[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
On 11 November 1985 a memorial was unveiled in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey to the Poets of the First World War. The names of sixteen poets, all of whom served in uniform, were inscribed on a tablet of Westmoreland slate. At the time of the unveiling only one of the sixteen, Robert Graves, was still living and he would die less than a month later. Six of the poets died in the war, among them Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen, whose classically connected verse is the subject of the inaugural volume in an anticipated series of Oxford Classical Reception Commentaries (OCRC). Lorna Hardwick, Stephen Harrison, and Elizabeth Vandiver have, in fact, produced two inaugural printed volumes, one a condensed version of the other, as well as an accompanying digital edition. The larger printed volume is identified as a complete scholarly edition, directed chiefly to classicists and encompassing all the classically connected poems by the selected authors. With the exception of Brooke’s pastoral paean ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ (memorable for the nostalgic enquiry, ‘Stands the Church clock at ten to three? / And is there honey still for tea?’), the shorter volume is confined to poems composed during and about the Great War. It is also intended to be accessible to a wider, less specialist readership. The covers of both printed volumes are aptly graced by war artist William Orpen’s haunting watercolours, Blown Up and Poilu and Tommy, works which themselves receive and connect with images from classical antiquity.
The First World War poets are a fitting, even obvious, choice of subject to inaugurate this series of commentaries. As Hardwick explains in her Introduction, they constitute a distinct genre of poetry and are studied and anthologized as such. Many of their poems have become popular standards of English verse, well represented in school and university curricula in the United Kingdom and widely quoted in the English-speaking world. More than half of the sixteen war poets commemorated in Westminster Abbey had received a formal classical education while others were keen autodidacts of ancient languages and literature. Their work is, unsurprisingly, replete with classical allusions and ‘receptions’. Spoilt for choice, the authors of the present study purposefully restrict their analysis to four ‘iconic’ writers (arguable in Sorley’s case), all touched by the macabre glamour of a tragically young death (their ages ranging from twenty to twenty-seven). But, as clearly stated, it is for their revealing differences that these particular writers have been selected: ‘They represent diverse social, literary, and cultural backgrounds and provide a significant range of educational experience, especially in relation to Greek and Roman texts and ideas’ (7-8).[1]
From his birth to his untimely burial on the Aegean island of Skyros, Rupert Brooke’s whole life was classically framed. The son of a classics schoolmaster, he experienced a traditional classical education, first at Rugby School and later at King’s College, Cambridge where he acted in the Cambridge Greek Play. His social circle was similarly gilt-edged and included members of the Bloomsbury Group and the Georgian poets. Men and women were equally captivated by his Grecian beauty. Gilbert Murray said he would ‘live in fame as an almost mythical figure’ and Brooke seems to have self-consciously cultivated his myth, promising to recite Sappho and Homer through the Cyclades as he sailed to Gallipoli. A dazzling, troubled, sexually ambiguous figure, he died from an infected mosquito bite before he reached Gallipoli and was buried under the moonlight, the air heavy with the scent of wild sage. Charles Sorley, the son of a Cambridge don, had a comparably privileged public-school education in classics at Marlborough College. He won a classical scholarship to Oxford, which he never took up as he was killed at the Battle of Loos in 1915, aged twenty. Less precious, and more pragmatic, about his classical inheritance than Brooke, he nonetheless read Homeric epic for pleasure and his ‘favourite text seems to have been the Odyssey’ (66). Isaac Rosenberg had probably the most interesting background of the four poets and certainly the most economically deprived. Born to Lithuanian-Jewish refugees, he grew up in London’s East End, steeped in the imagery of the Hebrew Bible and with Yiddish as his first language. He received a basic formal education but his knowledge of Greek literature was obtained through the intermediary of English translations. Despite his material disadvantages, Rosenberg was ‘an assiduous networker’ (83) whose ‘literary and artistic contacts were extensive’ (95). He died in the Battle of Arras in 1918. Wilfred Owen bridges the worlds of privilege and privation in that he attended fee-paying but not public schools. He was mostly self-educated in classics and always regretted that he did not go to Oxford and lacked any working knowledge of Greek. He was awarded the Military Cross and was killed in action a mere week before the Armistice.
Hardwick, Harrison, and Vandiver’s collective mission is to investigate how these distinctions of class and education directly influenced the poets’ access to Greek and Roman material, and how they helped shape their imaginative engagements with classical authors. In my view the carefully selective focus of the commentary admirably fulfils this objective. Moreover, both the Introduction and individual chapters duly acknowledge the polyphonic nature of First World War poetry, urging readers to pursue comparisons with other soldier-poets, with female poets, and with post-war poets such as H. D., T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Louis MacNeice, who produced seminal Modernist texts profoundly affected by the war and its aftermath.
Both volumes consist of an Introduction by Hardwick, establishing the aims and rationale of the new OCRC series, and chapters on each of the four poets: two short chapters by Harrison on Brooke and Sorley; a longer chapter on Rosenberg by Hardwick, and an even more substantial chapter on Owen by Vandiver (author of the pioneering study Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War, published in OUP’s Classical Presences series). Hardwick’s Introduction seeks to arm readers with a taxonomic lexicon, a list of terms they will encounter throughout the commentaries to describe different types of reception or classical connections – from explicit allusion, intertextuality, and metalepsis, through to riffing, glancing, and ghosting, the last a kind of palimpsestic form of reception. The Introduction to the larger volume also includes a potted history—valuable for the layperson and reception scholar alike—of Classical Reception as a thriving area of modern scholarship, one whose methodology, terminology, and assumptions are constantly evolving.
