The Unawareness of Youth

 

"Youth excels in unawareness," wrote Siegfried Sassoon, formulating his prose memoirs from memories of the past and poring over old diaries. "It seems reasonable to ask how a mind that understood so little of itself at the time can be analysed and explained by its owner thirty years afterwards!" 

Many is the middle-aged person who has asked him or herself that question. I am shortly to attend a college reunion marking the fortieth anniversary of my arrival in Oxford as an undergraduate. It seems quite incredible that this could be possible, since, looking in the mirror, I see the same person I have always seen, albeit with more wrinkles. I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to ponder on this phenomenon, but it probably explains why I have recently begun to appreciate the older Sassoon more than ever. 

When most people think of Siegfried Sassoon, they think of the young soldier, impassioned yet in control, innocent yet knowing, strong yet fragile. Perhaps I thought of him this way when I first became acquainted with his poetry. Once I had read his prose, however, I started to see him differently. I could have come away from the poetry admiring and yet without any particular urge to continue reading it. My mind would have drifted on to some other writer and the SSF would probably not have been formed in 2001, though I have no doubt that it would exist by now, the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War, in some form or other. 

Sassoon wrote, looking back on his younger self, that it had never occurred to him that he would be different as an old man, merely that he would be older. As the number of my aches and pains increases and I watch my parents becoming dependent on assistance from the social services, I become more and more in tune with his point of view. 

Looking back on those first weeks at university - in fact, looking back on my whole university career - I recall many incidents that make me want to cringe. Talk about green. Like Sassoon, I was brought up by a doting, protective mother, and arrived not knowing how to use a washing machine and barely able to boil an egg. My tutors were not exactly worldly women, but I imagined they must have been sometimes incredulous at the extent of my naiveté. Thankfully, they had seen thousands of girls like me in the course of their careers and felt no need to comment on it. I suppose that this was the way Helen Wirgmann saw Siegfried. "Half one's life is spent trying to understand things," she told him, "and the other half in trying to make other people understand what one has learnt." He claimed, in The Weald of Youth, that he did not understand this advice at the time. I tend to think that, even as a young man, he was more astute than he would have us believe.

I think this is why The Weald of Youth has been my favourite Sassoon work, ever since I first read it. There is something so endearing about his way of looking back on his youth, something very diffident and self-effacing and yet sharply observant. It makes me feel very close to the author – as if I had not already felt that when I began to read his poetry. It would be asking a lot of a younger person to feel the same, so it is rather curious that Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man was put on the school syllabus so soon after its publication.  It is, of course, a very entertaining book.  I recall falling about with laughter when I first read the description of the Butley captain, nicknamed "Did I say myself?" for obvious reasons, and the passage in which young Sherston goes for his first solo ride, only to lose his horse, is equally amusing though also rather poignant. 

I'm guessing that there will be people reading this blog who have never read Sassoon's memoirs, which have been somewhat overlooked in recent years in favour of his war poetry.  The general public distaste for blood sports may also have contributed to a loss of popularity for the Sherston trilogy, as many see the title Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man and naturally expect some kind of apologia for the practice of fox hunting.  What they would get, if they progressed past that title, would hugely exceed their expectations.

 

Farewell to Two Old Friends

It was with great sadness that we heard of the recent deaths of two of Siegfried Sassoon’s friends, both monks at Downside Abbey in Somerset.  I met Dom Philip Jebb, who passed away last weekend, on two or three occasions, when he spoke at Sassoon-related events.    I only met Dom Sebastian Moore once, but it was a memorable meeting and one that has stuck with me if only because I made a film of it which I bring out and watch from time to time.   Articles in past issues of Siegfried’s Journal contained material from both Philip’s and Sebastian’s memoirs of Siegfried Sassoon, and will no doubt be reprinted at some future date and made available to members who are interested.

