british holocaust poetry: songs of experience within a polyphony of cultural conflict. The poetry of these three writers, Plath, Hill,
andPaulin is loud, confident, public verse, and they are concerned to comment
on, and take issue with, a common Western culture, especially their Christian
background, and they self-consciously wrestle with their poetic heritage in order
to do so. By contrast, the writing of the British-Jewish Holocaust poets is low-key,
deeply personal, revealing individual experience and grief, and, I would argue, it
tends to be ambivalent about English culture rather than frankly critical of it. They
vary from each other, of course, but share a common straightforwardness that at first
appearsalmostnaivebycomparisonwiththecompanyinwhichtheyfindthemselves
in the anthologies compiled by Schiff and Lawson. Whilst they display less overt
difficulty or sophistication than the three better-known poets, it is interesting to
investigate how far their unassuming stance might be said deliberately to conceal
their difference but still constitute an implicit reproach to their host country.
Despite the fact that Harold Bloom’s view that British and American writers
should avoid the Holocaust might have been used as an alibi, such writers
are nevertheless confronted with Arthur Koestler’s stinging charges in 1943–4 that
‘matter-of-fact unimaginativeness has become a kind of Anglo-Saxon racial myth’,^38
and that ‘there is no excuse for you—for it is your duty to know and to be haunted
by your knowledge. As long as you don’t feel, against reason and independently
of reason, ashamed to be alive while others are put to death and guilty, sick,
humiliated, because you were spared, you will remain what you are: An accomplice
by omission.’^39 Sylvia Plath (who, unlike Hill, is pointedly excluded from S. Lillian
Kremer’s encyclopaedia,Holocaust Literature, although included in Hilda Schiff’s
anthology)wasamongthefirstEnglish-speakingpoetsto takeupKoestler’sgauntlet.
Refusing to be an ignorant accomplice, she poured out a stream of impassioned
poetry inspired by Holocaust imagery in the months before her suicide. In a BBC
interview in 1962, she claimed her right to engage with the Holocaust because of
her German and Austrian background, which made her concern with the camps
‘uniquely intense’.^40 This avowal took courage. The hostility to Germans and
Austrians which German-speaking Jewish refugees remembered encountering in
England during the War did not cease on VE day in 1945. The revelations of the
war trials in Nuremberg and Jerusalem seemed to justify a wholesale anti-German
prejudice which has continued to be reinforced by the dissemination of negative
stereotypes through Second World War films right up to the present day.
As Tim Kendall points out, Plath was writing shortly after the Eichmann trial in
1961–2; just as the Rosenberg trial informed the imagery of her novelThe Bell Jar,
(^38) Arthur Koestler, ‘On Disbelieving Atrocities’ (1944), inThe Yogi and the Commissar and Other
Essays 39 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1945), 96.
Koestler, ‘Answer to Some Inquiries’,Horizon, 8/48 (Dec. 1943), 433. The background to this
correspondence inHorizonis given in Mark Rawlinson, ‘This Other War: British Culture and the
Holocaust’, 40 Cambridge Quarterly, 25/1 (1996), 1–25.
Sylvia Plath, in Peter Orr (ed.),The Poet Speaks(London: Routledge, 1966), 169.