themusethatfailed World War, like those of the First, were focusing not on War but on the conduct of
theWar, and not on the function of poetry, but on its nature.
The self-imposed division between patriotic action and poetic thought created a
crisis of integrity, in the sense that it compromised the social integration of the poet
and, later, his individual integrity. The individual stance fatally underestimated the
importance of poetry in time of war. The lessons of the First World War had been
learnt in the 1930s by the readers of Sassoon, Owen, and Rosenberg, and those read-
ersnowlookedtothepoetstoclarifytheir ownresponsetowar.Thefamous question
‘Where are the War Poets?’, asked in theTimes Literary Supplementand actually
raised in Parliament, reflected a variety of expectations of poets, but at the very least
it showed that they had an essential role to play in public life. Poets with their ‘still,
small voices’, confined their contribution to ‘tossing ink grenades at the Goliath of
War’^9 and, by their self-mocking irony, brought back into the limelight not poetry,
but the poet. But by taking up the position of the marginal, powerless poet, they
were in fact maintaining the notion that poetry itself was powerless and marginal,
a position which was later to have grave repercussions for both poetry and politics.
The individual stance also encouraged internal divisions between warring schools
of poetry, with poets ranging themselves on either side of the somewhat obscure
line dividing the ‘classical’ from the ‘romantic’. This unedifying battle of the books
further weakened the cause of poetry, by distracting attention from a more import-
ant dogmatic division: the self-created split within the poet, between the private
and the public self. The split was based partly on the ideas of Yeats, particularly his
much-approved distinction that ‘We make out of the quarrel with others, rhetoric,
but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.’^10 Thus it happened that the ‘memorable
speech’ of the Second World War turned out to be that of Churchill and Priestley.
The idea that, as one soldier-poet put it, ‘The truest statements about war are made
under one’s breath, and the most false on public platforms’,^11 was to encourage
poets to leave the new media (radio and, after the war, television) to the politicians
and journalists, thus ignoring the very outlets that offered a return to the essentially
vocal nature of their art, and perhaps a return to their original functions in society.
This fatal split between the public and the private was masked by the events of
the second stage of the War, which temporarily forced the poets into the public
arena. For a brief time, from May 1940 to November 1942, when Britain ‘stood
alone’, patriotic poetry was not seen as a contradiction in terms. For a brief space,
poets responded to the call Orwell had made, inThe Lion and the Unicorn,fora
patriotism reunited with intelligence. They began by subscribing to some rather
loose distinctions between German and British notions of patriotism. For Orwell,
(^9) Charles Hamblett, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),I Burn for England(London: Leslie Frewn, 1966),
- 10
11 W. B. Yeats, ‘Per Amica Silentia Lunae’, inMythologies(London: Macmillan, 1962), 331.
Williams, ‘Comments by the Poets’, 16.