Waar Poets
Francis A. Miniter
having recently acquired a volume of Rupert Brooke's poems, I have been
reflecting on how many poets are associated with World War I. In addition to
these, there was Joyce Kilmer, who also died in the War, as did Isaac Rosenberg
and Charles Sorley. John McCrae (author of "In Flanders Field"), Robert Service
("Rhymes of a Red-cross Man"), Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Philip Larkin
all survived. And there were many others.
But when it comes to World War II, I can think of no war poets, other than John
Gillespie McGee, whose single poem was "High Flight", best known for its first
line 'Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth' and who did not survive the
war. Nor does any poetry about WWII come to mind.
Was it the nature of trench warfare that enabled or even encouraged poetical
reflection? Was there something about WWII that discouraged poetical reflection?
Vietnam produced little poetry as such, but much poetry in music. Simon &
Garfunkel, for instance.
Have I missed something?
Francis A. Miniter
Douglas Clark
--
Douglas Clark ..................... Bath, Somerset, UK ......
http://usergroup.plus.net .......... http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com
"Francis A. Miniter" <min...@attglobalZZ.net> wrote in message
news:45e25996$1@kcnews01...
Douglas Clark
news:45e25996$1@kcnews01...
There are a number of 2nd World War poets. Keith Douglas is probably the
best.
Philip Larkin was too young for First World War.
Douglas Clark
in dribs and drabs. Old age?
--
Douglas Clark ..................... Bath, Somerset, UK ......
http://usergroup.plus.net .......... http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com
"Francis A. Miniter" <min...@attglobalZZ.net> wrote in message
news:45e25996$1@kcnews01...
*Anarcissie*
wrote:
In the World War I period, a major war was thought of as an
unusual event. By the mid-1940s, however, everyone, at
least in the English-speaking world, was involved in more
or less continuous war or preparation for war, and not your
polite 18th-century war, either, but total war. From then on,
every poet was a war poet.
tbsa...@att.net
wrote:
Check out Paul Fussell's
The Great War and Modern Memory (1975)
&
Wartime: Understanding and Behavior in the Second World War
(1989)
They might clear up some things..
Also.. WG Sebald's On the Natural History of Destruction: With
Essays on Alfred Andersch, Jean Amery, and Peter Weiss. Translated by
Anthea Bell. New York: Random House, 2003.
& Nossack, Hans (2004). The End: Hamburg 1943. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press
Ted.
Don Tuite
<min...@attglobalZZ.net> wrote:
>Have I missed something?
>
We did "Death of the Ball Turret Gunner" (Randall Jarrell) in High
School in 1958.
Don
Don Phillipson
news:45e25996$1@kcnews01...
> But when it comes to World War II, I can think of no war poets, other than
John
> Gillespie McGee, whose single poem was "High Flight", best known for its
first
> line 'Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth' and who did not survive
the
> war. Nor does any poetry about WWII come to mind.
True, the war seemed to create no poets in the way
WW1 created Owen: but there are some ultra-memorable
individual lyrics, e.g.
John Pudney's elegy for Johnny Head-in-Air
Randall Jarrell's Ball-Turret Gunner.
It may be significant that these (and Magee's) are all about
flying. Sailors and soldiers dreamed differently.
--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
M J Carley
> Nor does any poetry about WWII come to mind.
Louis MacNeice had plenty to say about the second world war: `Brother
Fire', `Swing song', `Neutrality' would be good places to start.
--
Differenza fra il rivoluzionaro e il cialtrone. Il rivoluzionario
rompe l'orologio e invece di presentarsi alle nove si presenta alle
nove meno cinque. Il cialtrone rompe l'orologio e si alza alle undici.
Home page: http://people.bath.ac.uk/ensmjc/
Pjk
wrote:
You might be interested in this, a neat little volume, you'd think it
would be much bigger, American War Literature: Nineteen Fourteen to
Vietnam by Jeffrey Walsh.
1. Intro
2. Poetic Language: First World War
3. Two Modernists War Novels
4. Radicalism: "Plumes" and "Three Soldiers"
5. Lost Generation and War
6. Hemingway and Bessie: Education in Spain
7. Second World War Fiction: Alienation and Group Identity
8. Second World War Poetry: the Machine and the God
<-------------****
9. Towards VietNam: Portraying Modern War
Pjk
Sam Culotta
"*Anarcissie*" <anarc...@gmail.com> wrote in message
news:1172497539.8...@p10g2000cwp.googlegroups.com...
This would seem to be the best explanation. The "War to end all wars." had
such a devastating effect on the world in general and on writers and artists
in particular that later reactions were either subdued or dulled by
comparison.
The one poem that came to mind was Jarrell's Death of the Ball Turret
Gunner, but that war poem doesn't make Jarrell a war poet.
Sam.
>
>
>
Scribbler
wrote:
Not sure you missed anything really. Of course trench warfare as seen
in WW1 drew together an Army of scholars and labourers, thrown
together in the common good of fighting the war to end all wars. In
the case of Owen, he was already a practicing (but not established
poet). Being thrown together with Sassoon following about of Shell
Shock really inspired him to produce his best work. All of his
memorable work was produced during a five week period of battle as I
recall. I think we must also recognise that by 1939 people could see
for themselves what was happening on the war front simply by going to
the cinema - kind of took the edge of poetry and reading as the only
medium for information. In contrast WW1 poets were the picture
painters/news reporters of their day. Just my view.
War poets of course were not invented in WW1 (I know you didn't
suggest they were), but I was always taken by The Burial of Sir John
Moore by the Reverend Charles Wolfe. I was introduced to the poem
during my training as a soldier of the Light Division. Sir John Moore
is considered to be the father of my Regiment. I reproduce the poem
below for your enjoyment.
