the muse that failed poetry in general. George Orwell, in his attack on Auden’sSpain,pointed out the
harm that poetry could do to politics; Louis MacNeice denounced the damage that
politics could do to poetry:
Art, though as much conditioned by material factors as anything else, is a manifestation
of human freedom. The artist’s freedom connotes honesty because a lie, however useful in
politics, hampers artistic vision. Systematic propaganda is therefore foreign to the artist in
so far as it involves the condoning of lies. Thus, in the Spanish Civil War some English
poets were torn between writing good propaganda (dishonest poetry) and honest poetry
(poor propaganda). I believe firmly that in Spain the balance of right was on the side of the
government; propaganda, however, demands either angels or devils. This means that in the
long run a poet must choose between being politically ineffectual and poetically false.^3
The idea of art as ‘a manifestation of human freedom’ became in itself liberating
for the British poets waiting to be called up, unwilling ‘prisoners of war’ looking
for a way, not so much out of the War, as through it. George Orwell in ‘Inside
the Whale’, after warning against any direct meddling in politics, recommended
a clear mental and moral separation between the unavoidable patriotic action of
the citizen and the necessary individual thought of a writer. The writer should see
himself in the situation of Jonah inside the whale, caught up in the collapse of
Western civilization, in a world whose historical movement he had not been able
to—indeed, could not—control. He would be well-advised to follow the example
of Henry Miller, spokesman for ‘the ordinary man’,^4 content with recording merely
the individual point of view, assuming a ‘glorious irresponsibility’ which would be
liberating for both the artist and his art.
Orwell’s advice was brilliantly in tune with the mood of the threatened and
Phoney War, both poetically and politically. Poetically, it coincided with a change
in taste: an interest in surrealism, in the psychoanalytical theory of Jung, and a
rediscovery of the work of D. H. Lawrence and W. B. Yeats. The poets were in no
mood to add any more strident voices to the ‘drum’s discordant sound’.^5 Politically,
the early period of the War was marked by the failure of appeasement and the
ideological void created by the Germano–Soviet Pact of August 1939. The role of
poet as ‘ordinary man’ was widely adopted, though it took on a variety of forms.
In the all-too-conspicuous absence of Auden and other unacknowledged legislat-
orsof the 1930s,giventhegeographicaldispersionofthepoetsonce conscripted, and
the varied regional and Commonwealth origins of the soldier-poets, the isolationist
stand appeared the only one available. Under duress, poets ‘did their bit’ as inclina-
tion and opportunity presented themselves. Some were recruited into civilian jobs,
(^3) Louis MacNeice, ‘The Poet in England To-day: A Reassessment’, inSelected Literary Criticism,ed.
Alan Heuser (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 113. 4
George Orwell, ‘Inside the Whale’, inThe Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell,
i:An Age Like This, 1920–1940, ed. Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970),
548.
(^5) John Scott of Amwell (1730–83), ‘The Drum’, in Jon Stallworthy (ed.),The Oxford Book of War
Poetry(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 68.