British poetry anthologies of the Second World War: selection, mediation and
cultural standing
Philippa Lyon
Abstract
The article presents an analysis of the marginal cultural positioning of Britsh Second
World War poetry by contrast with that of the First World War. It considers this
positioning in the context both of longstanding cultural interest in historical and
dramatic representations of the 1939-45 war and the extensive post-war use of war
poetry in British education and commemorative practices. Taking processes of
editorial selection and organization as an additional layer of meaning-making to that
of the poetry itself, it briefly identifies taxonomical groupings within the large and
varied corpus of war poetry anthologies published during and after the Second World
War. An account of the post-war reactions to and constructions of this work is given
and the article concludes with the argument that such work represents a rich,
important and under-appreciated resource for the understanding of Second World War
literature and culture.
Keywords
Second World War poetry; war representation; war culture; anthologies; war poetry;
poetry in film.
Biography
Philippa Lyon researched literary and cultural analyses of Second World War poetry
for her DPhil thesis and published a critical guide on Twentieth Century War Poetry
(2005), as well as teaching English Literature in both continuing and higher
education. She has been Research Fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of
Brighton since 2008, during which time her research interests and publications have
diversified and developed. She has co-edited a history of the Brighton School of Art,
organized an exhibition on the artist MacDonald Gill and her book Design Education:
learning, teaching and researching through design has just been published by Gower.
Addresses
Centre for Research and Development, Faculty of Arts, Grand Parade, University of
Brighton, BN2 0JY
p.lyon@brighton.ac.uk
01273 642946
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This article draws on work from the author’s PhD thesis and subsequent research,
which began with the question of why Second World War poetry tends to have been
positioned as marginal and lower in quality than that of the First World War. This
research developed into an examination of the definition, extent and nature of Second
World War poetry through a concentration on the anthology format, which focussed
the field of study and enabled both poetic and editorial preoccupations to be explored.
The first section of this article, then, sets out and illustrates the premise of the
argument that Second World War poetry is at the margins of contemporary cultural
awareness, making reference to dominant conceptions of the ‘war poetry’ genre and
representations of the two world wars still in circulation. The second section of the
article offers in outline form a taxonomical analysis of a defined group of Second
World War anthologies, as a means of opening up and highlighting elements of the
literary and cultural-historical value of these works. Noting an unusual case of the
popular cinematic mediation of a Second World War poem, the third section of the
article describes some of the critical responses in the post-war period, and ends with a
case for the re-appreciation of Second World War poetry.
Introduction: representations of war and constructions of war poetry
War poetry in contemporary British culture is often deeply connected with the
recording and commemorating of war events and with the way particular wars are
remembered and acknowledged. Andrew Motion, for example, (Poet Laureate 19992009) described travelling to France with his father, a D-Day veteran, in an article on
the D-Day commemorations of 2004. Motion visited Keith Douglas’s grave and saw
that a poppy and card bearing the inscription ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ had been placed
there1. This is the title of one of Douglas’s best-known and most anthologised war
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poems, translating as ‘Forget me not’. The sight of this card on the grave leads
Motion not only to reflect on his father’s experiences, but also on Douglas’s brief life
and poetic career and the relationship between poetry and the Second World War:
‘That’s the authentic, cool Douglas note, in his poems as well as his prose, and it
would have captured a time of the war that produced strikingly few good poems. Why
so? Partly because the soldier-poets that survived were too busy fighting and driving
forward into Germany’ (Motion 2004: 4). Motion’s musings gravitate towards what
Douglas might have experienced and written about after the Normandy invasion, had
he lived to be part of it. Douglas’s voice was needed in this phase of the war, Motion
writes, as it was a period that ‘produced strikingly few good war poems’. It is a
comment that reveals an underlying expectation not just in the contiguity of war and
poetry, but in a relationship of causality: war begets poetry about war. Just as evident
in this quotation is the interest in the poet’s biographical and artistic personality, ‘the
authentic, cool Douglas note’. Whilst concern with a poet’s style or stamp of
personality is a common preoccupation for those who mine the sedimentary layers of
meaning in poetry professionally, there is an additional importance for the reader of
war poetry. As Rawlinson (2000) points out, for the war poet figure ‘as it has been
constructed since about 1914, cultural and moral authority is founded in an agentcentred and engaged perspective on combat’ (Rawlinson 2000:13). Whilst there is a
range of critical approaches within the academic war poetry field, there is still a
common perception that the authenticity of a war poet is marked by their involvement
in active war service, particularly through their combat experiences. Another implied
relationship of causality, then, is that ‘true’ war poets emerge from direct experience
of war.
