POETS WHO SING IN WAR TIME

Evening Star, Issue 23699, 5 October 1940, Page 4

POETS WHO SING IN WAR TIME

“ A literary monthly which publishes a fair amount of verse reports that since the outbreak of war it has been practically flooded out with poetical MSS. Other journals have likely had a similar experience,” says the ‘ Glasgow Herald.’ In time of war, it appears, the writing of verse increases greatly in this country, thereby showing that poetry is tile “ natural national form of self-expression.” Many of the MSS. are being posted to editorial desks from the military camps and depots at home and abroad, and from offices and the workshop bench. So far as can be observed from the comparatively meagre amount of published material as yet available, the writers are expressing individual reactions to war, including reaffirmations of the love of Nature and of the rights of man, and in style the traditionalists are encroaching on the experimentalists. The clear-cut emotions engendered by war, the stark vision given of love, death, separation, the beauty of the earth, the brevity of life, the fanaticism, the evil, and the sublime courage of men call for a simple form of expression, and English poetry will benefit to-day if it is purged of some of its recent arid obscurities.

One cannot foretell in what direction the current of verse will flow. In 1914-18 it flowed from idealistic patriotism and full-throated praise of the soldier-poet’s native soil to devastating criticism, in the poems of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen, of the horrors of trench warfare. During the past 22 years almost every new poet has employed imagery drawn from the Great War, and has expressed horror of war in all its aspects. So poets .face this war with their eves open to all its physical conditions,' and unfitted or unwilling to write martial odes in the old conventional style.

Bat there are several positive things they can do without hurt to their art or talent. They can plead against the calculated brutality of the Nazi conduct of war; they can rediscover the bedrock of the British 'soul and character, and give it resounding voice; they can substitute a positive faith for the scepticism and the langours of their immediate predecessors. They can, indeed, assist greatly in bringing the eternal verities before tbe attention of their countrymen. And in explorations of the secret places of the heart they can bring eomfort and solace to the anguished, hope to the shattered, and courage to those who act and endure.