The reason I went to Downside to make a film with Dom Sebastian was not that I am some kind of Oliver Stone wannabe but because he was due to speak at our 2007 conference but had to cry off because he was going on holiday!  If you are anything like me, your immediate response will be “I didn’t know monks had holidays”.  Well, they do, although I gather it’s not a frequent occurrence, hence Sebastian’s reluctance to cancel.  In a somewhat surreal conversation, I spoke to him on my mobile while walking round the wine section of a Sainsbury’s supermarket in London (not far from The Lamb, though I didn’t realise it at the time).  Naturally, news of a minor disaster like this is always going to reach you when you are away from home and cannot  easily communicate with the other party.  You can just imagine my husband’s incredulity, sitting at home when a  nonagenarian monk rang up to try to speak to his wife!  To cut a long story short, I had managed to come up with one of my Brilliant Ideas.  These usually come to me in the early hours of the morning after a sleepless night worrying about some SSF-related situation or other.  I could hardly ask Dom Sebastian to cancel his holiday, so I asked him to give me an interview which I would record on video and play to the conference, and that is what we did.

It turned out much better than I had hoped.  I spent an hour or so talking to Sebastian, although only 15 minutes of our conversation is recorded on film after some judicious editing.  Somewhat naively, I anticipated getting nothing but the truth from a priest, so I took him at his word when he told me that he had felt daunted because he was “practically illiterate” when he first met Siegfried.  I had no idea, at the time, that he actually had a double first in English Literature from Cambridge; I learned this only later when speaking to Dom Philip.  I suppose that what he meant was that he felt inadequate in the presence of a famous writer like Sassoon.  Yet it sounded to me as though the pupil-teacher relationship between Sassoon and himself had been just that.  He told me that Siegfried never questioned any of the more difficult dogma of Roman Catholicism but simply accepted it; I daresay Dom Sebastian was very grateful for the respect shown him by his elderly pupil, but I feel equally sure that the self-effacing instructor earned his keep.

The nicest thing about my visit to Downside to see Dom Sebastian, I think, was our walk to the rock garden where he had given Siegfried much of his instruction.  We closely inspected the bench in the garden which appeared to have been installed long enough ago to have been the one on which Siegfried and Sebastian sat, though it could have been a later replacement.  Dom Sebastian said he did not remember for certain, giving me the impression that he had not spent a great deal of time in the garden since – and yet it was the perfect setting, and I could just picture the two of them there, side by side, with the monk hesitantly explaining the finer points of Catholic doctrine and Siegfried attempting to listen intently, his attention sometimes diverted by the beauty of the natural world around them.

The other side of Dom Sebastian was his humour.  He had a very easy manner and appeared not to be put off in any way by my being female.  He had lived so long that he had no need to worry about conventions or rules, and I gathered he was considered something of a rebel, in theological terms.  He was of course a little forgetful about some details.  The subject of Wilfred Owen came up, and I asked if he had read the biography by Dominic Hibberd, which had just come out.  He thought about it for a moment then said, "It was a big book, wasn't it?"  I concurred, and he said he had found it very moving.  He proceeded to go into detail on the subject, and, although I had read the book, I didn't remember the content well enough to discuss it in any depth, so, like an idiot, I just copied down everything he said.  It was only later, when Meg checked the text of the interview, that I discovered he had been talking about some completely different poet (possibly Geoffrey Dearmer).   

As I'll be writing an obituary of Dom Sebastian for a forthcoming edition of Siegfried's Journal, I will move on to Philip Jebb.   The grandson of Hilaire Belloc, he was some years younger than Dom Sebastian and still a relatively young man when he visited the terminally-ill Siegfried Sassoon in hospital in 1967.  He had known Siegfried for some years (as did most of the Downside monks) through his participation in the abbey's cricket team as well as his occasional visits for religious reasons, and wrote movingly of the poet's last days in a letter to his own parents written shortly after the funeral.

I only met Philip Jebb as an elderly man, and, like Sebastian, he suffered from a little difficulty in recalling details.  This led to some embarrassing moments before and during our conference at Downside in 2007. Dom Philip was responsible for the abbey's guesthouse accommodation, and one or two delegates arrived to find they had not been booked in (thankfully, no one was left out in the cold as a result).  Nor would those who were present quickly forget the five minutes or so (it seemed more like an hour) at the beginning of Dom Philip's talk which was spent searching the conference room for the precious letter, which he had put down somewhere.  