The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna
Charles Wolfe 1791 - 1823
NOT a drum was heard, not a funeral note,
As his corse to the rampart we hurried;
Not a soldier discharged his farewell shot
O'er the grave where our hero we buried.
We buried him darkly at dead of night,
The sods with our bayonets turning,
By the struggling moonbeam's misty light
And the lanthorn dimly burning.
No useless coffin enclosed his breast,
Not in sheet or in shroud we wound him;
But he lay like a warrior taking his rest
With his martial cloak around him.
Few and short were the prayers we said,
And we spoke not a word of sorrow;
But we steadfastly gazed on the face that was dead,
And we bitterly thought of the morrow.
We thought, as we hollow'd his narrow bed
And smooth'd down his lonely pillow,
That the foe and the stranger would tread o'er his head,
And we far away on the billow!
Lightly they'll talk of the spirit that 's gone,
And o'er his cold ashes upbraid him-
But little he'll reck, if they let him sleep on
In the grave where a Briton has laid him.
But half of our heavy task was done
When the clock struck the hour for retiring;
And we heard the distant and random gun
That the foe was sullenly firing.
Slowly and sadly we laid him down,
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
We carved not a line, and we raised not a stone,
But we left him alone with his glory.
For what its worth I am still serving (33 years Brit Army) and have my
own book of poetry out. Manic Verse by David Hamilton can be
purchased at Amazon.co.uk. It isn't packed with military poetry, but
has a goodly sprinkling.
David H
Jack Campin - bogus address
> Gillespie McGee, whose single poem was "High Flight", best known for its first
> line 'Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth' and who did not survive the
> war. Nor does any poetry about WWII come to mind.
Hamish Henderson, "Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica".
Ezra Pound writing a couple of cantos in praise of Mussolini (they were
rediscovered a few years ago).
Jaroslav Seifert's poems of the period. Some of Prevert's "Paroles".
Not much. But there is more music marking the WW2 era than about any
other war: Stravinsky's Symphony in 3 Movements, symphonic works by
Honegger, Martin, Shostakovich and Vaughan Williams, the great coda of
Schoenberg's Second Chamber Symphony and his "A Survivor of Warsaw",
Bartok's sixth quartet, Dallapiccola's chamber works written when more
or less in hiding, Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, Tippett's
"A Child of Our Time", and indirectly a vast amount of music written
by people who lived through the worst Fascism and the war could do and
didn't want us to forget it - Penderecki, Haubenstock-Ramati, Xenakis,
Stockhausen, Zimmermann, Nono, etc etc. Literature doesn't come close
to matching all that.
============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk ==============
Jack Campin: 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland | tel 0131 660 4760
<http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> for CD-ROMs and free | fax 0870 0554 975
stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, & Mac logic fonts | mob 07800 739 557
Janet Puistonen
You should read Paul Fussell's book, "The Great War and Modern Memory." In
it he discusses at length the cultural context shared by many of the
soldiers: one that included much poetry committed to memory. An excellent
book.
Janet Puistonen
<G>--you should read Pat Barker's trilogy beginning with "Regeneration," in
which Sassoon and Owen, amongst others, are characters. Really a superb
book, IMHO.
Paul Ilechko
> But when it comes to World War II, I can think of no war poets, other
> than John Gillespie McGee, whose single poem was "High Flight", best
> known for its first line 'Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth'
> and who did not survive the war. Nor does any poetry about WWII come to
> mind.
Maybe you (and most of the other posters so far) are focusing too much
on poets who write in English. What about Paul Celan and Czeslaw Milosz?
Is there a greater poem about any war than Celan's 'Death Fugue'?
Paul Ilechko
> Not much. But there is more music marking the WW2 era than about any
> other war: Stravinsky's Symphony in 3 Movements, symphonic works by
> Honegger, Martin, Shostakovich and Vaughan Williams, the great coda of
> Schoenberg's Second Chamber Symphony and his "A Survivor of Warsaw",
> Bartok's sixth quartet, Dallapiccola's chamber works written when more
> or less in hiding, Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, Tippett's
> "A Child of Our Time", and indirectly a vast amount of music written
> by people who lived through the worst Fascism and the war could do and
> didn't want us to forget it - Penderecki, Haubenstock-Ramati, Xenakis,
> Stockhausen, Zimmermann, Nono, etc etc. Literature doesn't come close
> to matching all that.
But most of these are not explicitly about the war, even if some reflect
its influence. One obviously important work is Britten's War Requiem,
which takes Owen's WW1 lyrics and the Latin Mass and merges them into a
memorial for the victims of all wars and a hope for peace.
Janet Puistonen
I really question whether poetry can be fully appreciated in translation.
No, in fact I *don't* think it can. Not if the poet is using the original
language well. At best one can get some shadow of the real thing.
Paul Ilechko
OK, but how does that relate to the original question? Do you not think
that Celan and Milosz are great war poets?
Francis A. Miniter
Yes! I should have remembered this. I probably read that poem at least once a
year, and every time I read it I think of Catch-22.
Francis A. Miniter
Francis A. Miniter
That sounds like it is a great resource. I am definitely going to look for it.
Francis A. Miniter
Francis A. Miniter
>>But when it comes to World War II, I can think of no war poets, other than John
>>Gillespie McGee, whose single poem was "High Flight", best known for its first
>>line 'Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth' and who did not survive the
>>war. Nor does any poetry about WWII come to mind.
>
>
> Hamish Henderson, "Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica".
>
> Ezra Pound writing a couple of cantos in praise of Mussolini (they were
> rediscovered a few years ago).
>
> Jaroslav Seifert's poems of the period. Some of Prevert's "Paroles".