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Our experience and understanding of war poetry, as of other genres of poetry, is
selected, packaged and mediated. An audiobook anthology, Best of Second World
War Poetry (2005), incorporating over 100 poems written by servicemen and women,
was published and promoted by a bookseller as ‘a unique testament to the brutal
experience of war’ (Alibris 2011). To this statement was added a quotation from
Denis Healey, describing the anthology as ‘history with a thousand eyes’ (Alibris
2011)2. This comment implicitly proposes a conflation: the poems are not just
historically relevant, they are a literary embodiment of ‘history’. The ‘thousand eyes’
image also metaphorically references a well-established cultural construction of the
Second World War as a mass, popular phenomenon. If the First World War, in
popular imagination, is trench warfare, a war of land and mud, remote and
incompetent leaders and pitiful slaughter, then the Second World War is participation,
shared danger, a civilian as much as a forces’ conflict. Paul Fussell in Wartime:
Understanding and Behaviour in the Second World War (1989) contrasts the
representative visual iconography and discourses of the two world wars, noting a
preoccupation in Second World War culture with soldierly slang, grousing against
authority and resentment of petty minded officialdom. The Second World War is
often represented in terms of democratic and quotidian preoccupations; through the
views and experiences of the many, a notion notably foregrounded and critically
examined by Angus Calder in The People’s War: Britain 1939-1945 (1992). It is this
critical and popular idea of the war as essentially an experience of the many that finds
an echo in Healey’s image of the multitude of eyes.
Collections of Second World War poetry have been published in the post-war period,
with a scattering of new anthologies appearing over the last 20 years: from Hudson
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and Cheshire’s Poetry of the Second World War (1990), five anthologies edited by
Victor Selwyn including The Voice of War. Poems of the Second World War: The
Oasis Collection (1996)3, to Graham’s Poetry of the Second World War: An
International Anthology (1998) and Haughton’s Poetry of the Second World War
(2004). In addition, critical analyses of Second World War literature such as those by
Gill Plain (1996, 1997, 2005, 2008), Simon Featherstone (1995), Adam Piette (1995)
and Mark Rawlinson (2000) have demonstrated a continued presence of specialist
scholarly interest and activity in the field. The niche that Second World War poetry
occupies within the poetry publishing sector and in the scholarly war literature
community contrasts strongly, however, with the powerful attraction the Second
World War holds as a subject for dramatists, documentary-makers and historians. In
1999, the then German Culture Minister, Michael Naumann, remarked ruefully that
the British seemed still to be obsessed with the Second World War, and that, in fact,
‘There is only one nation in the world that has decided to make the Second World
War a sort of spiritual core of its national self, understanding and pride.’ (Young
1999: 16). Considering the quantity of Second World War documentary and fictional
material available over a decade after Naumann’s comment, such as can be seen
scheduled on popular history-oriented television channels, the point still stands today.
Yet the status and impact of different art forms that explore and represent the war
vary greatly. Whilst Saving Private Ryan (Spielberg 1998) became a popular (albeit
contentious) cultural reference point in exploring a particular military operation and
experience of combat, for example, it would be very difficult to claim that the
publication of any new anthology of Second World War poetry has sparked similar
‘watercooler’ interest. Despite broad-based and popular British fascination with the
Second World War, efforts by editors and publishers to select, reorganise and
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represent the poetry by theme in order to reach wider contemporary readerships do
not seem to have raised its profile.
