notes to chapter 5 235
written when he was a boy by students of Latin prosody with the aid of a
“Gradus”
(Florence Emily Hardy, The Later Years of Thomas Hardy, 78–80), quoted in Hynes
The Pattern of Hardy’s Poetry, 19.
- Thomas, “War Poetry,” 341–45. J. G. Fletcher disagreed (Egoist, Nov. 16, 1914),
calling the poem “inane driveltry,” and soldier poet Charles Sorley wrote in a letter of
the same month that the poem was “arid” and “untrue to the sentiments of the ranks
man going to war: “Victory crowns the just is the worst line he ever wrote — filched
from a leading article in The Morning Post, and unworthy of him who had always previ-
ously disdained to insult Justice by offering it a material crown like Victory.” Letter
from Charles Hamilton Sorley, November 30, 1914. Quoted in Hibberd, Poetry of the
First World War: A Selection of Critical Essays, 30. - Thomas, “War Poetry,” 341–45.
- Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 202.
- Monro chose to read a Henry Newbolt poem at the opening of the famous
bookshop in 1913. - Monro, “Varia,” 251 (quoted in Samuel Hynes’s excellent A War Imagined, 29).
- Blenheim, “Song : In War-time,” 446.
- Thomas, “War Poetry,” 333.
- Gosse, “Some Soldier Poets,” 296–316.
Chapter 5: The Trauma of Meter.- Ross, The Georgian Revolt: Rise and Fall of a Poetic Ideal 1910–1922, 22.
- The English meter feminized by the modernists was also claimed and reclaimed
as masculine by the military metrical complex before the war. Though the hysterical
soldier was often characterized as feminine, the specifically female home-front com-
munities were those from which the soldiers I describe felt alienated. This distaste for
the women writers of the home front created a division between the illusion of stabil-
ity that the home (that idea of England), provided, and the destabilized post-
traumatic meter with which they reckoned. - Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory, 167.
- Hynes, A War Imagined, 28.
- Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning, 204.
- Ford, Parade’s End, 314.
- Ibid. The completed sonnet, which does not appear in the text:
Now we affront the grinning chops of Death
And in between our carcass and the moil
Of marts and cities, toil and moil and coil
Old Spectre blows a cold protecting breath
Vanity of vanities, the preacher saith. 5
No more parades, Not any more. No oil
Unambergris’d our limbs in the naked soil.
No funeral statements cast before our wraiths.
“[H]e scribbled the rapid sestet to his sonnet which ought to make a little plainer what
it all meant. Of course, the general idea was that, when you got into the line or near it,