This essay was written for a short course at college in the summer of 1999. I was asked to write an essay on an aspect of the First World War - the only limitation was that it must not exceed one thousand words. This version of my essay is longer than that, but essentially it is the same essay. If anyone wants to discuss this further do email me.

Does 'Poetry' include all verse ? Is 'best' to be assumed between 'The' and 'Poetry' ? Does 'of' mean 'issuing from the period of', or 'about', or both simultaneously ? What, if 'of' means 'about', is to be included ?

This essay is an attempt to answer some of these questions.

Parfitt goes on to point out that if the canon of English poetry of the war only includes that poetry which was written during the formal period of the First World War, then much of Ivor Gurney's work is excluded from the canon, as are important poems by Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Edmund Blunden. As Parfitt says "[p]oetry of the First World War is understood, in the critical story, to be the verse of young men serving as subalterns on the Western Front."2

Nosheen Khan states that "anyone affected by war is entitled to comment upon it."3 Her argument is supported by Richard Eberhart who says "the writing of war poetry is not limited to technical fighters. . . . The spectators, the contemplator, the opposer of war have their hours with the enemy no less than uniformed combatants."4 Khan goes on to note that Catherine Reilly's English Poetry of the First World War : A Bibliography 5 identifies over five hundred women war poets, few of whom ever appear in the major anthologies.

Valid though Khan's and Eberhart's argument may be, the dominant, mainstream critical tradition is against them. This tradition equates 'war' with 'combat', and as James Campbell says critics of World War One poetry have created an ideology which "has served to limit severely the canon of texts that mainstream First World War criticism has seen as legitimate war writing."6 Consequently "what it legitimates as war literature is produced exclusively by combat experience; the knowledge of combat is a prerequisite for the production of a literary text that adequately deals with war."7 Inevitably, the limitations of such a construction means that only those male war writers with combat experience who represent that experience in their writing are included in the canon. This construction has led to the canonisation of these male war writers; Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and Wilfred Owen exemplify the genre. Campbell argues that the primary type of literary text in this genre which generates the ideology of combat gnosticism is, as he terms it, the trench lyric. In this term 'trench' refers to the commonest setting for First World War poetry, rather than its place of composition, since few trench lyricists actually wrote finished poetry whilst the were in the Line. Of course, the dominant icon of First World War poetry is the trench with its associated images of barbed wire, rats, shells and filth.

The critic most responsible for the construction and popularisation of the dominant, mainstream critical tradition is Paul Fussell. His influential book The Great War and Modern Memory 8 is focused almost exclusively on the combatant; for Fussell the experience of the First World War is synonymous with experience of the trenches. But as Campbell points out,9 war affects civilians as well as combatants, and thus war is not an exclusively masculine experience. Women's lives were affected, destroyed even, by the First World War, to much the same extent that men's lives were affected and destroyed.

Campbell is not the only critic to make the point that 'war' equates with 'combat', thus limiting the canon. Dominic Hibberd, in the Introduction to the Macmillan Casebook Poetry of the First World War notes that "[t]here were thousands, probably millions, of poems written in English during the First World War" but "critical opinion has never taken more than a very small number of them into account."10 Nine poets are represented in the Macmillan Casebook by individual critical comment. Hibberd explains that these "nine are not selected according to any theoretical definition of the category 'war poet', they are simply those authors whose poetry about the war seems to have attracted most critical attention."11 Reference to this volume indicates that criticism has concentrated on Owen (who receives the most critical attention), Rosenberg and Sassoon, followed by Blunden, Brooke, Yeats, Hardy and Gurney (who has only one reference). The lack of women poets indicates that criticism has largely ignored them. All the nine who receive individual comment were combatants, whilst the neglect of Gurney means that Rosenberg is the only ranker. This is indicative of how little serious criticism has been written about those poems which are not in the circle of the 'best'.