Some contemporary war poetry anthologies are particularly interesting in the way
they reveal the methodological and ideological problems of selection and mediation.
In Hollis and Keegan’s 101 Poems Against War (2003), for example, the
unambiguously pacifist editorial stance attempts to constitute the entire poetic
offering (taken from several wars) as an articulation of protest: ‘This extraordinary
anthology gathers together the most startling poems against war ever written…’ as the
book jacket promotional text expresses it. Yet a relatively small number of the poems
contained within this anthology display a primary concern with evoking the misery,
waste or immorality of war. In particular, Second World War poet Sorley Maclean’s
ironic, anti-Nazi poem ‘Death Valley’ fits uneasily beneath this banner, and Second
World War poems such as those by Keith Douglas’s ‘How to Kill’ and Dylan
Thomas’s ‘A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London’ are, at best,
offbeat companions to the more polemical pacifist poems. Douglas’s work displays a
fascination with the ‘sorcery’ of the act of killing and observations of the moment and
processes of death. To depict Douglas, in the words of the anthology title, as ‘against’
war, underplays the pragmatism and emotional and analytical distance of his poetry,
in which, for example, a dead soldier is calmly surveyed as both the lost lover and
successfully dispatched enemy. Thomas’s poem, in dealing with the death of a child,
is concerned far more with its philosophical significance and with general cultural
responses both to childhood and to death, than in presenting a case against war.
Indeed, the rootedness of the poem in the conditions of war is not explicit: it can only
be construed metonymically. The choice of these Second World War poems in the
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anthology illustrates a tension between the post-1960s liberal construction of the war
poetry genre as broadly anti-war and an interest in poems that elude easy moral or
ideological categorisation.
The significance of the Second World War’s marginal and often uneasy positioning
can be appreciated better when contrasted with the fortunes of First World War
poetry, an oeuvre deeply woven into British culture, including through compulsory
curricula, genealogical activity, memorial objects and commemorative practices. For
many years Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg and Siegfried Sassoon have continued to
have a presence as war poets in school English Literature texts, and Armistice Day
commemorations regularly draw on First World War poems, with ‘For the Fallen’ by
Lawrence Binyon (written in 1914) being a particular favourite. Current Poet
Laureate Carol Ann Duffy was commissioned by the BBC to write a poem in honour
of the last British First World War survivors, Henry Allingham and Harry Patch
(‘Last Post’, 2009a). Duffy subsequently invited her ‘fellow poets, to bear witness,
each in their own way, to these matters of war’ (Duffy, 2009b: 2) and several of the
resulting poems quoted or reprised the familiar tropes and images from First World
War poetry. At a time when the majority of civilians in the wealthier Western nations
are arguably very removed from the realities of war, detached as Haider has argued in
this journal (2010) from war’s scope, viscerality and relentlessness, contemporary
poets such as Duffy have attempted to use the deep respect accorded the First World
War to challenge the prevalence of distanced, even narcoleptic attitudes to war. The
history of the changing status and significance of war memorials also tends to
privilege the First World War; very few new memorials were built following the
Second World War and in many cases, the names and dates of the Second World War
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dead were added on to existing First World War plaques. In the last two to three
decades, memorials have frequently become a focus for reinscription as public sites of
grief and remembrance, as examined by Switzer (2010), yet within the realm of
changing ritual practices for the expression of loss, it tends to be the 1914-18 war
which functions as the Ur-conflict. In 1985, for example, Second World War poets
were excluded from a ‘war poet’ memorial unveiled in Westminster Abbey (Bergonzi
1996).
