Double sorrow: Proleptic Elegy and the End of Arcadianism in 1930s Britain

Twentieth Century Literature, Summer, 2003 by Patricia Rae

(38.) Some writers made the point about the inadequacy of pastoral nostalgia in this context by discrediting the compensatory potential of a frequent metonym for Arcadian England: the manor house. Consider here Sassoon's skepticism about the worth of Nutwood Manor in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Winifred Holtby's charting of the demise of Maythorpe Hall in South Riding.

(39.) Compare the sentiments of the poet Gerald Sanger:"This fateful year the crowds will not assemble / To pay their loving tribute to the shrine / Of that lost war we thought to be the last."

(40.) Note, for example, Clement Attlee's remark, in the parliamentary debates of November 28, 1939, that "while planning for war we have to plan for peace" (qtd. in Brooke 3).

(41.) "If we reject the present," notes Harry Levin, "we must choose between the past and the future, between an Arcadian retrospect and an Utopian prospect" (8). The practical orientation of the "forward-looking Utopian," Auden wrote in 1948, is at odds with the passive fatalism of the "Arcadian dreamer" ("Dingley Dell and the Fleet" in The Dyer's Hand 410). Raymond Williams's description of a decisive "moment" in the progress of any radical movement aptly describes the spirit of British leftism in the early 1940s: "[I]n every kind of radicalism the moment comes when any critique of the present must choose its bearings, between past and future" (36).

(42.) One example is the GPO propaganda film "Britain at Bay"; see the description in Brown 51. For poems resurrecting the promise of Arcadian renewal, see Latham, Helen Robinson, and Kenmark.

(43.) See Labour Party 144. See also the official publication from the 1940 conference: Labour Party, The Old World and the New Society (1942). These sentiments are identical to those in Brenda F. Skene's proleptic elegy "After the War."

(44.) As reported, for example, in a publication by an organization called Mass Observation: "The prime consideration at the back of most people's minds is that the muddle which followed the last war should not be repeated" (77). See also 30, 39, 43, and especially 46: "The only way out is to build up a picture of the coming peace which is different from the last and calls for a different personal outlook." Note also the anecdote about Winston Churchill's encounter with a soldier, heading off from the south coast on the eve of D day. In the words of Ernest Bevan, who accompanied the prime minister to the coast, "The one question the soldiers put to me ... was 'Ernie, when we have done this job for you are we going back on the dole? ... But the Prime Minister answered: 'No, you are not'" (Addison 242). Addison records other examples of this attitude in 163, 165, 183, and 184.

(45.) See note 6.

(46.) For a discussion of a range of such gestures, see Eng and Kazanjian.

Works cited

Addison, Paul. The Road to 1945: British Politics and the Second World War. London: Quarter, 1977.

Allot, Kenneth. "Men Walk Upright." Twentieth Century Verse 11 (July 1938): 60.