Poetry and War

Below, I've copied out Yeats' editorial comment on his exclusion of the war poets of the Great War from The Oxford Book of Modern Verse 1892-1935.  

I have a distaste for certain poems Written in the midst of the great war; they are in all anthologies, but I have substituted Herbert Read's End of War written long after. The writers of these poems were invariably officers of exceptional courage and capacity, one a man constantly selected for dangerous work, all, I think, had the Military Cross; 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.  In poems that had for a time considerable fame, written in the first person, they made that suffering their own.  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 great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced.  When man has withdrawn into the quicksilver at the back of the mirror no great even becomes luminous in his mind; it is no longer possible to write The Persians, Agincourt, Chevy Chase: some blunder has driven his car on to the wrong side of the road--that is all.
If war is necessary, or necessary in our time and place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of fever, remembering our comfort at midnight when our temperature fell, or as we forget the worst moments of more painful disease.  Florence Farr returning third class from Ireland found herself among Connaught Rangers just returned from the Boer War who described an incident over and over, and always with loud laughter: an unpopular sergeant struck by a shell turned round and round like a dancer wound in his own entrails.  That too may be a right way of seeing war, if war is necessary; the way of the Cockney slums, of Patrick Street, of the Kilmainham Minut, of Johnny I hardly knew ye, of the medieval Dance of Death.

The work of Wilfred Owen, in particular, is seen as a lacuna in the Yeats-edited volume.   Owen's comments in the drafts to his 1918 work, Disabled and Other Poems, exemplify the opposite of Yeats' view: 'This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or land, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to this generation in no sense consolatory. They may be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn. That is why the true Poets must be truthful.'

Yeats stated his opinion regarding Owen in more caustic terms in a letter he wrote to Dorothy Wellesley in 1936: "My anthology continues to sell, & the critics get more & more angry. When I excluded Wilfred Owen, whom I consider unworthy of the poets' corner of a country newspaper, I did not know I was excluding a revered sandwich-board Man of the revolution & that some body has put his worst & most famous poem in a glass-case in the British Museum-- however if I had known it I would have excluded him just the same. He is all blood, dirt & sucked sugar stick (look at the selection in Faber's Anthology-- he calls poets 'bards,' a girl a 'maid,' & talks about 'Titanic wars'). There is every excuse for him but none for those who like him. . . ."

My question is this: Do we take poetry's purpose to be to express an emotion, for is not pity, the thing Owen advocates, an emotion?  Is that the purpose of a poem in war?  To make us simply feel?   I don't mean to say that a poem shouldn't make us feel.  My question is: should it make us 'feel' only?  Secondly, do we take Wilfred Owen to be characteristic of all the Great War poets? What do we think of David Jones' In Parenthesis, written in 1937; what do we think of the poetry of Issac Rosenburg? Of Robert Graves? Herbert Read (who Yeats singles out)? 

I have included some poems from the various authors after the jump.

Dulce Et Decorum Est

-Wilfred Owen

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--

Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori.

Break of Day in the Trenches

-Issac Rosenburg

The darkness crumbles away.

It is the same old druid Time as ever,

Only a live thing leaps my hand,

A queer sardonic rat

As I pull the parapet's poppy

To stick behind my ear.

Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew

Your cosmopolitan sympathies.

Now you have touched this English hand

You will do the same to a German

Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure

To cross the sleeping green between.

It seems you inwardly grin as you pass

Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes,

Less chanced than you for life,

Bonds to the whims of murder,

Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,

The torn fields of France.

What do you see in our eyes

At the shrieking iron and flame

Hurled through still heavens?

What quaver -- what heart aghast?

Poppies whose roots are in man's veins

Drop, and are ever dropping;

But mine in my ear is safe --

Just a little white with the dust.

June 1916

Dead Man's Dump

-Issac Rosenburg 

The plunging limbers over the shattered track

Racketed with their rusty freight,

Stuck out like many crowns of thorns,

And the rusty stakes like sceptres old

To stay the flood of brutish men

Upon our brothers dear.

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead

But pained them not, though their bones crunched,

Their shut mouths made no moan.

They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,

Man born of man, and born of woman,

And shells go crying over them

From night till night and now.

Earth has waited for them,

All the time of their growth

Fretting for their decay:

Now she has them at last!

In the strength of their strength

Suspended--stopped and held.

What fierce imaginings their dark souls lit?

Earth! have they gone into you!

Somewhere they must have gone,

And flung on your hard back

Is their soul's sack

Emptied of God-ancestralled essences.

Who hurled them out? Who hurled?

None saw their spirits' shadow shake the grass,

Or stood aside for the half used life to pass

Out of those doomed nostrils and the doomed mouth,

When the swift iron burning bee

Drained the wild honey of their youth.

What of us who, flung on the shrieking pyre,

Walk, our usual thoughts untouched,

Our lucky limbs as on ichor fed,

Immortal seeming ever?

Perhaps when the flames beat loud on us,

A fear may choke in our veins

And the startled blood may stop.

The air is loud with death,

The dark air spurts with fire,

The explosions ceaseless are.

Timelessly now, some minutes past,

These dead strode time with vigorous life,

Till the shrapnel called 'An end!'

But not to all. In bleeding pangs

Some borne on stretchers dreamed of home,

Dear things, war-blotted from their hearts.

Maniac Earth! Howling and flying, your bowel

Seared by the jagged fire, the iron love,

The impetuous storm of savage love.

Dark Earth! dark Heavens! swinging in chemic smoke,

What dead are born when you kiss each soundless soul

With lightening and thunder from your mined heart,

Which man's self dug, and his blind fingers loosed?

A man's brains splattered on

A stretcher-bearer's face;

His shook shoulders slipped their load,

But when they bent to look again

The drowning soul was sunk too deep

For human tenderness.

They left this dead with the older dead,

Stretched at the cross roads.

Burnt black by strange decay

Their sinister faces lie,

The lid over each eye,

The grass and coloured clay

More motion have than they,

Joined to the great sunk silences.

Here is one not long dead;

His dark hearing caught our far wheels,

And the choked soul stretched weak hands

To reach the living word the far wheels said,

The blood-dazed intelligence beating for light,

Crying through the suspense of the far torturing wheels

Swift for the end to break,

Cried as the tide of the world broke over his sight.

Will they come? Will they ever come?

Even as the mixed hoofs of the mules,

The quivering-bellied mules,

And the rushing wheels all mixed

With his tortured upturned sight.

So we crashed round the bend,

We heard his weak scream,

We heard his very last sound,

And our wheels grazed his dead face.

On Being Asked for a War Poem

-W.B. Yeats

I think it better that in times like these

A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth

We have no gift to set a statesman right;

He has had enough of meddling who can please

A young girl in the indolence of her youth,

Or an old man upon a winter's night.