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Showing posts with label poets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poets. Show all posts
By which I obviously mean the First World War since neither before or since has our perception of a war been so influenced by literary output, particularly of outstanding poetry. Since most British poets and writers seem to have served on the Western Front, the literature has contributed to the country's obsession with that part of the war, important but not the only one. Even the lavish centenary celebrations last year have not changed that attitude much.
Furthermore, because of the high calibre of the literary output we do think of the First World War as being unparalleled in horror. I have no desire to go into a discussion about the technological developments that had made the war different from many others though the truth is that it was not till the Second World War that more people had died because of enemy action than because of diseases. As Paul Delany points out in his biography of Rupert Brooke, Fatal Glamour,
in the Gallipoli campaign, bloody as it was, two-thirds of he two hundred thousand Allied casualties were caused by disease rather than enemy action.One of those was Rupert Brooke who died of septicemia, caused by a mosquito bite and exacerbated by general weakness and low immunity.
It always seemed to me rather touching that the wonderful memorial to the Camel Corps on the Embankment, commemorates all the dead, whether in battle, of wounds or disease.
Fatal Glamour is an interesting biography and deals with Brooke as he was, warts or feet of clay and all, much of which was hidden for many years by the people who published his poetry, letters and a few biographies. The image of the golden boy (and he really was extraordinarily good looking), the poet (he certainly was talented as several of the best poems show), the warrior (that is more dubious but not for lack of trying) being struck down as he went to war for his country and for Western civilization had to prevail.
There is no question, there were many faults in Brooke and his personality had many problems and episodes of instability. Would he have overcome them, had he survived the war or would he have descended into manic depression, which is one possible explanation for his break-down in 1912 and his behaviour afterwards? None can tell. No more can we tell whether his talent would have developed into something truly magnificent or whether he would have become another second-rate poet like the other Georgian poets? Would his literary talent have stayed with the war like Sassoon's did or moved forward like Graves's did? We can but speculate and, sensibly, Paul Delaney does very little of it. There is so little to go on.
He does make a very interesting point about the role of Brooke and the other poets and writers, people who came from a class that had not, traditionally, sent its sons to war and who, therefore, reacted with greater horror to what they faced.
Rupert's death would have counted for much less if he had been a conscript. As a volunteer, it mattered little that he had died of illness just before his fellow officers were mowed down by the Turks. He had chosen to face death for his country; his country had not chosen for him. And he had volunteered as a poet, who in his war sonnets had expressed the volunteer's creed of self-sacrifice. Nor did all war poetry need to be of that kind: the poets of disillusion - Sassoon, Graves, Owen - had been volunteers, too.Numbers of volunteers went down as the news from the Western front and Gallipoli came in and by 1916 those who maintained that the war could not be fought or won without conscription were politically victorious. The idea that had been proclaimed as un-British for decades became acceptable and by 1939 taken for granted.
The 1914 - 15 generation of volunteers had a unique moral authority, sandwiched between the professionals of the British Expeditionary Force and the conscripts of 1916 - 18. No other belligerent country had met its wartime needs for soldiers in the British way; not coincidentally, none of those countries produced a comparable generation of poets. Whatever the excesses of Rupert's war poems, he still had his place in that lyrical flowering, without precedent before or since.
Very remiss of this blog not to note the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the great poet, essayist and conservative thinker, T. S. Eliot yesterday. As it happens, I am writing this in London Library, of which he was President from 1952 to 1964 and which has recently benefited greatly from the generosity of his widow, Valerie Eliot. Indeed, the new section of the library is called after the great man though I should have preferred it to be known as Old Possum House. Ah well, cannot have everything.
A few other links on the subject: the Academy of American Poets, the Poetry Foundation and the Nobel Prize website, which also has his acceptance speech.
And, for conservative thinkers and readers, here is Roger Scruton's brilliant essay on Eliot as a conservative mentor.
T. S. Eliot was indisputably the greatest poet writing in English in the twentieth century. He was also the most revolutionary Anglophone literary critic since Samuel Johnson, and the most influential religious thinker in the Anglican tradition since the Wesleyan movement. His social and political vision is contained in all his writings, and has been absorbed and reabsorbed by generations of English and American readers, upon whom it exerts an almost mystical fascination—even when they are moved, as many are, to reject it. Without Eliot, the philosophy of Toryism would have lost all substance during the last century. And while not explicitly intending it, Eliot set this philosophy on a higher plane, intellectually, spiritually, and stylistically, than has ever been reached by the adherents of the socialist idea.It is very well worth reading in full.
Eliot attempted to shape a philosophy for our times that would be richer and more true to the complexity of human needs than the free-market panaceas that have so often dominated the thinking of conservatives in government. He assigned a central place in his social thinking to high culture. He was a thorough traditionalist in his beliefs but an adventurous modernist in his art, holding artistic modernism and social traditionalism to be different facets of a common enterprise. Modernism in art was, for Eliot, an attempt to salvage and fortify a living artistic tradition in the face of the corruption and decay of popular culture.