>
> Not much. But there is more music marking the WW2 era than about any
> other war: Stravinsky's Symphony in 3 Movements, symphonic works by
> Honegger, Martin, Shostakovich and Vaughan Williams, the great coda of
> Schoenberg's Second Chamber Symphony and his "A Survivor of Warsaw",
> Bartok's sixth quartet, Dallapiccola's chamber works written when more
> or less in hiding, Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, Tippett's
> "A Child of Our Time", and indirectly a vast amount of music written
> by people who lived through the worst Fascism and the war could do and
> didn't want us to forget it - Penderecki, Haubenstock-Ramati, Xenakis,
> Stockhausen, Zimmermann, Nono, etc etc. Literature doesn't come close
> to matching all that.
Good point about the music. Henryk Gorecki's Third Symphony (Symphony of
Sorrowful Songs) for orchestra and solo soprano is one of the most haunting I
know of. And I still remember hearing Tippett's piece for the first time about
40 years ago at a concert hall in Hartford, CT.
Francis A. Miniter
Francis A. Miniter
I have to tell you that your responses have thrilled me. You have given me
about two years of homework to do. But who cares. I really appreciate all the
materials you have suggested. And I will look up as much of it as I can.
Francis A. Miniter
Paul Ilechko
I didn't make it clear in my other response to this, but I do agree that
a translated poem is not at all the same thing as the original. Now,
that said, a good translation can be a great poem in its own right, but
you have to view it as a collaboration of the poet and the translator.
The one language that I can read well enough to make sense of the
original is French, and I can clearly see that, for example, Richard
Howard's Baudelaire is infinitely superior to Wyatt Mason's Rimbaud.
I do like books that put the original and the translation side by side.
Even in German and Spanish I can figure out if a translation seems to be
well done, to some degree,
Sam Culotta
"Francis A. Miniter" <min...@attglobalZZ.net> wrote in message
news:45e39641@kcnews01...
Garp.
> Francis A. Miniter
Douglas Clark
of the men in the trenches in the Great War was very different from that
expressed by the famous War Poets. For that reason you can find a
considerable book in British Waterstone stores compiling poetry from
lesserknown poets which gives quite a different view.
And two points:
1. Owen wrote his famous poems in a few weeks in a cottage outside
Scarbrough after leaving Edinburgh before returning to the Front to be
killed.
2. My only claim to fame is that Pat Barker was in my year at the Girl's
school in Stockton while I was in the Boys.
--
Douglas Clark ..................... Bath, Somerset, UK ......
http://usergroup.plus.net .......... http://www.dgdclynx.plus.com
"Francis A. Miniter" <min...@attglobalZZ.net> wrote in message
news:45e25996$1@kcnews01...
Douglas Clark
news:45e3c102$0$8745$ed26...@ptn-nntp-reader02.plus.net...
> It should be pointed out that it is generally accepted now that the spirit
> of the men in the trenches in the Great War was very different from that
> expressed by the famous War Poets. For that reason you can find a
> considerable book in British Waterstone stores compiling poetry from
> lesserknown poets which gives quite a different view.
>
You must remember that the British Army defeated the German Army in 1918.
The Germans were never able to accept it hence World War 2. Haig, although
limited, wasnt as black as he was painted. That was mainly the work of Lloyd
George's Memoirs.
Lewis Mammel
Jack Campin - bogus address wrote:
> Not much. But there is more music marking the WW2 era than about any
> other war: Stravinsky's Symphony in 3 Movements, symphonic works by
> Honegger, Martin, Shostakovich and Vaughan Williams, the great coda of
> Schoenberg's Second Chamber Symphony and his "A Survivor of Warsaw",
> Bartok's sixth quartet, Dallapiccola's chamber works written when more
> or less in hiding, Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, Tippett's
> "A Child of Our Time", and indirectly a vast amount of music written
> by people who lived through the worst Fascism and the war could do and
> didn't want us to forget it - Penderecki, Haubenstock-Ramati, Xenakis,
> Stockhausen, Zimmermann, Nono, etc etc. Literature doesn't come close
> to matching all that.
"Welcome to the updated "Victory At Sea & War Movies CD Order Page".
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I can't call to mind the theme, off hand, but I can picture the
waves with the "V" and the swelling music.
Janet Puistonen
Oh, no intention to comment on them--neither of whom I've read, I must
confess.
It does relate to why Anglophones are likely to focus on poetry written in
English.
Janet Puistonen
> that a translated poem is not at all the same thing as the original.
> Now, that said, a good translation can be a great poem in its own
> right, but you have to view it as a collaboration of the poet and the
> translator.
Excellent point. I think of Ezra Pound's "translations," which are poems in
their own right. To what extent they capture the spirit and language of the
original, I can't say in many cases. (His Anglo Saxon efforts are great,
though.)
Just recently, I bought a couple volumes of Dostoyevsky for my kid, who
wanted to read them. Having recently read about the translations of Richard
Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, I searched out their version of The Brothers
Karamazov. I opened it at random and read a few paragraphs. What a
difference from the leaden prose I remember from my attempt to read it
decades ago! Living language!
The only native Russian speaker I know couldn't offer me an opinion, since
she naturally had read the books in Russian, but they certainly work in
English. I'm tempted to go back and reread them myself, actually.
Francis A. Miniter
On the light-hearted side, have you come across Baudelaire's "Imitation of
Longfellow's Hiawatha"? He does a good job of capturing in French the rhythm
and sense of the epic.
Sometimes, if languages are close enough, translations flow easily. E.g.:
Morgen, morgen nur nicht Heute,
Sagen alle faulen Leute.
T'morrow, t'morrow, but not today,
All the foolish people say.
