Volume 2, Number 3 · March 19, 1964
Two War Poets
By G. S Fraser
The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen
edited with an Introduction Notes by C. Day Lewis, with a Memoir by Edmund Blunden
New Directions, 191 pp., $4.75
Selected Poems
by Keith Douglas, edited with an Introduction by Ted Hughes
Faber and Faber, 63 pp., 13s 6d
The First World War was a great, prolonged, stupid battering war, won in the end by Haig and Foch (with the help of course of the American reinforcements) by a kind of animal toughness, insensitivity, and obstinacy. A beautiful landscape was smashed into mud. People dug themselves into long trenches, and when they were not killing each other lived, in their mud dug-outs, in a kind of stuffy, cosy, troglodyte domesticity. The Austrians put out a feeler for an end in 1917, and a brave liberal English conservative, Lord Lansdowne, put out a similar feeler in England. Nothing came of this; there was obstinate, uneducated hysteria on the English home-front. The war carried on. The Germans in the end retreated, but in good order; their armies were not surrounded and destroyed, there was no fighting on their home territory. The French had had to suppress large-scale mutinies in their armies against the wastefulness and pointlessness of the whole thing. The English poets who fought in that war and survived it, on the Western Front—Graves, Sassoon, Blunden, Read—carried away from it, if not actual shell-shock with a disability pension—as Graves did—a trauma, a haunting ghost, which they managed to lay about ten years after the Armistice in 1918 by memorable prose war memoirs: Good-Bye to All That, Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man, Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, Undertones of War, In Retreat. Ford Madox Ford, tougher or shallower, an impressionist artist even in the midst of danger, brought out his striking series of war novels earlier.
Review, 2441 words
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