News comes of two incredibly principled poets, who, one assumes, fight like anything for their various fees and royalties, withdrawing from the T. S. Eliot poetry prize, because ... oh fie ... it is now sponsored by nvestment management firm Aurum Funds. Oh, oh, oh. Smelling salts someone, please.
The Poetry Book Society negotiated the three-year sponsorship deal with Aurum earlier this year. The deal followed the withdrawal of its Arts Council funding – a move protested by over 100 poets including Carol Ann Duffy and Simon Armitage.TH is a little confused. It would appear that when "such institutions" give money voluntarily to sponsor a poetry competition, that is wrong and evil but if money is extracted from them by the state in the form of taxes and then handed over in the form of subsidy, that is good.
Kinsella told the Bookseller that he "fully" understood why the poetry organisation had looked elsewhere for funding, "given the horrendous way they were treated, but as an anticapitalist in full-on form, that is my position".
"Hedge funds are at the very pointy end of capitalism, if I can put it that way," he added.
Oswald, who pulled her collection Memorial from the prize on Tuesday, believes that "poetry should be questioning not endorsing such institutions".
All one can say is that it is a good thing that people like Leonardo da Vinci or Michelangelo did not think along those lines. Neither did T. S. Eliot, as it happens. He spent a good part of his life working in a bank and then running a publishing firm that made profits.
The poet, essayist, MP, irascible Catholic, Hilaire Belloc was born on July 27, 1870 in France but became a British subject in 1902.
There are so many aspects to Belloc's life, some less pleasant than others that only a very long posting would do anything like justice to the man. It seems wrong on his birthday to do anything but to celebrate him as a poet but it is difficult to decide on the poems, those well-known and delightful children's ones or one of the West Sussex ones?
As this is the Conservative History blog, perhaps one should stick to the political poems, few of whom are better than Lord Lundy [scroll down], whofrom his earliest yearsWell, we know what happened to Lord Lundy:
Was far too freely moved to Tears.
It happened to Lord Lundy then,It was that terrible tendency to be far too freely moved to tears.
As happens to so many men:
Towards the age of twenty-six,
They shoved him into politics;
In which profession he commanded
The Income that his rank demanded
In turn as Secretary for
India, the Colonies, and War.
But very soon his friends began
To doubt is he were quite the man:
They let him sink from Post to Post,What could be more conservative and, therefore, anti-utopian and anti-political than Belloc's famous quatrain about an election:
From fifteen hundred at the most
To eight, and barely six--and then
To be Curator of Big Ben!. . .
And finally there came a Threat
To oust him from the Cabinet!
The Duke -- his aged grand-sire -- bore
The shame till he could bear no more.
He rallied his declining powers,
Summoned the youth to Brackley Towers,
And bitterly addressed him thus--
"Sir! you have disappointed us!
We had intended you to be
The next Prime Minister but three:
The stocks were sold; the Press was squared:
The Middle Class was quite prepared.
But as it is! . . . My language fails!
Go out and govern New South Wales!"
The accursed power which stands on PrivilegeReaders of the blog may well have other favourites. They are welcome to post them.
(And goes with Women, and Champagne and Bridge)
Broke and Democracy resumed her reign:
(Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne)
As today is the anniversary of the great Victorian poet's death, Tory Historian decided to post a quotation or two. Naturally enough, there will be no references to valleys of death or canons on various sides, as that poem is a little too well known even by people who have no idea of what it is really about. (Incidentally, the same battle saw the charge of the Heavy Brigade, which achieved its aim with the participants coming back more or less intact. No poems were written about that.)
Here are a few gems, randomly chosen:
He makes no friends who never made a foe.
There lives more faith in honest doubt, believe me, than in half the creeds.
We cannot be kind to each other here for even an hour. We whisper, and hint, and chuckle and grin at our brother's shame; however you take it we men are a little breed.
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Far it be from Tory Historian to suggest that these and others of his memorable lines could be studied with some profit by politicians nowadays.
Aficionados of the classic detective story will recall that Patricia Wentworth's formidable heroine, Miss Silver, was inordinately fond of quoting Lord Tennyson's apposite phrases.
Tory Historian is very fond of St Pancras station, its combination of exoticism with the Eurostar trains and the longest champagne bar in the world with the more homely commuter trains and the large shopping, eating and drinking area.
One of the best sights is this charming statue to Sir John Betjeman, poet, writer, campaigner and all-round Good Egg, besides the Eurostar trains. Around the statue it is written: Sir John Betjeman 1906 - 1984, Poet and Saviour of this glorious station. A great memorial even apart from his poems.