Francis A. Miniter
Paul Ilechko
>
> Just recently, I bought a couple volumes of Dostoyevsky for my kid, who
> wanted to read them. Having recently read about the translations of Richard
> Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, I searched out their version of The Brothers
> Karamazov. I opened it at random and read a few paragraphs. What a
> difference from the leaden prose I remember from my attempt to read it
> decades ago! Living language!
I agree wholeheartedly. Some of the older translations were very poor.
I've had a long running dispute with Fido about Constance Garnett, whom
he reveres and I abhor. I find that P/V are generally superb. Do read
their Master and Margarita, if you haven't already.
John W. Kennedy
> I can't call to mind the theme, off hand, but I can picture the
> waves with the "V" and the swelling music.
In 9/8 (I suppose)
sol la mi re | do \la so | la /do mi sol la.....
--
John W. Kennedy
"The blind rulers of Logres
Nourished the land on a fallacy of rational virtue."
-- Charles Williams. "Taliessin through Logres: Prelude"
Pjk
the effects of war on writers. It should probably be updated
someday...
1. Aichinger, Peter, The American Soldier in Fiction: 1880-1963.
2. Aldridge, John, After the Lost Generation: A Critical Study of the
Writers of Two Wars
3. Beidler, Phillip, American Literature and the Experience of
Vietnam
4. Bergonzi, Bernard, Hero's Twilight: A Study of the Literature of
the Great War
5. Booth, Allysin, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space
Between Modernism and the First World War
The unprecedented magnitude of death during World War I forever
altered how people perceived their world and how they represented
those perceptions. In Postcards from the Trenches, Allyson Booth
traces the complex relationship between British Great War culture and
modernist writings. She shows that, through the experience of the
Great War, both civilian and combatant modernist writers found that
language could no longer represent experience. She goes on to identify
and contextualize several of the resulting modernist tropes: she links
the disolving modernist self to soldiers' familiarity with corpses,
the modernist mistrust of factuality to the apparant inaccessibility
of facts regarding the "rape of Belgium," and the modernist interest
in multiple viewpoints to the singularity of perspective with which
generals studied battlefield maps. Though her emphasis is on literary
works by Robert Graves, E.M. Forster, and Vera Brittain, among others,
Booth's analysis extends to memorials, posters, and architecture of
the Great War. This interdisciplinary quality of Booth's study results
in a much deeper understanding of how the Great War affected cultural
representations and how that culture represented the War.
6. Colby, Evelyn, Representing War: Form and Ideology in First World
War Narratives.
Focusing on both documentary and fictional First World War narratives,
Cobley (English, U. of Victoria, B.C.) shows how the rhetorical,
narrative, and generic conventions of the literature act as carriers
of ideological meaning, and how the critique this literature offers
remains to a large extent complicit with the war it ostensibly
opposes
7. Cooperman, Stanley, World War I and the American Novel
8. Cottington, David, Cubism in the Shadow of War: The Avant-Garde and
Politics in Paris, 1905-1914
An examination of the cubist movement set within the political,
economic, and cultural forces of pre-World War I France. Cottington
contends that cubism is a contradictory and unstable constellation of
interests and practices shaped by social and political forces
9. Cruickshank, John, Variations of Catastrophe: Some French Responses
to the Great War
10. Ecksteins, Modris, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of
the Modern Age
Dazzling in its originality, witty and perceptive in unearthing
patterns of behavior that history has erased, RITES OF SPRING probes
the origins, the impact, and the aftermath of World War I -- from the
premiere of Stravinsky's ballet The Rite of Spring in 1913 to the
death of Hitler in 1945. "The Great War," as Modris Eksteins writes,
"was the psychological turning point . . . for modernism as a whole.
The urge to create and the urge to destroy had changed places." In
this "bold and fertile book" (Atlantic Monthly), Eksteins goes on to
chart the seismic shifts in human consciousness brought about by this
great cataclysm through the lives and words of ordinary people, works
of literature, and such events as Lindbergh's transatlantic flight and
the publication of the first modern bestseller, ALL QUIET ON THE
WESTERN FRONT. RITES OF SPRING is a remarkable and rare work, a
cultural history that redefines the way we look at our past and toward
our future.
11. Fussell, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory
The year 2000 marks the 25th anniversary of Paul Fussell's work on the
war that changed a generation and revolutionized the way we see the
world. He explores the British experience on the western Front from
1914 to 1918, focusing on the various literary means by which it has
been remembered, conventionalized and mythologized. The text is also
about the literary dimensions of the experience itself. Fussell
supplies contexts, both actual and literary, for writers who have most
effectively memorialized the Great War as an historical experience
with conspicuous imaginative and artistic meaning. These writers
include the classic memoirists Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves and
Edmund Blunden, and poets David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred
Owen. In his new introduction Fussell discusses the critical responses
to his work, the authors and works that inspired his own writing, and
the elements which influence our understanding and memory of war.
