war poetry and the realm of the senses Swallowed his sense of sight; he stopped and swore
Becausea sagging wire had caught his neck.^19This is characteristic First World War verse in the way that the body of the individual
soldier is used to challenge the abstract heroism of the epic: poetry is refashioned as
missives from the trenches. Sassoon’s poem is also acutely diagnostic of the altered
phenomenology of the trenches: what the series of verbs in the first stanza—sliding,
groping, tripping, lurching—suggests is that space is no longer experienced through
a pair of eyes but through articulate flesh. ‘If it is true that I am conscious of my body
via the world’, writes Merleau-Ponty inPhenomenology of Perception(1962), the
body is also ‘the unperceived term in the centre of the world’.^20 Here, darkness and
sludge combine to alter this assumed relation, challenging the vertical organization
of the human bodily gestalt and marking a regression to the horizontal movements
(‘groping’, ‘paw’) of the beast. Different geographies of sense intersect in Sassoon’s
poem in the way the focus moves from the claustrophobia of the chalk bags to
the rattle of feet and grunts of men to the glowing ‘point of red’ until chaos
is come again with the darkness, and the surrounding world suddenly contracts
and impinges on the flesh as ‘sagging wire’. Yet, it was this sensory verisimilitude
that Middleton Murry used to question Sassoon’s literary claim while reviewing
Counter-Attack and Other Poems(1918) forNationon 13 July 1918: ‘They are not
poetry but verse.... They touch not our imagination, but our sense.’^21
This essay argues how the distinction between ‘sense’ and ‘imagination’ begins
to blur in the most powerful First World War verse as the inchoate cry of the
senses—‘the chaos of immediate sensation’ which Murry deplored in Sassoon’s
verse—is evolved into a lyric voice at once rich and strange. In few periods of literary
history are actual physical experience and artistic production as contiguous as in
First World War verse, and such poetry loses much of its power without the touch of
historical reality. But even the crudest warlyric is not the unmediated transcription
of immediate sensation: between the sensate body and the printed voice, between
experience and expression, come language and linguistic form. In poems such as
Thomas’s ‘Rain’ or Rosenberg’s ‘Returning, we hear the lark’, sense impressions
lead to an imaginative reconfiguration of nature that in turn develops into an
existential questioning of life without ever abandoning the immediate experience;
at the same time, both writers negotiate their relation with the Romantic lyric,
particularly with John Keats.^22
(^19) Sassoon, ‘A Working Party’, 19.
(^20) Maurice Merleau-Ponty,Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge,
1962), 94. 21
John Middleton Murry, ‘Mr Sassoon’s War Verses’,Nation, 23 (13 July 1918), 398.
(^22) See Edna Longley, ‘The Great War, history and the English lyric’, in Vincent Sherry (ed.),The
Cambridge Companion to the Literature of the First World War(Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2005), 65–6.