The most amusing incident, however, was one I was told of by Meg and Dennis after the event.  A couple of years earlier, Dom Philip had been one of the speakers at a "Sassoon Day" hosted by the War Poets Association at Mells.  When Dennis began talking about Mells at our annual dinner on the evening of the Downside conference, Dom Philip suddenly said, "You know, I should go and give a talk at Mells".  "You did," said Meg and Dennis in unison.  "Did I?  When was that?" asked Dom Philip, and duly received a reminder.  Demonstrating once again the monastic sense of humour, he replied, "Really?  Why wasn't I told?"

Another War Requiem

I am immensely grateful to those members and other correspondents who brought to my attention the current edition of BBC Music magazine, which deals in depth with the subject of the First World War, highlighting the plight of the musicians and composers who were involved and exploring the changes in the world of music that came about as a result of it.  Most of my readers will, I imagine, have heard the names of George Butterworth and Cecil Coles, two particularly promising British composers who died in that war, aged 31 and 29 respectively.  

The Scotsman Coles, little known in his lifetime, was "rediscovered" at the start of the 21st century; one of his works, Cortège, was used as the theme music to a documentary series about the Great War.  Some of his compositions survive as a result of his friendship with Gustav Holst (who at forty had been turned down for military service), to whom he posted copies of his manuscripts while on active service on the Western Front.  If you want to sample Coles's work, I would have to recommend a CD called Artists Rifles, issued in 2004, which includes not only Cortège but recordings of Sassoon, Blunden and others reading from their own work.

Butterworth, a close friend of Ralph Vaughan Williams as well as of Holst, was beginning to make his name as a composer by the time war broke out.  A teacher at Radley College (where our SSF President, Dennis Silk, was coincidentally headmaster for over twenty years in the latter part of the century), he kept his career as a musician secret from his fellow-officers in the Durham Light Infantry; having known him as G. S. Kaye-Butterworth, they discovered only after his death how distinguished a figure he had been. Among his best-known works are his settings of poems from A E Housman's collection, A Shropshire Lad, but it is his Banks of Green Willow, first performed early in 1914, that has captured the public imagination and led to his work featuring in the top 100 favourite classical pieces selected by Classic FM listeners in the annual "Hall of Fame".

The BBC magazine comes with a "free" CD included, containing works by Ivor Gurney and Frank Bridge. Gurney we know well and have been discussing on the SSF Facebook page ever since the BBC documentary about him, The Poet who Loved the War, presented by Tim Kendall in April 2014. Gurney's settings of the work of other poets include Sassoon's "Everyone Sang".  Bridge, on the other hand, is an unknown quantity to most people, even music lovers.  A committed pacifist, who was already in his thirties at the time war broke out, he produced one of his first war-related works in 1915 in the form of a Lament for the victims of the Lusitania.  His Oration, with Steven Isserlis on cello, is the work featured on the CD.

As for Gurney, a lot of what we have learned about him in recent years is a result of the efforts of Philip Lancaster.  Many members will recall how Dr Lancaster led us in a sing-song at our joint event with the WOA at The Lamb a couple of years ago; others will have enjoyed his lecture on Gurney at the recent Spring School in Oxford.  It was therefore disappointing to see him relegated to a non-speaking role in the BBC documentary, mostly popping in and out of library stacks.  Nevertheless, the programme brought Gurney to the attention of many who would otherwise never have heard of him, and showed how music and poetry were intertwined in the course of his artistic career.  Although certainly a tragic figure, he left a rich legacy for us to enjoy.

What the magazine achieves most effectively, however, is to draw attention to other musical figures of the time whose reputations are as yet unmade, not to mention some whose war service has been overlooked because they survived. Who knew, for example, that Arthur Bliss had fought on the Western Front and been mentioned in dispatches, many years before he became Master of the King's Musick?  Who knew that Maurice Ravel, nearly forty at the beginning of the war, was desperate to sign up as an airman but was rejected on health grounds and resorted to driving military vehicles at Verdun, and that Le Tombeau de Couperin was written in memory of fallen friends?  Herbert Howells, a Gloucestershire man like Gurney, was unable to serve after being diagnosed with Graves' disease (nothing to do with the poet of that name!) and was told in 1915 that he had six months to live; he eventually died, aged 90, in 1983.  He did, however, perform a useful service in being a regular correspondent of Ivor Gurney and the recipient of some of his manuscripts, as well as dedicating his 1915 Piano Quartet in A Minor "to the Hill at Chosen and Ivor Gurney who knows it"; the two men had often walked Chosen Hill together.  As for Arnold Bax, who would be Bliss's predecessor as Master of the King's Musick, he too was prevented from enlisting on health grounds, but, in view of his sympathies with the Irish activists involved in the 1916 Easter Rising (one of his works is entitled In Memoriam Patric Pearse), this may have come as a relief to him.  In addition to his music, Bax wrote poetry (heavily influenced by W B Yeats) and prose.