Fussell also shares the experience of his research at the Imperial War
Museum's Department of Documents and includes a new suggested further
reading list
12. Hynes, Samuel, A War Imagined: The First World War and English
Culture
According to Hynes ( The Auden Generation ), WW I engendered a sense
of idealism betrayed, turned high-mindedness into cynicism and gave
rise to resentment of politicians as the conviction emerged that the
war was meaningless, fought for no good cause. Calling this cluster of
attitudes the "Myth of the War," Hynes shows how these received views,
filtered through the '30s generation of Auden, Orwell, Waugh and
Greene, became "the truth about war." In this splendid study, the
Princeton professor of literature draws on novels, poems, films,
plays, paintings, music and diaries to show how WW I fostered radical
discontinuity with the past, an upsurge in images of violence and
cruelty, and the alienation of a "lost generation"; and intensified
pacificist and women's rights activism. Photos
13. Jones, Peter, War and the Novelist; Appraising the American War
Novelist
14. Klein, Holger (ed), The First World War in Fiction: A Collection
of Critical Essays
15. Mackaman, Douglas, World War I and the Cultures of Modernity
16. Meyers, Thomas, Walking Point: American Narratives of Vietnam
This study is a qualitative assessment within a group of five modes -
realism, the classical memoir, black humour, revised romanticism, and
mnemonic narrative - of the most important novels and memoirs written
by Americans about Vietnam. Among numerous works discussed are Philip
Caputo's A Rumor of War , John Delvecchio's The 13th Valley , David
Halberstam's One Very Hot Day , Michael Herr's Dispatches , and Tim
O'Brien's Going After Cacciato .
17. Onions, John, English Fiction and Drama of the Great War
18. Quinn, Patrick J (ed)., The Literature of the Great War
Reconsidered: Beyond Modern Memory
This definitive volume will alter our understanding of the literature
of World War I. New critical approaches have, over the last two
decades, redefined the term "war literature" and its cultural legacy.
Consisting, in equal measure, of essays by male and female scholars
(from several different countries), and devoted to both familiar and
lesser-known works, this book presents the many faces of Great War
literary study at the millennium
19. Sherry, Vincent, The Great War and the Language of Modernism
With the expressions ""Lost Generation"" and ""The Men of 1914,"" the
major authors of modernism designated the overwhelming effect the
First World War exerted on their era. Literary critics have long
employed the same phrases in an attempt to place a radically
experimental, specifically modernist writing in its formative,
historical setting. What real basis did that Great War provide for the
verbal inventiveness of modernist poetry and fiction? Does the
literature we bring under this heading respond directly to that
provocation, and, if so, what historical memories or revelations can
be heard to stir in these words? Vincent Sherry reopens these long
unanswered questions by focusing attention on the public culture of
the English war
Some of these are difficult to find or are very expensive.
Pjk
Don Tuite
The war spawned any number of novels in what Frye would have called
"Ironic Mode."
Don
Don Tuite
<jwk...@attglobal.net> wrote:
>Lewis Mammel wrote:
>> I can't call to mind the theme, off hand, but I can picture the
>> waves with the "V" and the swelling music.
>
>In 9/8 (I suppose)
>
> sol la mi re | do \la so | la /do mi sol la.....
I think Bennett called the motif "Song of the High Seas."
There was another motif for busy war workers at home.
J Seymour MacNicely
Subject: War Poetry
Date: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 7:22 PM
On Feb 26, 1:49 pm, "Sam Culotta" <culotta_...@verizon.net> wrote:
> "*Anarcissie*" <anarcis...@gmail.com> wrote in message
> > In the World War I period, a major war was thought of as an
> > unusual event. By the mid-1940s, however, everyone, at
> > least in the English-speaking world, was involved in more
> > or less continuous war or preparation for war, and not your
> > polite 18th-century war, either, but total war. From then on,
> > every poet was a war poet.
>
> This would seem to be the best explanation.
How can that be, seeing yours is the better one? His is, despite
being historically clueless, to say that WWI was an "unusual event"--?
Why for the god's sake, the ever so "polite" blood and mud on Yankee
boots that had charged over San Juan Hill was hardly dry, and what of
those belonging to the boys of Britain in the Crimea, and again in the
Boer War--what on earth can the boy think to be saying here, between
the sniff of his snuff and the sneeze? Let him tuck his hanky back to
his cuff, while we consider that his thinking, taken as a whole, can
be quite other than he thinks, if it were to be deconstructed into
something like, "By the 1940's (ho-hum) war had become so de rigeuer,
that every poet was doing it--war that is."
Not exactly the same as to say . . .
> The "War to end all wars." had
> such a devastating effect on the world in general and on writers and artists
> in particular that later reactions were either subdued or dulled by
> comparison.
Which is anything but . . .
"From then on, every poet was a war poet."
Did you hear our former 'poet laureate' Pinsky on C-SPAN II here the
other night? Well never mind, he said nothing to bear on the subject.
But just because this latter is the better explanation, I wouldn't
take it to the bank because it's only better than our dear Cissie's,
compared to which, as usual, anything is better.
The poetry of WWII was not being written as verse--but for a few songs
composed e.g. by Nazis that Jews in the camps were forced, except they
be bludgeoned to death, to sing. And there were a few death camp Jews
who wrote some songs too, running the gamut from the blackest of
gallows humor, to the occasional blood inked lament over things too
sad for a triteness of words to express, or for any later peace-time
sensibility to appreciate as verse.
WWII poetry was written on posters of Rosie the Riveter, and recited
in the broadcasts of Tokyo Rose. Otherwise it's all sublimated into
form of prose, in diaries and memoirs (novels of Jones and Mailer had
to wait till it was over). WWII poetry was a free form Haiku of wire-
service copy, quickly scrawled in the back seat of a Jeep, or as from
the pen of Martha Gellhorn wading knee-high in blood to Utah Beach on
D-Day. Such poetry as was indeed too "dully blunted and subdued," to
be--de rigeuer.
There was no time nor space for reflection, and no poetry, therefore.
--
Mackie
http://vignettes-mackie.blogspot.com/
"Who Did the Dahlia?"
