fighting talk This general judgement has been echoed in appreciations of war poetry. As the
FirstWorld War comes to be seen as heralding a break between Victorian and
modern conceptions of conflict, so a series of neat poetic oppositions emerges—the
glorious versus the gruesome, the heroic versus the hellish, the romantic versus
the realistic. One need not deny the differences between writing before and after
the First World War without feeling that such oppositions do a disservice to the
complexities of both nineteenth- and twentieth-century war poetry, to the former in
particular. Victorian war poetry has frequently been belittled or ignored by critics,
usually by way of dismissive references to Tennyson serving as prelude to discussion
of the poets of the Great War.^5 Even Malvern Van Wyk Smith, in what remains
the only book-length study of the subject, confines himself to the Anglo-Boer War,
and closes with the assertion that ‘after the Boer War, war poetry could no longer
be merely a sub-department of patriotic verse’.^6 But war poetry was not ‘merely’
this before the Boer War. Such statements have not helped to generate interest in
the subject. It is not given attention in essay collections,^7 and a recent study of
Victorian war literature sidelines poetry on the grounds that ‘so much of it seems
little more than a string of patriotic slogans’.^8 This sense of Victorian war poetry as
a synonym for victorious war poetry needs to be reconsidered. Like the speaker in
Browning’s poem, whose responsible gaze insists on looking twice, Victorian poets
often require us to see double.
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InFifteen Decisive Battles(1851), Edward Creasy noted that ‘It is an honourable
characteristic of the Spirit of this Age, that projects of violence and warfare
are regarded among civilized states with increasing aversion....Yet it cannot
be denied that a fearful and wonderful interest is attached to these scenes of
carnage.’^9 The interest was reflected in sales of Creasy’s book (a Victorian best-
seller, it was reprinted thirty-eight times before 1894). The ‘scenes’ were not merely
(^5) See e.g. Jon Silkin,Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War(Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1972), 26–7, and Bernard Bergonzi,Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War,2nd
edn. (London: Macmillan, 1980), 16.
(^6) M. Van Wyk Smith,Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War(Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1978), 310. 7
‘War poetry’ is not accorded a chapter (or even an index citation) in either Joseph Bristow (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), or
Richard Cronin, Alison Chapman, and Anthony H. Harrison (eds.),A Companion to Victorian Poetry
(Oxford: Blackwell, 2002). Instead, the emphasis is on patriotism; see Tricia Cootens, ‘Victorian poetry
and patriotism’, in Bristow (ed.),Cambridge Companion, 255–79.
(^8) John Peck,War, the Army and Victorian Literature(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1998), p. xiii.
(^9) Edward Creasy,Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World: From Marathon to Waterloo,i(London:
Bentley, 1851), pp. iii–iv.