First World War poets and their work have formed the subject of feature films in their
own right: the 1993 feature film Regeneration, for example, was based on the
eponymous fictional work by Pat Barker that explored the figures of Sassoon and
Owen, their relationship to each other, the war and the poetry that appeared in
different ways to consume them. There are First World War poems and poets that
have become symbolic far beyond their historical moment, with Owen often
mobilised as a symbol of the ‘pity of war’. This was a phrase he himself famously
coined in a Preface found posthumously among his papers and used for the 1921
collection Poems by Wilfred Owen. Owen became a figurehead for the need to
understand and identify with the human suffering beneath military rhetoric, an image
underscored by the use of a romantic and thoughtful portrait photograph in uniform in
collections of his poems4. Whilst the poetry of the Second World War has been the
subject of considerable scholarly and specialist interest, this work does not seem to
have led to the poetry being accessed more widely or resonating more strongly. The
issue from which this article emerges, then, is this ‘problem’ of Second World War
poetry and its marginal cultural standing. The critical thought on this falls into
different categories: one view is that, bar a small number of excellent poets, the
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poetry has not provided sufficient quality to sustain interest (Shires 1985). Another
view is that this tendency to seek a small canon of ‘quality’ Second World War poets
itself rests on problematic assumptions about war poetry being a genre shaped by the
First World War and its literary output (Walter 1997; Lyon 2005 a & b)5. As the next
section will explore, a fuller literary-historical contextual account shows that not only
was a great deal of Second World War poetry written and published but that it played
a significant role in wartime culture. In literary and cultural historical terms, this body
of work represents a substantive and meaningful dimension of the British artistic
response to the events of 1939-45.
The anthology form and war poetry in Britain during 1939-45
The anthology, as a conglomeration of poems selected and mediated by a supervisory
or editorial figure, offered extensive opportunities for meaning-making in wartime. A
very large corpus of war poems emerged during the Second World War. This can be
defined in historical terms as written in the period 1939-1945, although much of this
poetry was published after 1945 and much was re-selected, reorganised and
republished in post-war anthologies up to the present. This corpus is also defined
thematically: the poetry included within it alludes to, describes or metaphorically
explores war conditions, experiences and ideology. Many were put together with
overt editorial agendas in mind, exposing some of the values and aims underlying the
business of poetry publishing and poetry selling during the war. Extensive scholarly
work recording and categorising the poetry of both world wars has been published
and provides rich bibliographical data for any researcher in the field (Reilly 1978;
Reilly 1986), including lists of edited war poetry anthologies. For the purposes of this
research, the focus is a subset of approximately 90 anthologies, based on Reilly’s
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work (1986) but taking into account a number of works published subsequent to her
bibliography.
During 1939-45 poetry was, in content, form and production, greatly shaped by the
exigencies of wartime life, and was much in demand. Yet publishers faced the
challenges of paper rationing as large quantities of paper were diverted into War
Office use for official publications, and as Arthur Calder-Marshall described it in The
Book Front ‘Authors themselves were in short supply. The majority were serving with
the fighting or civil services. The number and quality of British books declined.’
(Calder-Marshall 1947: 31). Poetry anthologies were particularly popular, although
part of the reason for this appears likely to have been practical. As paper rationing
measures stopped the production of new literary magazines and saw the collapse of a
number of established ones, anthologies circumvented the worst constraints,
especially with careful typography and layouts (Beaujou 1940). The poetry
anthology’s popularity does not seem to have emerged solely due to a need for
efficient use of paper, however. Publishers and editors noted a cultural appetite for
the contemporary and a consequent apathy towards, or even rejection of pre-war
literature. Author, poet and typographer Sean Jennett noted in ‘The Price of Books’
that many books ‘that would have been sold out within a few days if they had
appeared now, remain on stock with the publisher only, it seems, because they were
published before the war’ (Jennett 1945: 10). Commenting more specifically on the
anthology as a format, Derek Stanford argued that it ‘helped to define the climate of
the time. The appearance of each one seemed to indicate fresh paths opening in the
literary landscape’ (Stanford 1977: 81). The anthology could be seen as of the
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moment, immediately relevant and identified with certain common war experiences or
domains.