Whilst the term 'war poet' has a practical value for general discussion and to course organisers, there has never been an agreed definition for the term. One of the first people to make a theoretical statement about the nature of war poetry, albeit unintentionally, was W. B. Yeats when he was editing The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1891-1935. In his Preface, Yeats, justifying his decision to omit the officer poets from his anthology, writes :

their letters are vivid and humorous, they were not without joy - for all skill is joyful - but felt bound, in the words of the best known, to plead the suffering of their men. . . . I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold withdraw his Empedocles on Etna from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced.12

Yeats's comments are a reaction against the cult status that Owen had acquired amongst the younger poets of Auden's generation following Edmund Blunden's edition of Owen's poetry which was published in 1931.

As far as Keith Douglas, a poet of the Second World War, is concerned, a war poet is someone who, like Owen, Sassoon, Sorley and Rosenberg, had had experience of fighting :

There is nothing new, from a soldier's point of view, about this war except its mobile character. . . The hardships, pain and boredom, the behaviour of the living and the appearance of the dead, were so accurately described by the poets of the Great War that . . . [a]lmost all a modern poet on active service is inspired to write would be tautological.13

Both Hibberd and Bernard Bergonzi assume that the only war poets worth discussing are the soldier-poets, and as Parfitt points out the shortlist of the 'best' war poets consists of Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Edmund Blunden, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Charles Sorley and Ivor Gurney - with the first three forming the élite.14 All eight of these poets were combatants - although Brooke and Thomas saw little action, all are male, all are young, and almost all were officers - the exceptions being Rosenberg and Gurney. This stereotype of the 'war poet' is a distortion which marginalises other groups of significance. Until Reilly's anthology Scars upon my Heart,15 women poets were largely ignored by the anthology editors. A quick look at the contents pages of the major anthologies shows that Gardner (Up the Line to Death, 1964), Black (1914-18 in Poetry, 1970) and Silkin (The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, 1979) all ignore women's war poetry. Hussey (Poetry of the First World War, 1976) includes one poem by Alice Meynell, and Parsons (Men Who March Away16, 1965) includes two poems by women poets, one by Charlotte Mew and one by Fredegond Shove. It is only when one reaches the Hibberd and Onions's anthology (Poetry of the Great War, 1986) that a more representative showing is made by women war poets. Hibberd and Onions include twelve women poets out of the one hundred in their anthology.

Although the anthology by Hibberd and Onions does something to address the deficiencies of the canon, there nevertheless remains a great deal of work to be done if women war poets are to be accorded the place that many critics feel they deserve in the canon of English poetry of the First World War.

For more on this subject see also my Critical Commentary on a survey of FWW Poetry anthologies which I wrote in the Spring of 2000.

1 - Parfitt, George English Poetry of the First World War : Contexts and Themes (Harvester Wheatsheaf: Hertfordshire, 1990), p.141
2 - ibid., p. 155
3 - Khan, Nosheen Women's Poetry of the First World War (Harvester Wheatsheaf: Hertfordshire, 1988), p. 2
4 - Eberhart, Richard and Rodman, Selden (eds.) War and the Poet : An Anthology of Poetry (Devin-Adair Co.: New York, 1945), p. xv quoted in Khan, p. 3
5 - George Prior Publs., 1978
6 - Campbell, James 'Combat Gnosticism : The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism' New Literary History Vol. 30, 1999 p. 203
7 - ibid., p. 204
8 - Oxford University Press: London, 1975
9 - Campbell, p. 207
10 - Macmillan: Basingstoke and London, 1990 p. 11
11- ibid.
12 - Yeats, W. B. The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1891-1935 (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1936), p. xxxiv quoted in Bergonzi, Bernard Heroes' Twilight (Carcanet: Manchester, 1996 3e), p. 213
13 - Douglas, Keith A Prose Miscellany (Manchester, 1985), p. 119-20 quoted in Bergonzi, p. 214
14 - Parfitt, p. 13
15 - Virago, 1981
16 - Feminists and pro-feminists might see reason for complaint in the title of this volume, but it is worth bearing in mind that the volume is named after a poem with that title by Thomas Hardy, written September 5, 1914.

(Many of these books are detailed on my Poetry and Criticism book page.)

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(This essay has been written by Michèle Fry, 1999 and it is copyright.)

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