Beowulf, translated by Francis Barton Gummere; Julius Caesar, Richard III, Hamlet, Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece, The Phoenix and the Turtle, Othello and The Comedy of Errors by William Shakespeare; Goody Two-Shoes; Christabel; Kubla Khan; The Pains of Sleep by Samuel Taylor Coleridge; Comfortable Service by Thomas Haynes Bayly; Tamerlane, &c. by Edgar Allen Poe; Complete Nonsense by Edward Lear; A Song of Speed by William Ernest Henley; Selected Poems of Henry Ames Blood; Ruthless Rhymes for Heartless Homes by Harry Graham; Six and Eightpence by Herbert Beerbohm Tree; Homeward Songs Along the Way, The Earth Breath and Other Poems, The Nuts of Knowledge, The Divine Vision and By Still Waters by A.E.; Lollingdon Downs and Other Poems with Sonnets by John Masefield; Songs of a Sourdough by Robert Service; Thirty-Six Poems, The Bridge of Fire, The Last Generation and The Old Ships by James Elroy Flecker; Mosada by W. B. Yeats; First Book of London Visions, The Second Book of London Visions, The Praise of Life and For the Fallen and Other Poems by Laurence Binyon; The Complete Poems and The Poetical Works by Rupert Brooke; The Poems of Wilfred Owen; Public School Verse, 1919-20, edited by Martin Gilkes, Richard Hughes, and P. H. B. Lyon; Over the Brazier, Goliath and David, Fairies and Fusiliers, Country Sentiment, The Feather Bed, The Pier-Glass, Wipperginny, Jack Kemp’s Wager, The Penny Fiddle, Ann at Highwood Hall and The Siege and Fall of Troy by Robert Graves; Masques and Poems and Poems by Peter Quennell; Images, Images of Desire, Images of War and Greek Songs in the Manner of Anacreon by Richard Aldington; The Poems of Anyte of Tegea, translated by Richard Aldington; The Sea Garden, Hymen and The Walls Do Not Fall by H.D.; Oxford Poetry, 1924, edited by Harold Acton and Peter Quennell; Aquarium and An Indian Ass by Harold Acton; The Burning Wheel by Aldous Huxley; Chamber Music, Pomes Penyeach, Collected Poems, Giacomo Joyce and The Cat and the Devil by James Joyce; Under Milk Wood by Dylan Thomas; Mainly on the Air by Max Beerbohm; Santa Clause and Fairy Tales by e e cummings; The Voices of Marrakesh by Elias Canetti, translated by J.A. Underwood, and Kafka’s Other Trial by Elias Canetti, translated by Christopher Middleton; Plant and Phantom, The Earth Compels, The Burning Perch, The Dark Tower, Holes in the Sky and The Penny That Rolled Away by Louis MacNeice; The Centuries’ Poetry: Donne to Dryden, Hood to Hardy and Bridges to the Present Day, compiled by Denys Kilham Roberts; The Penguin Poets: Wordsworth, edited by W. E. Williams; Prussian Nights by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, translated by Robert Conquest; Ariel by Sylvia Plath; Poems, Laurentian Lyrics and The Treasures of the Snow by Arthur S. Bourinot; The Psychology and Teaching of Reading by Fred J. Schonell; A Choice of Emily Dickinson’s Verse, selected by Ted Hughes, and Selected Poems, 1957-1981 by Ted Hughes; Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and The Real Inspector Hound by Tom Stoppard; Poems by Robert Conquest; A Look Round the Estate and Collected Poems, 1944-1979 by Kingsley Amis; Death of a Naturalist, Field Work, Selected Poems, A Cure at Troy and The Burial at Thebes by Seamus Heaney; Time for Lovers by Robin Ray; Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England and May Week Was in June by Clive James; In Flanders Fields and Other Poems of the First World War, edited by Brian Busby; Spring: A Folio Anthology, Summer: A Folio Anthology, Autumn: A Folio Anthology and Winter: A Folio Anthology, edited by Sue Bradbury; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Keith Harrison; Sir Gawain and the Green Knight by Simon Armitage; and Milk and Honey by Rupi Kaur
In English at least, Solzhenitsyn’s Prussian Nights is not necessarily a good poem. Solzhenitsyn had many gifts. Honesty was among them. But what he describes of the latter stages of the war, it’s so brutal, so casually brutal, that it’s almost no good in knowing what he has to say. We know already that the Red Army did terrible things. We know that in wartime, many lose their morality, do what they are permitted to do by their officers; and if, in any conflict, their officers say that there is no penalty for attacking the civilians among whom one is quartered, many would do it.
And if the officers turn a blind eye — if they can be deceived by their cunning subordinates — so much the better.