Some poets expressed a sense of defeat or depression about the war and its impact on
culture and art; being called up or enduring the attacks on the home front were, for
them, crushing to the creative spirit. Charles Wrey Gardiner, poet, editor and founder
of Grey Walls Press, wryly observed that ‘when you hear the drone of the flying
bomb [it] does not give much time for noting the sad whirl of changing times’
(Gardiner 1946: 127). For others, poetry and war were mutually beneficial
companions, even given the demands of active service or perhaps precisely because of
these demands. Some talked of the way the condensed, concise nature of poetic
expression lent itself to the restless, broken patterns of wartime life, the intermittent
drama alternating with boredom, or even the potential speed and immediacy of the
poetic form. For the American editor Oscar Williams, for example, ‘The poets who
are physically engaged in war bring us more vital news than can the headlines’
(Williams 1943: iii).
Politically, the signing of the Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact and the Soviet attacks
on Poland and Finland had profoundly unsettled allegiances and assumptions that had
taken hold on the Left in the Thirties. If anti-fascism had, as Spender described, been
a key unifying factor for the Left particularly in relation to the Spanish Civil War
(1946), this had since become substantially more complex. Whilst poets, authors and
critics reacted to these political shifts in different ways, the belief in poetry as an art
form of special and national significance in wartime continued to be articulated. For
Orwell, for example, the war presented the opportunity for a realisable Socialism
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based on a faith in the tolerance and fairness of the British people. This, he argued,
was evidenced in the British attachment to memories of disasters and retreats; their
implicit preference for the anti-heroic mode in war poetry: ‘The most stirring battlepoem in English is about a brigade of cavalry charging in the wrong direction.’
(Orwell 1982: 42). In citing Tennyson and ignoring the long and popular tradition of
militaristic and even jingoistic British verse, Orwell was being selective, yet he
prefigured the strain of anti-war poetry criticism that was to emerge more vocally in
the 1960s. For others, war required the relationship between literary expression and
political engagement to be restated, resulting in preoccupations with, for example, the
ballad as a form with more political potential and vitality, and as closer to the people6.
There are four interpretive categories that can be applied to the Second World War
anthologies: Wartime, Forces, Serial And Manifesto7. These groupings relate to the
approaches taken to editorial construction and mediation, together with sample
analyses of selected poetry. The point here is not to limit or tidy up a large and
diverse body of work but rather to offer a framework through which it can be
approached and understood. Anthologies of the first category, for example, can be
seen to reflect a strongly social concern with the impact of war, including on civilian
life, and to signal through anthology titles a variety of nuanced relationships of
contingency and dependency between poetry and war. Thus: Diemer and Reynolds’s
Some Poems in Wartime (1941), J Mitford Varcoe’s London 1940: And Other War
Verse (1945) and M. J. Tambimuttu’s Poetry in Wartime. These anthologies showed
a consciousness of war poetry’s standing as a genre and gestured to particular
constituencies of poets, gathering together women poets, ‘younger’ poets or poets
from a specific university as contributors (illustrated by Ledward, P. and Strang, C.,
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Poems of This War, by Younger Poets [1942] and Roscoe’s Poems by Contemporary
Women [1942]). ‘Wartime’ anthologies, then, displayed an awareness and interest in
the defining character of the war, its impact not only on living conditions and patterns
of thought but also on writing and publishing. These anthologies tended to register
paradoxical or complex views of the war: Patric Dickinson, for example, in the
introduction to his Soldiers’ Verse (1945) wrote of the war as both catastrophic and
banal in nature. This anthology, which drew on a wide range of poetry with a war
theme, also displayed the contradictory nature of contemporary demands on war
poetry and the war poet, first signalling its importance, and then approvingly quoting
Yeats’s infamous 1930s comment about war poetry, ‘I think it better that in times like
these/ A poet’s tongue be silent’ (Yeats 1936: v).
