Teaching World War I Poetry-Comparatively

College Literature, Summer 2005 by Norris, Margot

In his magisterial book, A War Imagined: The First World War and English Culture, Samuel Hynes describes the challenge that World War I posed to art. "Reality had changed, in fundamental ways that called into question the assumptions on which art, and civilization itself, had been based" (1990, 11), he writes. This insight has always shaped my approach to the poetic experiments of the canonical figures I teach in my required upper-division course on "Anglo-American Modernism." This large lecture class confronts undergraduates with the difficult texts ofT. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, H.D., Djuna Barnes, and others. Students readily grasp the notion that writers shaken by a cataclysmic four-year war would feel impelled to develop new forms and devices for conveying a post-traumatic vision of the modern world. But a curious problem emerges when the High Modernists and the trench poets are taught side by side in the same syllabus. Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and the other British soldier-poets appear so much more conventional, formally, and so much less brilliantly experimental, than the Eliot of The Waste Land, the Pound of Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, the Woolf of Mrs. Dalloway, and the Barnes of Nightwood. This emergence of such a disparity in the classroom is interesting because it harks back to some of the controversies between British poets with different aesthetic and ideological allegiances at the time of the war and in its aftermath. These controversies culminated, as we remember, in W. B. Yeats s infamous marginalization of trench poetry on poetic and aesthetic grounds.1 But in the classroom, this problem of poetic evaluation is best addressed by considering it in light of the different aesthetic and ideological pressures on the trench poets or soldier poets that can be historically and culturally contextualized.

One highly productive response to this problem is to teach the British trench poets side by side with the German soldier-poets of the First World War. Like their British counterparts, the German poets too needed to present a new vision of reality, as Hynes has called it (1990,11). And for the soldier-poets who saw mechanized combat on both sides of the trenches, this challenge was not merely aesthetic, but also ethical and ideological. The problem of inventing new forms for a new reality was further intensified by the immense volume of poetry stimulated almost instantly by the outbreak of World War I. Reliable estimates suggest that close to 50,000 poems were written daily in Germany as well as in Britain during the first month of the War, August 1914.2 Not surprisingly, much of this poetry was highly patriotic in sentiment and often amateur in form. But the serious soldier-poets of World War I met the challenge of representing the new reality inaugurated by the war by engaging in their own poetic struggles with the received and emergent aesthetic traditions of their day. These traditions offered a variety of acceptable and unacceptable ideological options to both English and Continental poets writing in the early decades of the twentieth century. One outcome of these struggles was that the British poets generally rejected the new forms offered by an ideologically problematic avant-garde, and retreated instead to the pastoralism of Georgian poetry for their forms. The German poets, in contrast, were able to modify Continental avant-garde techniques, such as those offered by a robust Expressionism, into poetic strategies that produced far more radical expressions of the war experience. This difference was produced by the very different political implications offered to the poets by their respective avant-garde options. British poets were appalled by the militarism and violence implicit in the Futurism and Vorticism that excited many of the pre-war modernists, while the Germans could look to an Expressionism that offered ways of presenting intense and dramatic feeling without sentimentality. I will offer more specific examples of this argument at a later moment. But I simply wish to suggest for now that when classroom discussion is guided at the outset by a thesis of the sort I am here proposing, student discussion and analysis of the poetic issues raised by combat poetry is quickly sharpened. And by putting the British trench poetry side by side with German trench poetry, it becomes possible to give students historically specific contexts for understanding the ways that poetry is constrained by traditions, institutions, belief systems, and prevailing aesthetic movements.

Teaching World War I poetry comparatively in this way is, of course, easiest and most plausible in the curricula of Comparative Literature programs and departments. But by using translations and putting bilingual texts for the German poets into a course pack, the course can be taught under a variety of rubrics in English departments as well. Furthermore, by adjusting the specificity of the context, such a course can be adapted to different instructional levels ranging from lower-division to senior and undergraduate honors seminars. In teaching the work of soldier-poets fighting on opposite sides of the trenches, my aim is to communicate three important concepts to students that I hope will offer them valuable applications beyond the realm of war writing. The first principle is that notions of an essential national character are both unhelpful and ideologically suspect in trying to account for the differences in poetry written across national divides. Students with exposure to culture criticism and postcolonial theory have generally been trained to appreciate the necessity to de-essentialize race, gender, and nationality. A comparative war literature course reinforces this insight and offers specific demonstrations even to students without theoretical training. The second point students are led to explore in some depth is that literature is not created ex nihilo out of some unmediated or pure experience, even an experience as dramatic and vivid as military combat. This opens the way for students to consider poetic traditions, cultural communities, publishing venues, economics and other historical conventions, factors, and institutions as determinants of how and what poets may be able to produce. Third, we consider the ideological inflections of literary and cultural enterprises as carriers of value and ethical judgments that may be particularly charged and consequent in a wartime atmosphere.