Out of Obscurity

Those who were at The Lamb last weekend for our annual get-together with the Wilfred Owen Association were fascinated and moved to hear Richard Wilson talk about his illustrious great-uncle, the poet T P Cameron Wilson (1888-1918). Present in the audience was Merryn Williams, whose monograph in Cecil Woolf's War Poets Series has done much to arouse wider interest in his poetry.

Cameron Wilson

Cameron Wilson is one of many First World War writers who remain "obscure" in the eyes of the general public, having been eclipsed by a few people with more dramatic backstories and/or more glittering literary careers. ("Minor" poets is sometimes used as a blanket term for them.) Yet he had enjoyed comparative success with his work even before the war, and it is surprising that his output is not better known. Although writers like Owen and Sassoon have a genius that stands out, and were almost guaranteed to rise to the top of the pile at some stage, the final analysis of who is remembered and who is not suggests that chance has played almost as big a role as merit in deciding the content of the First World War's poetic canon.

Take Robert Nichols. Edmund Gosse compared him to Keats and Shelley, but latter generations have come to consider his work nothing out of the ordinary. Nichols and Sassoon got to know one another in 1917. Like Sassoon, Nichols had suffered psychological problems as a result of his war experiences, and it had already ended his military career. Also like Sassoon, he survived the war, though he didn't make old bones - he died aged 51, his reputation as a poet already much depleted. But it was Nichols who wrote the introduction to Sassoon's Counterattack collection in 1918, and Nichols who helped secure him a lecture tour of the United States in the following year, by recommending him to his own American fans. He describes Sassoon as "one of the leading young poets of England", somewhat condescending praise from one who was himself only about 25 at the time. I wonder if that is the reason he understates Sassoon's actual age.

Robert Nichols

There is a blog dedicated to the work of these "forgotten" poets, and the War Poets Association also works to enhance their reputations. There are also related groups, such as "Female Poets of the First World War", a subject on which a lot of great work has been done by the tireless Lucy London.

On our tours of the Western Front in the company of the remarkable Vivien Whelpton, we have encountered many of these lesser-known poets: Leslie Coulson, Ewart Alan Mackintosh, Noel Hodgson, Patrick Shaw-Stewart and innumberable others - and have argued over their respective merits. We have even stood on the spot where Vera Brittain's fiancé, Roland Leighton, was shot by a sniper in 1915, aged only twenty. Ironically, Leighton, who wrote only a few unpublished poems, seems to have acquired a literary reputation that rests almost entirely on the flattering picture of him painted in Brittain's memoir, Testament of Youth.

I wonder sometimes if there is a war poem for everyone. Who is to decide whether Cameron Wilson's "Magpies in Picardy" is better or worse than "Anthem for Doomed Youth"? We can say only that we prefer one or the other, find one or the other more moving, or that one strikes a chord with us that another fails to strike.

To find out more, read Lucy London's blogs at

http://femalewarpoets.blogspot.co.uk

and http://forgottenpoetsofww1.blogspot.co.uk .