Francis A. Miniter
> From: "Mac the Nice" <jpd...@hotmail.com>
> Subject: War Poetry
> Date: Tuesday, February 27, 2007 7:22 PM
>
> On Feb 26, 1:49 pm, "Sam Culotta" <culotta_...@verizon.net> wrote:
>
>>"*Anarcissie*" <anarcis...@gmail.com> wrote in message
>>
>>>In the World War I period, a major war was thought of as an
>>>unusual event. By the mid-1940s, however, everyone, at
>>>least in the English-speaking world, was involved in more
>>>or less continuous war or preparation for war, and not your
>>>polite 18th-century war, either, but total war. From then on,
>>>every poet was a war poet.
>>
>>This would seem to be the best explanation.
>
>
> How can that be, seeing yours is the better one? His is, despite
> being historically clueless, to say that WWI was an "unusual event"--?
> Why for the god's sake, the ever so "polite" blood and mud on Yankee
> boots that had charged over San Juan Hill was hardly dry, and what of
> those belonging to the boys of Britain in the Crimea, and again in the
> Boer War--
None of these wars held a candle to WWI. The charge at San Juan Hill, in Cuba,
was a single, small engagement. The Spanish-American War was over almost before
any mobilization began.
The Boer War - presumably you mean the Second Boar War (1899-1902), took about
75,000 lives - hardly a morning's charge at Verdun.
The Crimea???? That was 1857! Those "boys" would have been 80 years old if
they took part in WWI.
In WWI treches stretched from the Alps at the edge of Switzerland all the way to
the North Sea. 600,000 were lost in one three day campaign. Poison gas was
used for the first time, as were tanks, airplanes, bombs. The artillery of WWI
was far more destructive than that in any war before. The whole landscape of
eastern France was obliterated, and the shell holes remain today in many places.
To say that WWI was an unusual event was actually an understatement. It was
horror personified.
Francis A. Miniter
Harry Thompson
"M J Carley" <ens...@bath.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:JE2yEx.D7...@bath.ac.uk...
> In the referenced article, min...@attglobalZZ.net writes:
>
>> Nor does any poetry about WWII come to mind.
>
> Fire', `Swing song', `Neutrality' would be good places to start.
I think Betjeman did too.
Harry Thompson
"Francis A. Miniter" <min...@attglobalZZ.net> wrote in message
> Ladies and Gentlemen,
>
> I have to tell you that your responses have thrilled me. You have given
> me about two years of homework to do. But who cares. I really appreciate
> all the materials you have suggested. And I will look up as much of it as
> I can.
>
>
> Francis A. Miniter
I must say, you asked a very interesting question.
David Loftus
The original question is indeed interesting. I have nothing of
substance to contribute by way of response to it, but it made me
realize I could name many novels associated with World War 2, but few
with World War 1.
Was there something more peculiarly suited toward novels about the
former, or am I just parading my ignorance about the latter?
David Loftus
Paul Ilechko
Maybe it's just a change in emphasis from poetry to fiction over that
time period ?
Sam Culotta
"David Loftus" <dlo...@earthlink.net> wrote in message
news:1172707000.4...@h3g2000cwc.googlegroups.com...
If you mean, written in the period after the wars, it may be there were
generally fewer novels published period. ( Just guessing)
All Quiet On the Western Front is all that comes to mind right now. I am
reminded of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, not a "war novel", but one in which the
war certainly plays an important role.
But in modern times there have been a few novels heavily steeped in that
period and that event.
Faulk's "Birdsong", McEwan's "Atonement"..
maybe enough time has passed to lend that time the rosy tinge of nostalgia.
Sam
>
*Anarcissie*
wrote:
I was thinking also that after the mid-1940s, war had become
total and continuous, and this was on everyone's mind. And
so when Allen Ginsberg wrote about the "hydrogen jukebox"
and boys sobbing in armies in 1954, he was a war poet even
though there was no officially declared war on, and San
Francisco wasn't being bombed. Whereas in the World War I
period, there was still felt to be a distinction between
peacetime and wartime.
There is also the exhaustion of war. As in "The Eye":
... it is half
the planet: this dome, this half-globe, this bulging
Eyeball of water, arched over to Asia,
Australia and white Antarctica: those are the eyelids that
never close; this is the staring unsleeping
Eye of the earth, and what it watches is not our wars.
That is also a war poem, one that withdraws.
Jack Campin - bogus address
>> substance to contribute by way of response to it, but it made me
>> realize I could name many novels associated with World War 2, but
>> few with World War 1.
>> Was there something more peculiarly suited toward novels about the
>> former, or am I just parading my ignorance about the latter?
> were generally fewer novels published period. ( Just guessing)
> All Quiet On the Western Front is all that comes to mind right now.
> I am reminded of Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, not a "war novel", but one
> in which the war certainly plays an important role.
Rebecca West's "The Return of the Soldier", Franz Werfel's "The Forty
Days of Musa Dagh", Patrick McGill's "The Great Push", Frederic Manning's
"Her Privates We".
WW1 was the start of the war memoir genre, with Juenger's "The Storm of
Steel", Graves's "Goodbye To All That", cummings's "The Enormous Room",
Lawrence's "The Seven Pillars of Wisdom" and Vera Brittain's "Testament
of Youth". That sort of book must have displaced the novel to some extent,
as they could all be read as literature rather than just ripping yarns
like most earlier first-hand accounts of war.
============== j-c ====== @ ====== purr . demon . co . uk ==============
Jack Campin: 11 Third St, Newtongrange EH22 4PU, Scotland | tel 0131 660 4760
<http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> for CD-ROMs and free | fax 0870 0554 975
stuff: Scottish music, food intolerance, & Mac logic fonts | mob 07800 739 557
J Seymour MacNicely
> None of these wars held a candle to WWI.
Wars don't hold candles, Francis. But even so, if the reasoning
following from it doesn't take, let's see . . . not the Oscar
but . . . what shall we say . . . the Daniel Pinkwater Award for Best
Non Sequitur of the year--your judges shall certainly have been
asleep.
