Introduction

Hello, I'm Peter Howarth.

I'm senior lecturer in modern literature at Queen Mary University of London,

and this is a series of talks about the first World War.

What I want to do in this first talk is to think a bit about why poetry? Why poetry?

Why is poetry needed and wanted in the war?

Because there's a basic conflict in the idea of war poetry between what war is

and what poetry is.

And through that conflict, I want to explore

the way that there are so many layers of conflict within these war poems.

It's not just England and Germany.

It's

the conflicts of the poet with himself, usually or herself.

Conflicts of the poet, with the audience back at home,

conflicts of the poet with his or her loyalties

to country or to religion.

And so what we're going to explore is the way that

the conflict is not just out there on the battlefield,

but in the process of the person writing these poems.

The core difficulty that I mentioned then is the conflict between war and poetry.

Since time began, wars have been fought and their chaotic and confusing

and dangerous, and the first World War really amplifies all of those things.

They're chaotic because in the war you don't know

exactly where you are and exactly where the enemy.

Our first World War conditions, um,

give you a great lack of visibility of your enemy.

You're out there in the in the trenches.

Um,

and there's this flat stretch of no man's

land and everyone's firing artillery at one another.

Um, you can't see where the bullets are coming from,

so there's a kind of physical confusion and disorientation.

And with that confusion also comes the confusion that

as the trench line shifts over the years,

you are often occupying trenches that used to belong to the other side.

And maybe we're yours right at the beginning of the war.

So there's a feeling of living

in a place which is haunted by the dead of both sides.

And many soldiers report this experience of feeling closer to the

other side than they do to the folks back at home.

So confusion,

um, there's also moral confusion going on in a war.

You're being forced to do stuff which in peacetime

would have you prosecuted and put in prison.

And yet, in war it's called glorious, and you're given medals for it.

And the Army is an institution which very

much encourages bonds of loyalty between soldiers because they

know that inside each soldier is possibly being torn

apart by what they're being asked to do.

The acts of killing

of another fellow person.

So these conflicts are morally confusing as well.

And then, of course, they're dangerous.

And the First World War took that to new

levels with the levels of post traumatic stress disorder

that came from being under fire and being paralysed

and being able unable to do anything about it.

The first were World War, called that shellshock

against the confusions of War. We have poems,

poems which are supposed to be art

poems which are supposed to have order on purpose and beauty to them.

And there's a real moral contradiction here in writing a poem.

You are in some sense, trying to come to terms with what you're writing about.

You're not necessarily trying to justify it, but you're trying to recognise it.

You're trying to give it a name. You're trying to put it in some kind of perspective.

But there's a question whether you can do that with war.

Making any sense of war is in some sense, not being true to what the war is.

Uh, war is confusing and chaotic,

and there you are making some kind of order about it.

So the phrase war poetry is a kind of oxymoron, a conflict in terms.

There's also a real conflict here for First World War poets.

Many of them were products of the new state education systems.

Um, they were being given an education which told them how to write poetry at school,

and their textbooks were pretty unambiguous that to write great poetry,

you had to use high addiction,

elevated words and give everything a sense of beauty and purpose and order.

I'm just going to read a couple of quotations to you.

This is one from a book called The Art of Diversification.

Um,

which says the substantial and vital function of poetry

will be to make patterns out of life.

Well,

that sounds great if you're making a pattern out

of life that's already seems reasonable and organised.

But how do you make a pattern out of the war?

How do you make a pattern out of traumatic experience, which might be so dangerous

to your mental health that you can't think about it.

And that's why maybe you're in shell shock

or another one by a chap called Brewer called author Matori,

which is how to write poems.

And this one is important because it was one we know

Wilfred Owen bought and taught himself how to write poetry through,

Bruce says.

This real poetry chooses picturesque images

and quaint words

and epithets that would be out of place in prosaic description.

In other words, don't whatever you do,

write about things realistically like as you would do in prose.