How many, though, have even heard the names of William Denis Browne and Ernest Farrar, not to mention their German equivalent, Rudi Stephan, the Australian F S Kelly and the New Zealander Willie B Manson?  Both Kelly and Browne were companions of Rupert Brooke on board the "Grantully Castle", and it was Browne who selected Brooke's burial place on Skyros. Browne himself was killed only a few weeks later; Philip Lancaster has kindly posted a fascinating article about him on our Facebook group.   The young composer had two degrees from Cambridge - like Siegfried, he was at Clare College, though somewhat later than our hero.  He had also, like Brooke and Sassoon, enjoyed the patronage of Eddie Marsh.

Frederick Septimus Kelly, like Gurney and Bax, had another string to his bow, so to speak, being an Olympic rower! Having survived Gallipoli, he died on the Somme in 1916.  Rudi Stephan, from a privileged background, had been able to get his work published in his early twenties largely thanks to his father's money and influence, but was considered a little avant-garde by contemporary standards; his music is now highly regarded.  He was killed, aged 28, by a Russian sniper on the Galician front, where unrest continues to break out sporadically to this day.

Further material about these composers and their work is not difficult to find on-line.  I was staggered by the sheer quantity, once I started googling.   Although none of the composers who were killed in action are exactly household names now, you can be sure that Siegfried Sassoon, himself no mean practitioner of the piano, would have been familiar with several of them.

The Spaniard Enrique Granados, who died, aged 48, when his cross-channel ferry was torpedoed by a U-boat, has fared a little better, fame-wise, than those mentioned above, on account of having made his name as a composer and performer prior to the outbreak of war; he was in fact on his way back to his homeland from the USA where he had been playing the piano for President Woodrow Wilson. Meanwhile, the Russian Alexander Scriabin, also slightly too old to serve in the war, died in 1915 of septicemia from a sore on his lip!   Avoiding military service has never, alas, been a guarantee of longevity, even if it does give one a slightly better chance.

If I may suggest some further individual works with a wartime flavour, Arthur Bliss's "choral symphony", Morning Heroes, is written in memory of his younger brother Kennard, who was killed in 1916 aged 24, once again reminding us of Sassoon's experiences.  This rather epic work was performed at the Wilfred Owen centenary concert in Shrewsbury Abbey back in 2008, with Robert Hardy as narrator, and uses words from the work of Owen himself, Homer, Walt Whitman, Li Tai Po and Robert Nichols - a somewhat curious combination.  The other work performed at that concert was The Lark Ascending, composed by Ralph Vaughan Williams, yet another Gloucestershire composer, who was too old to enlist as a fighting man but joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and certainly saw some action at the Western Front.  Later he transferred to the artillery, where continued exposure to the sound of the guns led to his becoming deaf in later life, always a disadvantage for a composer.  The poem after which The Lark was named is, coincidentally, by George Meredith, the subject of a 1948 critical study by Siegfried Sassoon.

I could go on all day.  There is, however, another aspect to the music of the First World War, highlighted in the BBC Music magazine, that had not seriously occurred to me, in the shape of its propaganda value.  I'm not just talking about popular songs like "Keep the Home Fires Burning" but about classical music.  I think this may be a subject for a future post.

