ralph pite
In some respects it is an alarmingly heroic story, even though it presents heroism
asattained by seeing through received ideas of heroism. The ‘lions-led-by-donkeys’
version of the First World War—of lion-hearted Tommies sent to needless death in
their thousands by incompetent commanders—is repeated in Owen and Sassoon.
Though of the officer class themselves, both poets are on the side of the ordinary
soldiers, first in the way they led their troops, and secondly in their writing—in
specific poems that praise the lower ranks or attack the generals, and through a style
that discards the ornate mellifluousness of late Victorian poetry. This is especially
true of Sassoon and of Charles Sorley, and it is frequently noted as an aspect of the
war’s poetry generally.^4
War poetry is thus understood within a sequence of feeling in which naivety
gives way to disillusionment and mature understanding; in that process, rhetoric,
idealism,andunreflectingnationalismareleftbehind,andrespectfor theestablished
hierarchy loses out to admiration for the ordinary man, now seen as one’s equal.^5
This is all very well except that it rescues war itself, making the trenches a crucible
in which fantasy is refined away. Rosenberg’s question—‘What in our lives is
burnt|In the fire of this?’^6 —is given too swift an answer: hypocrisy is burnt away,
illusions shattered. Rosenberg meant nothing so straightforward, and his lines are
reduced by a normative understanding of what war poetry should express. War
shows people the futility of war, so it is not absolutely futile.
This contradiction within the received idea ofwar poetry emerges more clearly if
you consider an advocate for war such as John Ruskin, who saw conflict as morally
beneficial:
First, the great justification of this game [war] is that it truly, when well played, determines
who is the best man; who is the highest bred, the most self-denying, the most fearless, the
coolest of nerve, the swiftest of eye and head. You cannot test these qualities wholly, unless
there is a clear possibility of the struggle ending in death.^7
These views seem absolutely opposed to Wilfred Owen’s poetry or Ivor Gurney’s
(if not to Sassoon’s), yet the idea of warfare as a test of mettle—which was passed
by Owen and Sassoon, but failed by Brooke—persists unacknowledged within the
literary history we bring to the appraisal of their work. Jon Silkin, in the introduction
to his anthologyThe Penguin Book of First World War Poetry(1979), puts the case
most schematically, outlining in four ‘stages of consciousness’ the emergence of
(^4) Some of the stylistic changes may be due to Hardy’s example, especially his manner in the
sequence ‘Satires of Circumstance’ from 1912, which is cited by Sassoon as an influence.
(^5) Martin Stephen’s ‘Preface’ to his anthologyNever Such Innocence: Poems of the First World War
(London: Dent, 1988), pp. vii–xvii, carefully considers these models of understanding the poetry.
(^6) Isaac Rosenberg, ‘August 1914’, inThe Poems and Plays of Isaac Rosenberg, ed. Vivien Noakes
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 130. 7
John Ruskin,The Crown of Wild Olive: Three Lectures on Work, Traffic and War(London: Smith,
Elder & Co., 1866), 167. Daniel Pick discusses the period’s attitudes to war in hisWar Machine: The
Rationalization of Slaughter in the Modern Age(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993).