Many words are protected by poetic association

from vulgar use.

So Brewer says that poetry ought to use a high and, uh, impressive language,

one with a lot of history and tradition behind it.

It shouldn't be using the language of the street

well, with that kind of background behind you,

those are not ideal instructions for teaching you how to

write war poetry about the reality of blood and guts

and mess tins

and chaos.

And the real problem behind that is,

if poetry is supposed to use high addiction and to use

regular forms and to make a pattern out of things.

It is always going to struggle not to make the physical mess of the war

into something much more coherent than it actually was.

So what we see in a lot of first World War poetry is a conflict within the poem itself.

The conflict between what the poem is talking about,

the messiness and the forms of the poem which is putting them in order.

These are poems which are dealing with the reality which can't

fully be contained by what the poem is made of.

This means we should perhaps think about war poems in a

different way to the one you may have unconsciously been using.

A lot of the time,

people think that the war poets had a message which

they wanted to get across to the people at home,

and they then decorated their message in sounds and informs

and in rhymes.

And so the job of you as the reader is to take the poem and decode

the message to get the message that the poet was always trying to give you.

But that means the form is basically only ever an amplification of the message

and all you can say about it. Is the rhymes really emphasis?

What Owen is feeling here, or the rhythm's really emphasis.

What's as soon as feeling here?

And I think that the forms are ways of processing what's going on.

They're not ways necessary to amplify the message there

ways to work out just what is happening here,

ways to try to come to terms with things.

And sometimes when the forms break down

their ways to recognise that you can't process it,

that it doesn't make full sense

their ways of trying to get a certain feeling, which maybe can't exist in words.

Sometimes the words say one thing,

and the form says another.

So it's incredibly important to pay attention to the forms

of World War one poems not because they amplify the message

only, but sometimes because they're providing another set of messages,

or connotations, which cut against what the words are ostensibly saying.

And that's particularly important for World War one poetry,

because they're dealing often with very, very traumatic material.

When we come to look at dot net decorum s, that's what we're going to see

having an artificial form,

a form which doesn't fit the mess that you're writing about, um,

looks like a problem.

It looks like you're going to write bad poetry because you're going

to be framing it and making it artificial and stiff and stilted.

And this is actually something that Owens poems highlight.

The forms are very loudly out, their their manifest, their very, very audible.

I think they're also because World War

One poets need to deal with something horrible

and so having a form which is definitely not quite fitting. The content

is a way of keeping that content at a distance.

It's a way of registering it, but also not having to relive it perfectly

if you like.

A lot of first World War poetry is like a horror film,

which then dissolves into pixels to show you that it's a

film and then comes back into shot again and then dissolves.

It's showing you the horror,

but it's also showing you it's registering of the horror,

and that goes back to what I was saying at the beginning.

War poems are not messages that are decorated by poetic forms.

The forms are helping them process, hold the content, deal with it, register it,

work out what they feel about it.

So what we get in first World War poems is

the truth is always more than one conflict going on.

There's the conflict on the battlefield,

but a lot of conflicts with the poet and

himself conflicts with the poets and other poets.

Um, how do you write like Keats when your material is not at all kitchen,

um, conflicts with the folks back home, um conflicts with the basic traumas of war,

conflicts with the officials, conflicts with patriotism,

conflicts with the bureaucracy

and sometimes conflicts with your own family,

the people who are waiting for you to return home safely.

Ultimately, there's also conflict within yourself about your own guilt.

A lot of these first World War poets are

also soldiers who may be protesting against the war,

but they have been involved in something that has got people they love killed

and a poem like Delta Decorum EST is processing

that guilt

and trying to deal with it.

And so all of this is backed up by the ultimate conflict between war and poetry,

between the mess and the chaos of war and the need for

poetry to make some kind of sense of it without justifying it,

or maybe by justifying it

and then ending up itself in some state of moral confusion.

And that's what we're going to see with the forms of World War One poems.