And why is this spittle-spume of a red-faced tirade nothing but a tune
you toot through a tin of red herring, my dear? Well here's a clue:
because it is founded entirely in Mr./Ms. Cissy's false dichotomy
posed by the term "major war". There is no such thing as a "major
war" because there is no such thing as a "minor war" as anyone who's
ever been killed in any kind of war will be very quick, when you meet
him in Hell, to tell you.
As usual, you comically presume that by speciously prating away at
this or that particular of a thesis, you have by some statistical
magic of quantities managed to topple the larger *qualitative*
principle, which, if it is valid, was so a priori, merely as
discovered by a dialectical synthesis of the finite particulars, but
not generated by them. And because I know you haven't the first notion
of what that means, I shall make it simple: Don't you see how cheap it
is, for your argument to depend on nothing but this ignoble attempt to
quantitatively belittle the tragedy and triumph of the Spanish
American War . . .
> The charge at San Juan Hill, in Cuba,
> was a single, small engagement.
This no more than to say, "My war is bigger than your war. Nyah, nyah,
nyah!" To which the only possible answer would be to give you a hanky
and see how hard you can blow--before someone of a far beastlier
character than mine upon noting your tone, should be moved to see some
blood on the linen, and not just some snot in it.
> The Spanish-American War was over almost before
> any mobilization began.
All war is major war because all war is total war or it is no war at
all.
>
> The Boer War - presumably you mean the Second Boar War (1899-1902) ---
I didn't give it a single God damned thought, you sweet old thing. I
simply remembered the valor of Winston Churchill, as from his highly
decorated service in the Boer campaigns.
As usual, from the clubbish snot of your fantasized Usenet social
standing there you are groveling again under a demand to be rude to
the Jew, the 'troll', lest the goyim be rude to you, hence the persona
non grata (ha-ha!) status for me, as demanded by the intolerance of
fools and belly crawling snakes on a cyber-plane, and so once again,
in your savage collective cowardice you presume far, far, far too
much.
> took about
> 75,000 lives - hardly a morning's charge at Verdun.
And there you go again, to speak of the 75,000 as though they were so
many lifeless clots in the abortion clinic dumpster, just as your sort
does, more and more as the years go on since Roe v. Wade. But you
cannot see where your mendacity of specious argumentation is taking
you . . .
>
> The Crimea???? That was 1857!
So it was.
> Those "boys" would have been 80 years old if
> they took part in WWI.
And so they would have been alive to see them both--wouldn't they? And
for all those among whom the recent stench of the Boer War(s) was
hardly yet gone from the air, they would not have seen WWI as anything
in the way of "an unusual event" because no kind of war has ever on
this earth been "an unusual event", nor anything less than major and
total. The only "unusual event" on a planet peopled by your socially
goose-stepping sort, Francis, is peace, an event so God damned
unusual, that since the history of the world began, there's not been
25 years gone by, that its ever been left to stand.
So listen up here just a minute, you impetuously presumptuous no doubt
relatively impeccable poltroon. If there's one thing a sucked up,
stuck on himself buck-dyke like you will never on this earth be in a
position to judge, it's the merits and morals of a man like me--of
that be ye certain! And know it is because there *is* no other man
like me. So I fully understand why seeing and knowing that would so
often frost and shrink your gonads, to feel that excruciating sense of
inferiority it must engender in you, that it can only generate in you
the spitefulness we so often see here from the narcissistic likes of
you. When you're really thin-skinned and vain, as all uncured
libidinal neurotics like you are, Francy; it's too hard to be in the
presence of a cured queer like me who really has something worth being
stuck on--like the healing power of Freudian psychoanalysis at his
command, and an ability to fuck something other than a stinky butt--
eh?
But of course, I'm used to it by now, since I've always been just so
wonderful and loving as I am now, and just so wonderfully hated for
it, too--as we see! Hah-hah! I love it.
Of course, you can't help but feel you're being condescended to by a
being of such rarefied qualities as mine, nor can I help doing it,
even though I feel your pain. So, wouldn't you be better off to just
get it over with? Just fall bravely down to your knees before me, to
beg for your knighthood, darling boy, you'll be much the happier,
wiser and kinder and braver, and ever so much more useful for it.
>
> In WWI treches stretched from the Alps at the edge of Switzerland all the way to
> the North Sea. 600,000 were lost in one three day campaign. Poison gas was
> used for the first time, as were tanks, airplanes, bombs. The artillery of WWI
> was far more destructive than that in any war before. The whole landscape of
> eastern France was obliterated, and the shell holes remain today in many places.
>
> To say that WWI was an unusual event was actually an understatement.
Nonsense.
> It was
> horror personified.
Now, that *is* an understatement. But that being said, what about
WWII of which nothing can be said but by understatement? Do I not
contradict the thesis that "all war is major and total war" if I
should seem to agree with some that Hitler and Hirohito's War was
somehow the more major, the more total--given evidence in the lack of
poetry to come forth of it?
Foolishness! There's really not anything nearly so romantic and pretty
in it as we might like to suppose--that in the presence of such
bestiality as went abroad over the earth with the advance of the Third
Reich, that the light of poetry was snuffed out in the heart of men.
Such folly! It is soooooo simple: In the trenches of the First World
War there was nothing but the time, and the space for it. In the
Second World War, there was none, no trenches, no such thing, and with
so much catching up to do, entering the war so late as the Allies, but
chiefly we Yanks, had done--what then? There was J.D. Salinger,
writing what is perhaps the finest short story ever to dry on paper
from a pen in the hand of a soldier, or any other kind of man, woman
or god, as he too had to wait till the war was done, and his own
postwar lapse into a deep psychic depression was over, to put it down,
in form of _For Esme, With Love and Squalor_. So really, it's only
what I was saying before . . .
