the muse that failed And keep your tears
Forhim in after years.
Better by far
For Johnny-the-bright-star,
To keep your head,
And see his children fed.^17In fact, by 1945 Oscar Williams’s anthology of war poetry was able to argue that
war poetry should be read as part of an ongoing struggle for democratic social
reform:
The true modern poets are poets of compassion. The pity that Owen so deeply felt for
the soldier in the trenches has been extended by them into compassion for all who suffer
everywhere, not only in combat, but from the evils of poverty and social pressures intolerable
to human beings.^18
On the other hand, potentially conflicting political viewpoints could be avoided
altogether by defining ‘England’ and ‘Englishness’ in quasi-mystical terms. This
approach led to an emphasis on the sacred character of poetry, a return to the
notion of the poet as bard and seer. It was a response to the very obvious need
for the beautiful and the transcendent, which poetry seemed peculiarly able to
provide. The difficult, mad mystical poets of the late eighteenth century came
back into fashion and were reread in the context of the 1940s: Christopher Smart,
William Blake, William Cowper, John Clare. The crucifixion became a central image
of tribute to a generation which had made a collective sacrifice. Neo-Romantic
poets cast themselves into the role of sacrificial victim, in poems like Sidney
Keyes’s ‘War Poet’, in which the poet’s face becomes ‘a burnt book|And a wasted
town’.^19 Poets far from the battlefields—Edith Sitwell, Dylan Thomas, H. D., David
Gascoyne—could present death as an entrance into a transcendent world. The
poet’s vision turned the unbearable sights of war into symbolic images, icons.
The visual power of images of churches in flames fed into a religious mood, later
strikingly evoked by Stephen Spender:
There was a feeling of incandescent faith that never quite took fire. It was present in Eliot’s
Four Quartets, Edith Sitwell’sStill Falls the Rain, Dylan Thomas’sRefusal to Mourn the
Death, by Fire, of a Child in London, in John Piper’s drawings of churches burning, in Henry
Moore’s drawings of people in air-raid shelters, and in the apocalyptic paintings of buildings
on fire and of blast furnaces, by Graham Sutherland.... The mood was compounded
of seriousness through constant confrontation with death and destruction, of the sense
of belonging to a community where all classes were drawn together in sympathy, of the
phoenix-like rebirth of the English past from the ashes of burning cities, and of awe at the
(^17) John Pudney, ‘For Johnny’, in Gardner (ed.),Terrible Rain, 77.
(^18) Williams, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),War Poets,3.
(^19) Sidney Keyes, ‘War Poet’, inCollected Poems, ed. Michael Meyer (Manchester: Carcanet,
2002), 70.