A Reality Check

"History is our reality check," says Michael Wood in his regular column in this month's BBC History magazine.  Michael (or so I like to think of him) has a habit of coming out with percipient comments like that one.  He is, to my mind, the ultimate TV historian - possibly the man who made it all happen, with his 1979 series "In Search of the Dark Ages".  Apparently it was all an accident; after he wrote the scripts, the producer suggested he should present the programmes himself as an economy measure.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Only the ubiquitous Dan Snow can compete with Michael Wood in terms of all-round knowledge and presentational style.  It does, of course, help that both are good-looking men guaranteed to appeal to the female audience, but I do think they also have their admirers among their own gender.  I wonder, if either of them had been in the age group for conscription during the First World War, what their fate would have been.  I've previously touched on the subject of the Lost Generation in this blog, so I won't repeat myself. 

The First World War "lives" project, for all its failings, does bring us into close touch with reality.  Looking at official records can somehow make you see your own family from the outside, and shows them up for exactly what they are.  My 88-year-old father was overjoyed to see the charge sheet proving that his own father had not been telling tall stories when he claimed to have spent a fortnight in a military prison in 1919 for running a gambling business on board ship on the way home to Blighty.  Nor had he lied when he claimed to have been "jumped" by a group of locals in an Italian village after drinking something called vino, which he believed to be the equivalent of beer and therefore consumed in similar quantities (or at least, what he told his sons was similar to the written testimony he gave the military authorities).

Similarly, an investigation into Siegfried Sassoon's official records demonstrates that he was generally exactly where he said he was, doing what he claimed in his memoirs.  Why one should expect anything different I don't know, and yet it brings it all home when you see it down in black and white.  That doesn't, of course, mean that there is only one version of reality, or indeed of history.  Yet there are certain facts and events for which the documentary evidence is overwhelming.  This, strictly speaking, is what history is: things that happened in the past that were recorded, hence the term "prehistory" for events that took place but were not recorded in writing.  Both historical and prehistorical events may be open to interpretation, but it is to the written sources (plus archaeological evidence) that we turn when there is doubt.  If an event has only been recorded by one person, the evidence is slim; if, on the other hand, it has been recorded by several independent individuals, the chances are that it happened as described.

This is not what Michael Wood was talking about in his article.  He was focusing on the slave trade and discussing the reluctance of the British people to recognise their own historical role in creating it.   In a rather different way, in the course of his talk at last year's SSF conference, Phil Carradice referred to the human race's habit of repeating its errors because of its ignorance of history (with particular reference to Afghanistan), which is more in line with the central theme of E H Carr's seminal 1961 book What is History?  Carr, although commenting that the belief in "historical facts existing objectively and independently of the interpretation of the historian is a preposterous fallacy", he also described "counter-factual" history as a "parlour game" played by history's "losers".  He believed in causation and took a determinist view, dismissing Churchill as a historian because of the latter's suggestion that the accidental death of King Alexander of Greece was the cause of the Greco-Turkish wars of the early twentieth century.  History, for Carr, was a science rather than an art, one that offered an opportunity for understanding the present and future as well as the past.

What would E H Carr have made of the currently fashionable "Poets versus Generals" debate?  Do we have anything to learn from revisiting the First World War in the light of what we now know?  Well, if we look at it without our judgement being clouded by 21st century values, we will certainly learn that some of the popular fallacies do not hold water.  You only have to go on one of Clive Harris's battlefield tours to recognise the falsity of some of the urban myths that have spread so freely through the British population in the course of the past century.  Yet, if we ignore the views of men like Sassoon and Owen who actually lived through the war, how can we claim to be looking at these events with an impartial eye?  As usual, I find I have more questions than answers.

Remembering Lives of the First World War

Luke Smith, introducing the Imperial War Museum’s “Lives of the First World War” project, comments “The launch of Lives of the First World War really is just the beginning,” which sounds like something of an understatement when you consider they have no less than eight million lives to fill in.  My first acquaintance with the project has been daunting.  Although I know my grandfather’s full name and have seen it on his sign-up papers, the on-line archive has no record of this and records him only by his first initial – at least, I assume it’s him.  You do have to wonder whether the average person is going to be able to find their way through the maze of pages and instructions.  Nevertheless, full marks to the IWM for trying.

With Dan Snow as its “ambassador”, the project has a head start.  One of the most watchable presenters of television history around today, he is bound to attract public interest.  Yet once again the question looms, why do we want to carry out this exercise of remembrance?  Evidently, to paraphrase Siegfried Sassoon, we haven’t forgotten yet – and we don’t particularly want to.

