helen goethals
War and the progress of poetry. The chronological framework of the War would
notbe confined to the outbreak and cessation of hostilities between Britain and
Germany, but redrawn to include the poetic and political events of the period
1938–48, from Munich to the Berlin airlift. The War would then be seen not so
much as a belated attempt to redress the European imbalance of power, but rather
as one of several stages of the conflict that dominated the twentieth century, the
struggle between capitalism and socialism. In such a perspective, and by way of
broad example, the three assumptions implied in the term ‘patriotic poetry’ will be
seen to correspond to three distinct periods of the War.
During the first period, stretching from the Munich agreement in September 1938
to the fall of the Chamberlain government in May 1940, the dominant assumption
was that poetry could and should be kept entirely separate from politics, because
political poetry was necessarily propaganda, and propaganda was necessarily a Bad
Thing. This assumption, widely held in 1939, stemmed from well-documented
reactions to two previous wars: the anger of the First World War poets against the
dishonest reporting of the battlefields, and the use of poetry to drive lambs to the
slaughter of the trenches, and the disillusionment of the Thirties poets after the
betrayal of the Left during and after the Spanish Civil War. Both Wilfred Owen’s
‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and Yeats’s ‘Lapis Lazuli’ contributed to the radically new
tone of Charles Causley’s ‘Recruiting Drive’:
Under the willow
I heard the butcher-bird sing,
Come out you fine young fellow
From under your mother’s wing.
I’ll show you the magic garden
That hangs in the beamy air,
The way of the lynx and the angry Sphinx
And the fun of the freezing fair.
······
You must take off your clothes for the doctor
And stand as straight as a pin,
Hishandofstoneonyourwhitebreast-bone
Where the bullets all go in.
They’lldressyouinlawnandlinen
And fill you with Plymouth gin,
O the devil may wear a rose in his hair
I’ll wear my fine doe-skin.^2In John Lehmann and Stephen Spender’s anthologyPoems for Spain(1939), poetry
had been willingly pressed into the service of propaganda, but as the Republican
cause was betrayed and lost, so too was the poets’ belief in the soundness of political
(^2) Charles Causley, ‘Recruiting Drive’, in Desmond Graham (ed.),Poetry of the Second World War
(London: Pimlico, 1988), 29.