> The poetry of WWII was not being written as verse--but for a few songs
> composed e.g. by Nazis that Jews in the camps were forced--except they
> be bludgeoned to death--to sing. And there were a few death camp Jews
> who wrote some songs too, running the gamut from the blackest of
> gallows humor, to the occasional blood inked lament over things too
> sad for a triteness of words to express, or for any later peace-time
> sensibility to appreciate as verse.
>
> WWII poetry was written on posters of Rosie the Riveter, and recited
> in the broadcasts of Tokyo Rose. Otherwise it's all sublimated into
> form of prose, in diaries and memoirs (novels of Jones and Mailer had
> to wait till it was over). WWII poetry was a free form Haiku of wire-
> service copy, quickly scrawled in the back seat of a Jeep, or as from
> the pen of Martha Gellhorn wading knee-high in blood to Utah Beach on
> D-Day. Such poetry as was indeed too "dully blunted and subdued," to
> be--de rigueur. There was no time nor space for reflection, and no poetry,
> therefore.
--
Mackie
http://vignettes-mackie.blogspot.com/
"Who Did the Dahlia?"
Now On-Line -- Chapter 17: Black Licorice
J. Hubert Wigmore was an aspiring writer, health and fitness
aficionado, and gigolo to the married landlady who had set him up as
manager of the apartment complex on the other side of the lilacs from
the Gillespie twins place . . .
Jack Campin - bogus address
Hey, I just realized my newsreader lets me kill postings based on the
NNTP-Posting-Host line. Should work just fine for bigoted shits who
post through Google and keep changing their username.
Francis A. Miniter
I tend to think you are right. As someone else pointed out, WWI produced a lot
of memoirs. I have a whole shelf of them in my WWI section.
One WWI novel not already mentioned was "Paths of Glory" (later made into a
famous movie of the same name) by Humphrey Cobb (1935). Curiously, there was a
much earlier book of the same name by Irvin S. Cobb, an American journalist who
was assigned to the front in 1914, which is more in the memoir genre. I have
tried to find a connection between the Cobbs, but the origins of Humphrey, who
was born in Italy, possibly of Canadian parents, are not very clear.
WWI serves as a background reference in the Lord Peter Wimsey stories of Dorothy
Sayers, but it is never directly discussed.
Francis A. Miniter
Francis A. Miniter
Erich Maria Remarque was a masterful writer. "The Road Back" (1931) is a sequel
to All Quiet on the Western Front. Then during WWII, he wrote "Arch of
Triumph" set in Paris on the eve of WWII, where a Jewish doctor who is a refugee
from Germany is working at a hospital under the table. Excellent novel. The
brandy Calvados is almost a character in the story.
Francis A. Miniter
jimc...@pacbell.net
wrote:
> "Francis A. Miniter" wrote in message . . .
> > None of these wars held a candle to WWI.
>
> Wars don't hold candles, Francis. But even so, if the reasoning
> following from it doesn't take, let's see . . . not the Oscar
> but . . . what shall we say . . . the Daniel Pinkwater Award for Best
> Non Sequitur of the year--your judges shall certainly have been
> asleep.
>
> And why is this spittle-spume of a red-faced tirade nothing but a tune
> you toot through a tin of red herring, my dear? Well here's a clue:
> because it is founded entirely in Mr./Ms. Cissy's false dichotomy
> posed by the term "major war". There is no such thing as a "major
> war" because there is no such thing as a "minor war" as anyone who's
> ever been killed in any kind of war will be very quick, when you meet
> him in Hell, to tell you.
One thinks of wars in the Ozarks with crazed half-Sioux
moonshiners fighting off invading revenooers.
"... killed a b'ar when he wuz only three,
lawst his mother in the A & P..."
CB
"Francis A. Miniter" <min...@attglobalZZ.net> wrote in message
>
> Was it the nature of trench warfare that enabled or even encouraged
poetical
> reflection? Was there something about WWII that discouraged poetical
reflection?
>
> Vietnam produced little poetry as such, but much poetry in music. Simon &
> Garfunkel, for instance.
>
> Have I missed something?
>
>
You may want to investigate poetry in other languages, particularly Russian
(at least what survived Stalin), or German from the eastern front (if any
survived the SS and the collapse). Those were the soldiers who endured the
most of war as a way of life; the first part of the actual warfare on the
Western front was over in a few weeks (ending in Dunkirk), and wasn't to
resume until D-Day, by which time the the end was clearly in sight. Also
literary traditions in both Germany and in particular the Soviet Union
remained much stronger than those of the Western Allies, where film and
radio were making deep writing obsolescent. Also check out the literature of
the Spanish Civil War.
Cheers;
CB
PS. sorry for the late comment; I followed this down from raf, where some of
the messages had been cross-posted.
tbsa...@att.net
wrote:
> Is it possible that poetry is not the medium for WW2 literature?
>
> The war spawned any number of novels in what Frye would have called
> "Ironic Mode."
I'd tend to think that Hasek's (sp?) "Schwiek" (sp?) initiated the
"Ironic Mode".
Ted
ObBook: JIMI HENDRIX TURNS 80 by Tim Sandlin
marywill...@yahoo.com
> reflection? Was there something about WWII that discouraged poetical reflection?
I think WWI got poetry and WWII got movies, but none of them truly
reflected what the soldiers felt. Except maybe recent movies like
Saving Private Ryan.
~M
----
http://www.noveltracker.com - top ten novels, ranked hourly
jadel
J. Del Col