernism. Not least of the ironies
of Barker’sRegeneration, of course, is that as it reimagines Sassoon in the Great
War, it does so through unacknowledged dependence on some of the ‘modernist’
texts that Sassoon believed had sidelined his own aesthetic values, with its echoes
and paraphrases of Eliot’sThe Waste Land,Hemingway’sFarewell to Arms,andso
on. In that sense, the novel stands perhaps inadvertently as testament to Sassoon’s
lack of influence on post-war modes of writing. One consequence of Sassoon’s
marginalized feeling was the increasing stress he placed on the importance of his
wartime poetic relation with Owen. As Max Egremont writes:
He missed what Owen might have become—a constant ally amid Sassoon’s broken literary
friendships with Bob Nichols, Graves, Turner, the Sitwells. Wilfred had been ‘a kindred
poet’, although ‘of more powerful intellectual genius’. Together, they might have defeated
the Eliot school: a recurrence of Sassoon’s fantasy.^65
Probably only Owen’s death permitted the fantasy of modernism’s defeat at Owen’s
hands to remain intact, but its recurrence is a measure of Sassoon’s felt literary
isolation by the 1940s. In his diary in 1948 he writes: ‘I have, more and more,
believed that he [Owen] would have been incalculably valuable to me. His death
made a gap in my life which has been there ever since.’^66 A year later, Graves
takes the opposite stance, celebrating his distance from ‘the caprices of a world in
perpetual flux’, claiming to be free from ‘the frantic strain of swimming against the
stream of time’.^67
Given their early collaborative instincts, there is a certain irony to the fact that
what Sassoon and Graves most obviously shared in the 1940s and 1950s was isolation
from ‘the stream of time’ as much as from each other. In Graves’s case, this is a
willed distance from national, political, and literary canons which served to liberate
his mature poetic voice; in Sassoon’s case, it is the consequence of a nostalgia for a
lost England, lamented in part through his regret for Owen’s lost years. The journey
through Sassoon’s poems can feel like a journey backwards rather than forwards in
time, from ‘Died of Wounds’ or ‘The Hero’ in the First World War to his Second
(^64) Graves, ‘Foreword toPoems and Satires 1951’, inThe Complete Poems, ii, ed. Beryl Graves and
Dunstan Ward (Manchester: Carcanet, 1997), 345–6.
(^65) Egremont,Siegfried Sassoon, 466. (^66) Sassoon, quoted ibid. 452–4.
(^67) Robert Graves,The Common Asphodel: Collected Essays on Poetry 1922–1949(London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1949), p. x.