I hark back to a post I made over a year ago, entitled “To commemorate or not to commemorate 1914?”  Well, the media are definitely commemorating it in no uncertain fashion, as are most societies with even a borderline interest in history and/or culture.  Even Dylan Thomas has been represented as a war poet, albeit one of the Second World War.  Although one would imagine that the public would be sick of hearing about already, interest in the subject seems to be enduring and more and more people are looking up their ancestors’ war records on-line.

It seems to me that people today – at least in the UK – feel somewhat guilty about what their ancestors experienced in past conflicts, specifically World War I, and are looking for a way to assuage their consciences by paying their respects, as well as being, quite simply, interested in what made them tick.  A spate of First World War novels and non-fiction books that have come to the fore in recent years are, I think, the key to this.  When the war was only a few decades in the past, it tended to be romanticised; people today, hardened by screen violence, nevertheless feel horror when confronted by the truth about what people went through a hundred years ago, still more so when there are photographs and newsreel films to bring home its full impact.

The swathe of TV programmes such as “Who do you think you are?” (which has spawned no less than 16 international versions, in countries from Australia to Poland) illustrates a growing interest in genealogy in general, as do the many periodicals and books on the subject, and the family history societies that exist throughout the world.  Websites such as ancestry.co.uk and findmypast.co.uk have proliferated and make the process simpler for those who are just beginning to take an interest in the subject.

Although you can add your own material to the IWM database free of charge, you have to pay a subscription in order to access official records and link them to the record for the individual you are interested in.  This is bound to be off-putting, particularly for older people who are averse to entering credit card information online.  Naturally I looked up Siegfried Sassoon and found that there are eight people already “remembering” him, so that’s eight people who have managed to follow the instructions so far.  I hope I will be able to figure it out myself in due course.  In the meantime, it would be interesting to hear from people who have already tried and even more interesting to hear whether anyone has found out anything they didn’t already know about the subject of their enquiries.

At the Grave of Henry Vaughan

April was beginning to show signs of bringing some lovely spring weather when I decided to make my third trip up to Llansantffraed, near Talybont-on-Usk, near Brecon, to visit the grave of Henry Vaughan (1621-1695).  Siegfried Sassoon visited the grave in August 1923 and it inspired him to write one of his best-known post-war poems.  I have taken that poem as the basis for a monograph I'm producing for the Cecil Woolf "War Poets Series", and I'm hoping it will be published in time for the paper, on the same subject, that I'll be giving at the British Poetry of the First World War conference at Oxford in September.  As I'm only a panel speaker, it won't be a long lecture - we are only allowed twenty minutes, which will no doubt be a relief to some of the audience - but it is going to be difficult to cram everything I would like to say into the time available.  You can regard this post as a preview.

In the beginning, I had been mystified as to what attracted Sassoon to Vaughan's work at this particular time in his life.  Even allowing for the fact that young men of the early 20th century were not only brought up to be interested in poetry but were familiar with poets that we now regard as old-fashioned and/or obscure, it seemed an odd coupling.  In 1923, Vaughan was far from being a popular poet and it was probably Edmund Blunden who introduced Sassoon to him after they both returned from the First World War and struck up their lifelong friendship.

On further investigation, I found so many parallels between Vaughan and Sassoon that I was quite overwhelmed.  Sassoon himself may not have been aware of some of these, even after he got to know Vaughan's work.  The 200-year gap between Vaughan's death and Sassoon's birth is not the obstacle I thought it was to their fellow-feeling.  Both were, in their way, war poets, though Vaughan in a much less obvious way than Sassoon.  Both came to detest the very idea of war and long for the pastoral idyll of which it had robbed them.  Both lived as country gentlemen, were great horse-lovers, and spent too much money on this favourite pastime.  Each had two brothers, one of whom died as a result of a war, and, although they were two very different wars (in Vaughan's case, a civil war as opposed to a world war), both men were very close to the action and shared some comparable experiences.  Is it any wonder that Sassoon felt drawn to Henry Vaughan?

