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War Began in Nineteen Sixty-Three: Poetic Responses to the 50th Anniversary

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Abstract

This chapter examines the notion of more subtle inaugurations of a secondary canon of post-Great War poetry, writ largely as creative cultural reception, as opposed to lived personal experience. Discussion focuses upon a series of key texts produced in the years around the 50th anniversary of the conflict. I examine the early work of Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, and Geoffrey Hill, important writers who produced influential poetic utterances about the First World War from the historical distance of 50 years. A literary rehabilitation of the conflict is generally perceived to have occurred around this period, to the extent that, as I point out, more recent revisionist historians are blaming it for the skewed, literature-dominated perspectives we have on the Great War today.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    David Reynolds, The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century (London, rpt 2014: Simon & Schuster, 2013), p. 317.

  2. 2.

    Gary Sheffield, Forgotten Victory (London; rpt, 2002: Headline Publishing, 2001), p. 17.

  3. 3.

    The quotation is my own from the poem, “Dear Revisionist” ll.18–19, Stand 14, no. 2, Jon Glover (ed) (Leeds: Leeds University, 2016), p. 75.

  4. 4.

    David Reynolds, Introduction to The Long Shadow: The Great War and the Twentieth Century, p. xv.

  5. 5.

    Spender called Owen the greatest English war poet in “Poetry”, Fact, no. 4 (July 1937), p. 26 and, as Heaney points out in his essay “Sounding Auden” the younger poet owed more than just inspirational debts to the soldier-poet. Owen represented a technical precursor also, particularly in his use of pararhyme (Seamus Heaney, “Sounding Auden”, London Review of Books 9, No.11, June 4, 1987, pp. 15–18).

  6. 6.

    As Hynes observes: “This sense of opportunity lost, of the test that one has failed without even having taken it, is expressed in many memoirs of the time, and is, I think, an important factor in the collective consciousness of the whole generation of young men who came of age between the wars”. Samuel Hynes, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s (London: Pimlico, 1976), p. 21.

  7. 7.

    Fran Brearton, “‘But that is not new’: Poetic Legacies of the First World War”, S. Das (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Poetry of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 229–241.

  8. 8.

    Ted Hughes, Review of Men Who March Away: Poems of the First World War, edited by I.M. Parsons (London: Chatto and Windus, 1965) from The Listener, August 5, 1965.

  9. 9.

    Ted Hughes, “Griefs for Dead Soldiers”, The Hawk in the Rain (1958; rpt. London: Faber & Faber, 1968), pp. 52–53.

  10. 10.

    Paul Fussell, The Great War and Modern Memory (London: Oxford University Press, 1975), p. 314.

  11. 11.

    The Hawk in the Rain, pp. 49–50.

  12. 12.

    Siegfried Sassoon, “On First Passing the New Menin Gate”, The War Poems (1983, rpt; London: Faber and Faber, 2014), p. 143.

  13. 13.

    Elizabeth Vandiver, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War. Classical Presences (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

  14. 14.

    Terry Gifford and Neil Roberts, Ted Hughes: A Critical Study (London: Faber and Faber, 1981), p. 84.

  15. 15.

    Harold Owen, Journey from Obscurity: Wilfred Owen 1893–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963).

  16. 16.

    Seamus Heaney, “The Main of Light” from The Government of the Tongue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 31.

  17. 17.

    William H. Pritchard, “Larkin’s Presence”, from Philip Larkin: The Man and his Work, Dale Salwak (ed.) (London: Macmillan, 1989), p. 78.

  18. 18.

    Stephen Regan, “Larkin’s Reputation” from Larkin with Poetry, Michael Baron (ed.) (English Association Conference Papers, 1997), pp. 63–64.

  19. 19.

    Steve Clark, “‘The lost displays’: Larkin and Empire” from New Larkins for Old: Critical Essays, James Booth (ed.) (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), pp. 175–176.

  20. 20.

    Stephen Regan, p. 64.

  21. 21.

    Henry Hart, The Poetry of Geoffrey Hill (Illinois, South Illinois University Press, 1986), p. 70.

  22. 22.

    Interview with Blake Morrison, New Statesman (February 8, 1980), p. 213.

  23. 23.

    Interview with Blake Morrison, p. 213.

  24. 24.

    Geoffrey Hill, “Genesis”, For the Unfallen (1971, rpt. London: André Deutsch, 1959), pp. 15–17.

  25. 25.

    Geoffrey Hill, “The Apostles: Versailles 1919”, For the Unfallen, p. 48.

  26. 26.

    Henry Hart, pp. 70–71.

  27. 27.

    Jeffrey Wainwright, Acceptable Words: Essays on the Poetry of Geoffrey Hill (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), p. 7.

  28. 28.

    Jon Silkin, “War and the pity”, Geoffrey Hill: Essays on his work, Peter Robinson (ed.) (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1985), p. 120.

  29. 29.

    Geoffrey Hill, “Funeral Music” King Log (1971, rpt. London: André Deutsch, 1968), p. 25.

  30. 30.

    Jon Silkin, p. 122.

  31. 31.

    “The Death of Shelley”, For The Unfallen (London: Andre Deutsch, 1959), p. 51.

  32. 32.

    “A Pastoral”, For The Unfallen, p. 56.

  33. 33.

    Geoffrey Hill, “History as Poetry”, King Log, p. 41.

  34. 34.

    “Elegaic Stanzas”, For The Unfallen, p. 43.

  35. 35.

    “Soliloquies: The Stone Man”, King Log, p. 47.

  36. 36.

    “Three Baroque Meditations”, King Log, p. 47.

  37. 37.

    “Two Formal Elegies For the Jews in Europe II”, For The Unfallen, p. 32.

  38. 38.

    “A Valediction to Osip Mandelshtam”, King Log, p. 38.

  39. 39.

    Charles Hamilton Sorley, “When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead”, Marlborough and Other Poems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1919: facsimile rpt. Forgotten Books, 2012), p. 78.

  40. 40.

    Isaac Rosenberg, “Dead Man’s Dump”, The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg, Ian Parsons (ed.) (London: Chatto and Windus, 1979), pp. 109–111.

  41. 41.

    Vincent Sherry, The Uncommon Tongue: The Poetry and Criticism of Geoffrey Hill (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1987).

  42. 42.

    Geoffrey Hill, Collected Critical Writings: Isaac Rosenberg 1890–1918, Kenneth Haynes (ed.) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 456.

  43. 43.

    Isaac Rosenberg, “On Receiving News Of The War”, The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg, Ian Parsons (ed.) (London: Chatto and Windus, 1979), p. 75.

  44. 44.

    To Mrs. Herbert Cohen, summer 1916; The Collected Works of Isaac Rosenberg, Ian Parsons (ed.) (London: Chatto and Windus, 1979), p. 237.

  45. 45.

    “Orpheus And Eurydice”, For The Unfallen, p. 57.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Aberdeen, Aberdeen, UK

    Martin Malone

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  1. University of Southern Queensland, Toowoomba, QLD, Australia

    Martin Kerby , Margaret Baguley  & Janet McDonald ,  & 

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Malone, M. (2019). War Began in Nineteen Sixty-Three: Poetic Responses to the 50th Anniversary. In: Kerby, M., Baguley, M., McDonald, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Artistic and Cultural Responses to War since 1914. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96986-2_19

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