Solzhenitsyn was a fine writer. Robert Conquest, his translator, was a decent poet in his own right. Perhaps this is one of those examples of something substantially true, but unwelcome. Teaching the reader nothing new about existence, saying only what we knew all along: that life is short and dreadful, that members of our species are evil in their hearts, that there is no salvation coming, no justice. Nothing worth the name.
Have moderns like Tom Stoppard, in their own work, ever had another point of view? Is there another subtext to MacNeice? (The man who wrote The Dark Tower can only have had a bitter view of life, even if it has its moments of glory.) Flecker, dying young, had a tragic view of life. Wouldn’t anyone?
Mystics like George William Russell (‘A.E.’), like Yeats, would disagree. Of course they would disagree, wouldn’t they?
Other war poems, even by men who by war’s end had become sure and supremely experienced, all have a similar feeling. I’ve heard veterans of many conflicts describe it: a sense that what is happening before one’s eyes is impossible, that it must be made-up or confected or fraud or imagination. Yet it never is.
Laurence Binyon, artist, man of letters, academician, wrote some of the best poetry of the First World War. Not as a fighting man but as an ambulance-worker at the front and, at home, a heavy-hearted observer. He is not as fashionable as the soldier-poets, not quite as tragical a figure.
Robert Graves’s most famous works in all genres are on the First World War. Good-Bye to All That is very famous. It’s taught in schools. In some of his early war poems, Graves does not necessarily seem incredulous. He has read, he seems to say, so deeply into history, into myth, into the truths carved into the rocks, that nothing surprises him. Except the peculiarities of sensations, of the body or the mind; they can still surprise him very much. Other, later Graves works are almost folkloreish. Jack Kemp’s Wager, for instance, would not have been out of place in an early Dickens novel — the kind of story Mr Pickwick might have read about in a book by his bedside in a country inn, or one character might have told another around the fire. Is there jeopardy? Not a great deal. Is there true drama? Only of a theatrical sort. What do we learn? That good guys win and bad guys lose, in the end — if they are permitted by fate and fortune.
Writers like Richard Aldington who served in the first war and those who were their contemporaries like Helga Doolittle (H.D.) saw the world anew as a series of burning, vivid images, as if lit up by a magnesium flare. Aldington’s work is painfully tragic, his characters all futile and bitter. Those who embody (if the reader cares for it) a Greek poetical ethos merely want to get drunk and to dance in the evenings of their days. The most successful Aldington character is an aged alcoholic, getting his fun while he still can.
The next generation of men — Huxley and Acton and Quennell — cared seemingly to the exclusion of anything serious about aesthetics; their solution to meaning was doing: looking at things, buying things, observing things. In his own way, someone like John Maynard Keynes articulated it best. More than a few men of that age seemed to think the solution to life was eating and drinking well and having entertaining conversations about music and art with a good number of close friends. Such an idea might still hold water.
Meaning is created, in the eye of the beholder. When Elias Canetti looked at a man like Kafka he saw a human form much diminished, weak in frame and stature, writing love letter after love letter that was not reciprocated — desperate to put some weight on his emaciated frame, determined if failingly to separate his body with the illness and weakness which wracked it. Little humanity, little joy, in any of that. And yet in Marrakesh, the same Canetti found strange beauty in the women hiding from him behind doors; the tight and high-walled streets where men like him were unwelcome. He saw the beggars, the blind beggars, and in giving them a coin felt he had done something not wholly futile.
The species of deep depression shown in writings like Sylvia Plath’s — which anyone who has ever brushed past suicidality will find both familiar and also deceptive, the product of an ill mind, not a perspicacious one — is a natural response to the mid-century. When everything good was killed progressively, and it seemed nothing decent would ever be built again. Someone like Joyce, meanwhile, ventured so far into language as a pursuit that all meaning was lost and only vague sense remained. And yet, when he wrote to his nephew Stephen, Joyce was witty and straightforward. It was a matter of audience, a matter of what true thing the author most wanted to convey.
The moderns like Heaney and Kingsley Amis reflect the same crisis of modernity that began when they were boys. How is it possible to be happy in what is so obviously a fallen world — where bad things happen and new technology means only that we know about them but cannot do a thing to heal, to palliate? Amis’s solution was in humour and drink. Heaney’s was, in a word, in truth. The truth of subjective experience; the truth of the old stories; the truth of life as it really is and is actually lived. Childhood has a truth to it that must be unearthed — a subjective truth, a truth of fear as well as pleasure, a truth worth understanding.
The old stories like Beowulf, like Gawain (enjoying still now an immense, decades-long renaissance). Old stories like Shakespeare; like his poetry.
Clive James describes in one of his memoirs going to Italy mostly for a jolly and finding new energy, new dedication, in the study that country and its verse. As if it made sense for the first time. For the first time he seriously considered working, really reading — all to try to understand, to make something concrete where before there was ignorance and confusion.
Is this possible? Is it possible for even a moment?