fighting talk Geoffrey Hill has questioned the achievement of Wilfred Owen’s war poetry
bysuggesting that it ‘applies a balm of generalized sorrow at a point where the
particulars of experience should outsmart that kind of consolation’.^108 One of the
strengths of Housman’s poem is that it breathes an air of ‘generalized sorrow’
without feeling complacent or merely luxurious. His speaker may perhaps be
envious of the sleep of those dead who are unperturbed by noises in their dreams,
but ‘Lovely lads and dead and rotten’ also conveys both pity and anger, a feeling
that the particulars of experience are not to be tidied up into wholly consolatory
patterns. This poem, and the one by Hardy, were both immensely popular in the
trenches during the First World War; as Paul Fussell has argued, the work of these
two poets in particular ‘anticipates [and] even helps to determine the imaginative
means by which the war was conceived’.^109 But the richness of this work owes
much, in turn, to the searchings of earlier Victorian war poetry, a poetry that—in
its refusal to provide a ringing endorsement of war even as it remained wary of the
dangers of that refusal—offered itself as bequest and as monitory force.
(^108) Geoffrey Hill, ‘ ‘‘I in Another Place’’: Homage to Keith Douglas’,Stand, 6/4 (1964–5), 7.
(^109) Paul Fussell,The Great War and Modern Memory(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), 282.