Recent Developments in European Thought

by Unknown

(4) Effects of the War upon Poetry

Thus could the great Catholic poet sing under pressure of the supreme national crisis of his country. Poetry at such times may become a great national instrument—a trumpet whence Milton or Wordsworth, Arndt or Whitman, blow soul-animating strains. The war of 1914 was for all the belligerent peoples far more than a stupendous military event. It shattered the patterns of our established mentality, and compelled us to seek new adjustments and support in the chaotically disorganized world. The psychical upheaval was most violent in the English-speaking peoples, where the military shock was least direct; for here a nation of civilians embraced suddenly the new and amazing experience of battle. Here too, the imaginatively sensitive minds who interpret life through poetry, and most of all the youngest and freshest among them, themselves shared in the glories and the throes of the fight as hardly one of the signers of our most stirring battle poetry had ever done before. How did this new and amazing experience react upon their poetry? This, our final question, is perhaps the crucial one in considering the tendencies of recent European poetry.

In the first place it enormously stimulated and quickened what was deepest and strongest in the energies and qualities which had been apparent in our latter day poetry before. They had sought to clasp life, to live, not merely to contemplate, experience; and here indeed was life, and death, and both to be embraced. Here was adventure indeed, but one whose grimness made romance cheap, so that in this war-poetry, for the first time in history, the romance and glamour of war, the pomp and circumstance of military convention, fall entirely away, and the bitterest scorn of these soldier-poets is bestowed not on the enemy, but on those contemplators who disguised its realities with the camouflage of the pulpit and the editorial arm-chair. Turn, I will not say from Campbell or from Tennyson, but from Rudyard Kipling or Sir H. Newbolt, to Siegfried Sassoon, and you feel that you have got away from a literary convention, whether conveyed in the manners of the barrack-room or of the public-school, to something intolerably true, and which holds the poet in so fierce a grip that his song is a cry.

But if the war has brought our poets face to face with intense kinds of real experience, which they have fearlessly grasped and rendered, its grim obsession has not made them cynical, or clogged the wings of their faith and their hope. I will not ask how the war has affected the idealism of others, whether it has left the nationalism of our press or the religion of our pulpits purer or more gross than it found them. But of our poetry at least the latter cannot be said. In Rupert Brooke the inspiration of the call obliterated the last trace of dilettante youth's pretensions, and he encountered darkness like a bride, and greeted the unseen death not with a cheer as a peril to be boldly faced, but as a great consummation, the supreme safety. How his poetry would have reacted to the actual experience of war we can only guess. But in others, his friends and comrades, the fierce immersion in the welter of ruin and pain and filth and horror and death brought only a more superb faith in the power of man's soul to rise above the hideous obsession of his own devilries, to retain the vision of beauty through the riot of foul things, of love through the tumult of hatreds, of life through the infinity of death. True this was not a new power: poetry to be poetry must always in some measure possess it. What was individual to the poets was that this power of mastering actuality went along in them with the fierce and eager immersion in it; the thrill of breathing the

'calm and serene air
Above the smoke and stir of this dim spot
Which men call earth,'

with the thrill of seeing and painting in all its lurid colouring the volcanic chaos of this 'stir and smoke' itself. Thus the same Siegfried Sassoon who renders with so much close analytic psychology the moods that cross and fluctuate in the dying hospital patient, or the haunted fugitive, as he flounders among snags and stumps, to feel at last the strangling clasp of death, can as little as the visionary Shelley overcome the insurgent sense that these dead are for us yet alive, made one with Nature.

He visits the deserted home of his dead friend—

'Ah, but there was no need to call his name,
He was beside me now, as swift as light ...
For now, he said, my spirit has more eyes
Than heaven has stars, and they are lit by love.
My body is the magic of the world,
And dark and sunset flame with my spilt blood.'

And so the undying dead

'Wander in the dusk with chanting streams,
And they are dawn-lit trees, with arms upflung,
To hail the burning heaven they left unsung.'