Add to this that Vaughan was a Welshman (probably Welsh-speaking) and Sassoon had been on active service at the Western Front with the Royal Welch Fusiliers and you see an additional attraction.  Not only that, but Vaughan's grave at Llansantffraed happened to be on the way to Manorbier in Pembrokeshire, where Sassoon was heading to visit another poet friend, Walter de la Mare.  Naturally, he stopped off, in order to try to capture something of Vaughan's spirit, and he obviously succeeded; but the poem was not written during the actual visit.  It is dated around a week later, when Sassoon had taken time to reflect on the experience and refine his immediate response into a polished 14-line sonnet that encapsulated his feelings so successfully that the poem has become one of his most acclaimed.

Sassoon enthusiasts will be pleased to learn that the locals not only recognise Vaughan's reputation as one of Wales's foremost poets, albeit somewhat after the event, but that a reading of Sassoon's poem, "At the Grave of Henry Vaughan", generally forms part of the annual commemoration that takes place close to the anniversary of the older poet's birthday.  For those who wish to investigate further, there is a Vaughan Association with its own Journal and a conference coming up (see http://vaughanassociation.blogspot.co.uk/p/thevaughan-association.html)

What is War Poetry?

I went to the Spring School at Oxford University's English Faculty believing that I had a fairly good idea of the answer to this question.  Despite a general awareness that there are many different interpretations of the term "war poetry", it was not something that seemed to call for a great deal of explanation.

Dr Mark Rawlinson's introductory lecture set the scene for further investigation of the topic remarkably well, and certainly raised some unexpected questions, as well as more familiar ones.  Can a woman or a non-combatant qualify as a war poet?  Is war poetry, as Robert Graves suggested, a form of "higher" journalism?  Can war poetry change anything, whether in the short or long term?  Does war poetry still exist?  Did it, in fact, ever exist?

Wilfred Owen, with his insistence on an essential "disjunction" between war and poetry, would have viewed the description of his work as "war poetry" in a negative light.  Keith Douglas, one of the two best-known poets of World War II, suggested that there was nothing new to be said, so influential had the post-World War I "war poetry boom" (Graves's phrase) been.  Stephen Spender, on the other hand, felt that the "environment" of the second war was so different from that of the first that it made imitation pointless; the conditions were so unprecedented that they were perhaps not conducive to writing poetry at all.

The questions raised at the beginning of the conference were both reinforced by, and partly answered in, the sessions that followed - particularly those on Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg and David Jones.

Wilfred Owen saw it as the poet's task to "witness", but disputed whether it was possible for the poet to do more than "warn".  It is as though he not only believed (like Siegfried Sassoon) that poetry is a vocation, but that the poet has a God-given duty to write about war from first-hand experience.  Yet Sassoon's most-quoted poems about the war are, to my mind, essentially satirical.  He focused on particular aspects of war, those that concerned him most, and sought to highlight their absurdity.  He did make a practical attempt to oppose the war (or rather, its continuation), but he did not actively seek to do so through his poetry.  As Meg Crane pointed out in her talk, he continued to write "real" poetry alongside his more biting, virulent "anti-war" poems. An example Meg chose of the former type, "The Dragon and the Undying", is in a completely different style and shows another side to the Sassoon we have been tempted to think we know.

When it comes to realistic writing about the war, however, you cannot do much better than the work of Ivor Gurney, as Dr Philip Lancaster clearly demonstrated.  Where Rosenberg and David Jones brought an artist's eye to the war, Gurney brought a musician's; but his love of landscape (he had taken up walking to provide relief from his "neurasthenia") led him to see many parallels between his home county of Gloucestershire and parts of France.  Gurney's poems take in all aspects of the war, not just the horror of the shell bombardments, the squalor of the trenches and the psychological effects on the combatants.  He writes also of some of the war's more positive aspects, often with an unexpected humour.

This spectacularly good conference did not end with an answer to the question posed at the beginning, but it did explore so many facets of the English-language poetry of the First World War that I believe even the most learned of delegates will have taken away something fresh from the experience.  In September, we have another opportunity to hear speakers of a similar calibre at the British Poetry of the First World War Conference being run by the English Association.  Details here: http://englishassociation.ac.uk/conference

Don't miss out!