War Poet

New Zealand Listener, Volume 19, Issue 474, 23 July 1948, Page 12

War Poet

7 FIRE AMONG THE RUINS. By Stuart Piggott. Geoffrey Cumberlege: The Oxford University Press. N the 1914-1918 war a whole generation of poets-Grenfell, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves-found a new and_ terfible reality in war. . The poets of the recent war came to it with an inherited cynicism_ and disillusion which, at least in part, cushioned them against the harsh blows of fate. Thus, although the moral and physical’ predicaments were both more desperate than in 1914-18, no artist found it in his heart to treat the recent war as a melodrama. Modern war poetry has the tougher fibre even if less passion. And’ it is less querulous. Stuart Piggott, though a comparatively minor poet, shares the stoicism of his generation, or the indifference, He is aft accomplished, an able, rather than a supreme poet. But poet he is, and it is the war which fills his quiet meditative verse with sadness if not with anger. A literary poet, the allusion, to classical mythology or to "Arnold on the Hinksey ridge," comes to him naturally, without any hint of a mandarin exclusiveness, Several of his poems are, in a sense, occasional: he broods oft Monte Cassino and wonders whether the age of its 8th Century founder was any more dark thag our own when -the guns roar and spit across the rayished vineyards The opening poem, The Fire, is in vety similar mood to those five poems, The Ruins, which, blitz-inspired, closed the poetic career of Laurence Binyon with an unlooked-for greatness. Many of Stuart Piggott’s poems are closely linked to place: "The Western Himalayas," "North Indian Landscape," and "Cairo" afe* three such glimpses of a (continued on next page)

(continued from previous page) time "and a-~place, man rather than nature holding the focus of attentionWhile in Shepheard’s their young officers with pleasant stupid bronzed faces talk shop in the bar, the world seen satisfied through shallow blue eyes, Piggott’s negative virtue is his good taste. Not a word jars anywhere in any poem, but only a few of the words are memorable. His mairt positive virtue is his ability to plan qa poem. Each of these twenty-six poems is homogeneous in mood, reaches without check its prepared conclusion. Another virtue is his modesty: he never bites off -more than he can chew. ‘Thus he speaks well, if with muted passion, for -a tired, frightened England this is our land empty, yet crowded: a people unsure and rootless: THE STARS AND STRIPES PRESIDENT ROOSEVELT. By R. &. Kiernan. Harrap. \VELL-PROPORTIONED, straightforward, unrevealing, R. H. Kiernan’s biography of America’s greatest president (we are bound to think so) is’ what an older generation would have called "workmanlike." It does a plain job well. It could have done with rather scantier quotations from Franklin Delano Reosevelt’s speeches, though all of these are in point. At the end of it we are very little nearer to understanding Roosevelt himself, but we have learned a great deal about his actions. Surely there must have been a private Roosevelt! The immense strength of Roosevelt’s personal qualities-his astuteness as a politician and his unfailingly good judgment simultaneously of two most ticklish contexts, the American political situation and the trend of international eventsdoes emerge in this book, even if the outlines are not sharp and clear. Roosevelt’s skill’in assessing American public opinion and going to the utmost limit of what it would stand for is, historically, the factor which saved the democratic world, at least in its first struggle with totalitarianism. Mr. Kiernan touches only lightly on the event which broke Roosevelt’s career in half, his infantile paralysis. Nor does he seem able to decide which Roosevelt was the greater-the liberal capitalist who broke the slump with the New Deal, the commander-in-chief of the United States armed forces (he wore the title no less appropriately than Washington or Lincoln) who prepared his country for war in spite of itself and then won that war, or the cripple who triumphed over a tragic disability.

David

Hall