david wheatley
Red Cross in Normandy, is ‘a vision and sense of a time-honoured conception of
humanityin ruins, and perhaps even an inkling of the terms in which our condition
is to be thought again’.^35 If this conception does not extend to a rethinking, in
all human humility, of what it means to write poetry too, then no amount of
savage indignation will avail our ‘poetry againstwar’. Rather, as Geoffrey Hill finds,
pondering his own life as a child of pre-war England, and the many other lives he
might have led instead, the true artist writing in fitful peace in the shadow of never-
ending conflict finds that ‘all have godlike elements|divided among them: such
suffering,|you can imagine, driven, murderous,|albeit under notice of grace’.^36
(^35) Samuel Beckett, ‘The Capital of the Ruins’, inAs the Story Was Told(London: John Calder,
1990), 27–8.
(^36) Hill,The Orchards of Syon(Washington: Counterpoint, 2002), 2.