The three authors adhere to a consistent format in their individual chapters: a biographical summary, focusing on the poet’s education and sociocultural background, precedes close textual analysis. Each of the poems discussed is printed in its entirety (unless it is too fragmentary to be useful) and the date and known circumstances of its composition are provided along with publication details. ‘Paramaterial’, i.e. evidence external to the text, such as correspondence, is listed together with information on relevant archives and repositories. Then follows a formal analysis of the poem, reception commentary, and often a brief account of ‘associated’ works which contain echoes of, or offer insights into, the poem.
Looking back at the Spanish Civil War and the ‘Theban army’ of international recruits, who were mostly too young to have served in the Great War, Ronald Blythe wrote in 1963 that ‘the battle noises from Spain in the summer of 1936 produced in … volunteer soldiers spiritual reactions which would have shocked Wilfred Owen and pleased Rupert Brooke.’ He was invoking a familiar dichotomy between the romanticism of Brooke’s poetry and the stark realism of Owen’s. While the OCRC commentaries do not try to deconstruct this dichotomy, they do offer a more nuanced appreciation of Brooke and Owen’s attitudes to the war as discernible in their deployment of classical material. In particular, Vandiver provides a fascinating wider context for understanding ‘the most famous example of classical reception in First World War poetry’ (168), namely Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. She reveals Owen’s interest in, and personal experience of, the exhilaration associated with Homeric aristeia, citing as evidence the closing lines of his poem ‘Spring Offensive’ and a letter he wrote to his mother in October 1918, describing the action for which he won the MC. She also uncovers a fragmentary poem which indicates that ‘at some point in 1917 Owen was quoting an English version of dulce et decorum est unironically’ (279). Vandiver highlights the twin paradox that Owen’s most enduring poem, broadly accepted as straightforwardly anti-war and even anti-classical, may actually reflect a transient mood rather than an implacable position, and that his apparent indictment of the Horatian tag has itself become canonical. It is the jingoistic misappropriation of dulce et decorum est, plucked from its original context (Odes 3.2) and denuded of nuance, that Owen deplores, branding the practice ‘the old Lie’. And yet his poem has now become a barrier to reading the Horatian ode with fresh eyes – a consequence that bears out Paul Fussell’s observation in The Great War and Modern Memory: ‘At the same time the war was relying on inherited myth, it was generating new myth, and that myth is part of the fiber of our own lives.’
The Great War undeniably exerts a powerful fascination within our cultural psyche. It was a war of peculiarly modern horror and proportion often consciously construed and poetically configured in terms appropriated from classical mythology. The inaugural OCRC volumes thus help to contextualize, and deepen our understanding of, some of the war’s best-known poetry. The general reader, and conceivably the professional classicist, might be a little daunted by the various taxonomies of classical reception but, on the whole, the authors do a good job of steering us through the terminology and referring back to the definitions supplied in the Introduction. Nor do they shy away from addressing certain ironies and pitfalls implicit in attempts to mine a given poem for classical presences. One such irony is that any investigation of a poet’s so-called ‘low-intensity’ awareness of ancient texts requires a high-intensity awareness, a vigilance and keenness of perception honed by deep and broad exposure to the classical canon. Among the lurking pitfalls of trying to pinpoint a distinctly classical allusion, and evaluate its significance to the poet, is the sheer variety of non-classical source material which may be in the creative mix, a phenomenon known as ‘thick reception’.
‘How and at what point new writers and new readers enter that “thick” network of references and experiences is’, Hardwick declares, ‘at the centre of activities of reading and analysing classical receptions and underlies OCRC commentaries’ (4). An intriguing example of ‘thick reception’, of the dynamic interplay of reference and remembering, may be found in a famous quotation which prefaced the Order of Service for the unveiling of the Great War poets’ memorial in Westminster Abbey: ‘The lamps are going out all over Europe; we shall not see them lit again in our life-time.’ Although it was not published until 1925, Edward Grey’s remark, originally shared with a friend in the pre-war summer dusk, has endured as a proleptic elegy for the generation to which these poets belonged. Grey had been a student of ‘Greats’ at Balliol, albeit a resolutely indolent one, and his words have an almost prophetic Virgilian resonance. Perhaps that is why, in 1927, Virginia Woolf, a largely self-taught classicist, referenced the line in her novel To the Lighthouse: ‘One by one the lamps were all extinguished, except that Mr Carmichael, who liked to be awake a little reading Virgil, kept the candle burning rather longer than the rest.’ More poignantly, the eponymous hero of her novel Jacob’s Room, classically educated and doomed to die in the Great War, stands before the Acropolis as darkness descends and the narrator tells us: ‘Now one after another lights were extinguished. Now great towns – Paris – Constantinople – London – were black as strewn rocks … the wind was rolling the darkness through the streets of Athens.’
Authors and Titles
Greek and Roman Antiquity in First World War Poetry: Making Connections
Introduction (Lorna Hardwick)
1. Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) (Stephen Harrison)
2. Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895-1915), (Stephen Harrison)
3. Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918) (Lorna Hardwick)
4. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) (Elizabeth Vandiver)
Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen: Classical Connections
Introduction (Lorna Hardwick)
1. Rupert Brooke (Stephen Harrison)
2. Charles Hamilton Sorley (Stephen Harrison)
3. Isaac Rosenberg (Lorna Hardwick)
4. Wilfred Owen (Elizabeth Vandiver)
Notes
[1] Page numbers refer to the larger scholarly edition.