The ‘Forces’ category of anthologies concentrated on poems by members of the
armed forces, thus aligning most closely with the popular notion of war poetry
referred to in the first section of this article and continuing a ‘soldier poet’ tradition
that can be traced back to the First World War. ‘Forces’ anthologies offered service
perspectives, displaying strong preoccupations with the interrelationship between
military duty, suffering and art. Many titles firmly declaimed their military identity
and values: Poems from the Forces, More Poems from the Forces (Rhys 1941; Rhys
1943), Poems from India (Currey and Gibson 1945), Poems from the Desert (Eighth
Army 1944). The editorial approaches evident within these anthologies asserted or
assumed that war poems written by soldiers had a distinctive value by contrast with
those written by civilians. Constructions and critiques of heroism, self-aware,
reflective and mocking voices and a confident refusal to regurgitate governmentsponsored patriotic rhetoric were all common features of these works. Such
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publications were closely linked to particular theatres of war or military units, such as
in the 1944 Eighth Army anthology Poems from the Desert, the result of a poetry
competition written in and about the Western Desert, run by the Army’s Education
Officer following the El Alamein victory at the end of 1942. The introduction to this
work, in a foreshadowing of Motion’s comment at the beginning of this piece,
articulated a clear expectation on the part of the Eighth Army Education Officer that
soldiers would want to write poetry about the war, and that many were doing so
already.
The ‘Serial’ category refers to the phenomenon of often long-running poetry
publication serials that suddenly found it impossible to resist or avoid dealing with
wartime issues, such as Thomas Moult’s Best Poems (having had its inaugural issue
in 1922, the volumes published in 1939, 1940, 1942, 1943 and 1944 showed the
editor’s struggle to adapt his selection methods and ethos to ‘fit’ wartime better). The
‘Manifesto’ category of works, by contrast, saw their explicit purpose as developing a
new philosophy or view of civilisation, of claiming a challenging poetic space quite
other to that in which wartime events were journalistically recorded, expressed or
commemorated. These last anthologies include, for example, The New Apocalypse
with an introduction by J. F. Hendry (1939), The White Horseman edited by Hendry
and Henry Treece (1941) and The Crown and Sickle, also edited by Hendry and
Treece (1944). Such works declaimed that civilisation was in fundamental crisis and
made urgent demands for paradigm shifts in cultural understanding. Often influenced
by psychological or psychoanalytical as much as political thought, these anthologies
emphasised the idea of the ‘organic’ and the deep linking of the unconscious with the
conscious mind as critical and radical issues for society.
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Whilst mapping and interpreting such a body of work is clearly problematic, the
categories outlined above are intended to offer some illumination of the editorial
textures and contours within this poetic landscape. Anthologists and poets were
concerned to comment upon the material conditions and experiences of the war but
often in a way that decentred the idea of heroic combat: they focussed on the dullness,
the absence of motivation even in the face of ‘necessary’ war and the banalities of
forces’ life, as in one of the more frequent choices in post-war anthologies, Alun
Lewis’s ‘All Day It Has Rained’. They also analysed war as a cultural phenomenon,
grappling with its many contradictions and dissecting the political and philosophical
underpinnings of conflict. A number of poets articulated a loss of confidence in
liberal ideas of progress in counterpoint to the notion that victory in the war was
likely to lead to a fairer Britain. In this context of moral and spiritual embattlement,
many poets also probed uneasily into the nature of selfhood in wartime, not only
observing how identity bowed and fractured under the conditions of war but
displaying doubts about the basis of their own poetic and personal authority. At the
same time, it is possible to see that some poets attempted to sustain more stable poetic
voices or personae, from which they could convey the fragility and chaos of the
external world.
1945 and after: ‘as dead as other journalism’?
In 1945, the Anthony Asquith directed-film The Way to the Stars was released. The
film relates events on a British air base as members of the air force train, depart on
missions, count those who don’t return, socialise and woo local women. Flight
Lieutenant David Archdale, a heroic figure in the film, writes poetry. When he dies in
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battle, a poem written by him is discovered, and his grieving widow asks their mutual
friend Peter Penrose to read it out to her:
For Johnny
Do not despair
For Johnny-head-in-air
He sleeps as sound
As Johnny underground
Fetch out no shroud
For Johnny-in-the-cloud;
And keep your tears
For him in after years.
Better by far
For Johnny-the-bright-star,
To keep your head,
And see his children fed.
(Wollman 1950: 112-3)
The poem was written by poet John Pudney in 1941 during an air raid on London
(Pudney 1978, 76). It was published in the News Chronicle and subsequently read on
the radio, seeming to capture popular sentiment about the significance of the air force,
air combat and loss more generally in the 1939-45 war. Pudney had been a BBC radio
producer and scriptwriter and during the war was recruited to write Government
propaganda about air crews. The poem provides a powerful focus of consolation in
the film and such was its impact that Johnny in the Clouds, a slightly adapted
quotation from the poem, became a second, unofficial title for the film. Based on
Flare Path, a stage play by Terrence Rattigan, The Way to the Stars was
commissioned by the Ministry of Information to boost morale and strengthen AngloAmerican relations. The film featured another of Pudney’s poems, ‘Missing’, and was
hugely popular after its release8.
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In the poem there is an interplay between the dominant reassuring, stoic wartime
ideology (the injunction to ‘keep your head’ and ‘see his children fed’), a
representation of the pilot as a glamorous figure and the reference to the pilot’s
constant vulnerability to bodily harm or death. The poem is read in the film by
Penrose, who is a provider-figure rather than an ingénue, hesitating on the brink of
taking up a place in the domestic realm as well as the air base. Yet pilots as a ‘type’
are simultaneously, paradoxically evoked as heroic and otherworldly. The body of
flight literature from Saint-Exupery to T E Lawrence and Richard Hillery offers quite
distinct constructions of the pilot (Rawlinson 2005): from the earth-bound brother,
son or husband who becomes a self-realised hero in uniform, to the idealised, mythic
aerial figure, deliberately anonymous. In the ‘For Johnny’ poem in The Way to the
Stars, mediated as it is through Asquith’s directorial vision, Mills’s acting style and
the propagandist intent of the film’s makers, tensions between competing explorations
of the pilot’s experience and significance are evident, yet this romantic cinematic
narrative achieved enormous morale-boosting, popular appeal.
In the 15 years following the end of the war, few other poems or poets of the Second
World War reached similar levels of familiarity or popularity and Pudney himself
commented with bemusement at its continued prominence: “it all belongs to another
life” (1975, 76). Literal and symbolic rebuilding efforts and conditions of continued
hardship mitigated against the desire for reminiscence or a celebration of wartime art.
Experiences of the war were still being processed, including the realisation of the
scale of the Holocaust. The doubt about whether it was possible to express trauma and
violence on this scale through art was articulated most famously in Theodor Adorno’s
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famous dictum that ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’ (1967, 34). For some
literary figures, the issue was not so much the moral, political or philosophical
impossibility of art after the Holocaust, but the conditional and historically limited
nature of literature written to address very specific war conditions. By the Fifties,
Kathleen Raine was referring to the idea of the witness or reporter-poet who wrote:
‘poems descriptive of events in place and time as such, mostly from the war years,
that seem now as dead as any other journalism’ (Raine 1956, xiv). Alan Ross
commented that: ‘The war was on too huge a scale for any writer to avoid war poetry.
[…] When the war ended, there was a kind of numbness, an inarticulateness about
what was really going on’ (Ross 1950, 923). War poetry, they suggested, had emerged
as a type of necessary response to events: its significance and value as ‘art’ lapsed as
the peace-time readership moved through a period of post-hoc shock and fatigue.
Second World War poetry was, therefore, located quite quickly as meaningful
primarily in relation to its precise circumstances, that is, to the ‘live’ experience of
war, whilst selected First World War poets were accorded universal status. Anthony
Thwaite in his Contemporary English Poetry (1957) wrote, alongside an analysis of
the wartime poetry of David Gascoyne, Sidney Keyes, Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis
and Drummond Allison, that ‘the implicit feeling amongst most poets seemed to be
that Wilfred Owen had said everything worth saying about war itself’ (Thwaite 1959,
122). Thwaite and several later critics (for example, Shires, 1985) focussed on a small
canon of 1939-45 war poets ‘proper’, viewing only a few as worthy of serious literary
attention and the ‘war poet’ status. This approach has not been entirely without its
counter-voices, however. Maurice Wollman’s anthology Poems of the War Years put
forward the view that radical and transformational effects had been brought about by
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war: ‘The War destroyed much that had impaired and clogged English poetry of
recent years. … Diminished were the hesitancies, the fumblings, the incertitudes; the
poet now more frequently faced reality, grim though it might be, and accepted it, in
the ‘the wakeful anguish of the soul, with fortitude..’ (1950, xxiv – xxv). Yet it was
often the First World War that was depicted as lending itself to poetry as a form
whilst the ‘dispersed and changeable’ nature of the Second World War, it was argued,
was more conducive to narrative (Grant 1948, 66). In the mid-1960s, with the
emergence of a newly pacifist-oriented social and political protest culture, a more
politicized interest in the value of Second World War poetry to literature and culture
emerged, alongside a liberal-progressive use of it in education; yet it remained, in
popular terms, a very marginal dimension of the representation and understanding of
the war.
The success of The Way to the Stars, and the Pudney poem it deploys draws in part on
the First World War tradition of the soldier poet: the romantic literary figure who dies
in battle, perhaps as a hero, leaving behind poetry that is seen as traversing that
difficult route between military and civilian experience and understanding. Yet, as
discussed earlier, darker issues are alluded to in both film and poem. Post-war critics
have represented Second World War poetry as inclined towards reportage, a mode
supposedly in keeping with a justified and necessary war that did not call for a radical
new forms and images, a depiction that belies the more introverted, fractured and
metaphysical dimensions of the work. War is understood through powerful processes
of representation, which involve many layers of selection, mediation and
interpretation. Despite the post-First World War tendency to look for familiar
metaphors and tropes within war poetry, and to see poems as fitting within an overall
20
coherent narrative of the war, preferably chiselled from the authentic experience of
the poet, the richness, scepticism, romanticism and bleakness to be found in much
Second World War poetry does not need to be, and often cannot be, constructed or
contained in this way. It is this very heterogeneity, the multiplicity of significant
domains of wartime experience, the military and domestic contexts equally unsettled
and official rhetoric and reasoning questioned or dislodged, that Second World War
poetry offers to the literary and cultural history of the war.
21
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1
Keith Douglas (1920-44) served as an officer in North Africa and then in the D-Day
invasion of Normandy. He is one of the more frequently anthologized and discussed
poets of the Second World War. ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ was published 1943.
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2
Healey’s comment is quoted by online bookseller Alibris in the promotional text for
the Best of Second World War Poetry audiobook (2005).
3
The Salamander Oasis Trust was established after the Second World War. Its aim
was to collect, edit and publish poems written by servicemen during the 1939-1945
War. Selwyn’s five anthologies emerged from the work of this Trust.
4
This can be seen, for example, in the cover of the 1994 Wordsworth Poetry Library
edition of The Poems of Wilfred Owen.
5
Lyon’s 2005 publications (a & b) both consider the idea of the ‘war poet’ and the
formation of the war poetry genre in the twentieth century in some detail.
6
Simon Featherstone offers an important critical appreciation of Scottish poets Sorley
Maclean and Hamish Henderson, looking at their Second World War poetry and their
use of the heroic tradition (Featherstone 1995: 82-87).
7
These category descriptors are elaborated extensively, together with analysis of
sample anthologies and poems, in Lyon (2005a).
8
In his autobiography Thank Goodness for Cake, John Pudney described how ‘For
Johnny’ “lived on into my middle age with some persistence. Strangers quote it at me
at unexpected moment – a commissionaire opening a door, a garage receptionist with
tears in her eyes, a North Sea trawlerman, a girl in the Embassy at Athens.” (1978,
76).
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