ONE DOES not immediately think of the war poetry of 1939-45 as representing an important period of political involvement. However, in the work of Douglas, Keyes and Lewis we can see almost a model of the tensions located in a commitment to the poet’s individuality and a growing awareness of political realities in the wider world. In reaching such a judgement we have to make continual qualifications since we are not dealing with consistently developed literary theory, though the poets involved were certainly politically conscious. In fact, the poetry was profoundly multi-dimensional; the very best was that which grew from tension. The war involved the individual and yet it was often an alienating, looking-glass world. The poet was forced into a historical consciousness and yet lived for the moment. He travelled to Africa, Europe and India and became more conscious of the history and feel of individual places in Britain.

     The Second World War for Auden and others represented a failure relative to their experience of the preceding decade. But for younger men the history and literature of the First World War came as readily to mind when Europe plunged back into chaos. This is important because it helps to explain the confusion felt by writers at the public desire for a literature of something like that of 1914-18. In fact, seen either as the continuation of Thirties politics or as a continuation of the First World War the early Forties could not and should not have produced writing of the same sort as that of Owen, Rosenberg or even Brooke. Frome either viewpoint important new dimensions had been added. Bernard Bergonzi has said:

The war of 1914-18 can still very properly be referred to by its original name of the Great War; for despite the greater magnitude of its more truly global successor, it represented a far more radical crisis in British civilisation. (Bernard Bergonzi, Heroes’ Twilight, London, 1965, p. 17.)

This was certainly true in so far as the Second World War represented a confirmation rather than a first awakening of how wrong things could go. It may also be true that the actual business of joining up was less strange and had more moral point than it did in 1914. And when the soldier poet spoke of the pleasures of comradeship or elation of combat it was not against a background of personal naïvetér about the horrors of war such as Sassoon describes in the Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man nor was it in the context of a growing division between the ignorant chauvinism of the people at home and the futile suffering of those in the trenches. When Owen spoke of the positive qualities of wartime experience in ‘Apologia pro Poemate Meo’ one feels him, in part, defending himself against misunderstanding by the complacent and the profiteers.

     Keith Douglas wrote of combat as a sort of test, and despite the weird isolation of the soldier both in his physical and moral surroundings he noted time for pleasure and admiration:

To see these tanks crossing country at speed was a thrill which seemed inexhaustible — many times it encouraged us, and we were very proud of our Crusaders; though we often had cause to curse them. (Keith Douglas, Alamein to Zem Zem, London, 1946, Penguin edition, 1966, p. 13.)

The situation for all poets after 1939 was very different and it may be because people have looked for a mere repetition of the particularities of trench poetry that the writing of 1939-45 has left many people dissatisfied and puzzled:

     When his [Keith Douglas’s] Collected Poems were first published in 1951, by Editions Poetry London Ltd., with notes and introduction, edited by John Waller and G. S. Fraser, he appeared primarily interesting, to most of his readers, as a ‘war-poet’, and as such seems to have been largely forgotten. (Ted Hughes, Introduction to Keith Douglas, Selected Poems, London, 1964, p. 11.)

To capture the genuine significance of Douglas and the other soldier poets we have to look with a wider knowledge of the causes and effects of the war and its overwhelming acts of mass destruction. But the act of recharacterising the particular horror and the particular moral insight of a poem like ‘Vergissmeinicht’ is by no means simple because the effect we want to achieve is not its diminution when seen against the emotional impact of Dresden, Dachau and Hiroshima but its enrichment.

     A process of critical ‘tacking’ between one valuation of Douglas’s position and another is already under way. Ted Hughes, with the advantage of hindsight, has tried to place him in an almost metaphysically stoical tradition:

The war brought his gift to maturity, or to a first maturity. In a sense war was his ideal subject: the burning away of all human pretensions in the ray cast by death. This was the vision, the unifying generalisation that shed the meaning and urgency into all his observations and particulars: not truth is beauty only, but truth kills everybody. (Hughes, op. cit. p. 13.)

But it is interesting that Douglas did not, in fact, explicitly generalise on these points. Compared with Sassoon, Douglas may have had little in terms of a stable, peaceful political ethos to contrast with his experience of war. But he did not therefore simplistically identify with the lot of, say, the Jews or civilian populations under bombardment or with men in peacetime who lead a similarly precarious existence. Indeed Geoffrey Hill has quoted effectively to show his vision of the ‘unique and alien existence of a man destined for, or engaged in Battle’. (Geoffrey Hill, ‘ “I in another place” ‘ Stand, Vol. 6, No. 4, p. 9.) After referring to passages from Alamein to Zem Zem and to ‘Cairo Jag’, ‘Dead Men’ and ‘How to Kill’, he continues:

. . . each of these phrases, far from asserting a ‘unifying generalisation’ about experience, conveys a sense of alienation, exclusion, of a world with its own tragi-comic laws, like Alice with all the sinister suggestions exaggerated. And much of the acuteness of the perception is in the recognition that not everyone has to go through with this; that two absolutely different worlds co-exist at about a day’s journey from each other. (Geoffrey Hill, op. cit., p. 9.)

In fact, though death fascinated Douglas, and death in wartime was obviously a perpetually haunting possibility, his response is nearly always personal and almost withdrawn in its meticulous calm. Observation, even of the horrific, is unemotive and the tone undeclamatory, often self-critical or questioning in a way that avoids the public modes of historical generalisation, moral exhortation and satire used by the poets of 1914-18. Though Sassoon was the only anti-war poet to achieve success during the course of the Great War one senses both in him, and in Owen, a feeling for a potential audience on whom a didactic style would not be lost. For Douglas, the looking-glass world of war created a different, perhaps more profound, alienation. The British public may not have been as ignorantly patriotic as in 19 14-18 but, at least as far as he could see, the aesthetic impact of the war was minimal and confused. Perhaps if he had lived to see more work by his contemporaries he would have felt his battle experience to be less isolating. But as it was he felt misunderstood:

. . . you say I fail as a poet, when you mean I fail as a lyricist. Only someone who is out of touch, by which I mean first hand touch, with what has happened outside England — and from a cultural point of view I wish it had affected English life more — could make that criticism. (Keith Douglas. Letter to John Hall, Collected Poems, London, 1966, p. 149.)

This was a ‘cultural’ tension with profound political overtones and it shows how a shifting consciousness affected style. The serious, withdrawn voice of Douglas and many of his fellow poets who shared something of his feeling for death has, I believe, been characteristic of much writing after 1945.

     It is here worth recalling Douglas’s prediction that the important Second World War poetry would come after the war. If this prediction is found to be meaningful it will demonstrate how the framework of poetry written between 1939-45 extends into the present and how present British poetry takes its concerns not simply from the obviously topical events and pressures but from the historical and psychological impact, particularly the enforced individualism, of the last war. It is worth quoting Douglas’s essay at length since it touches on so many problems. The concluding paragraphs are:

The poets who wrote so much and so well before the war, all over the world, find themselves silenced, or able to write on almost any subject but war. Why did all this happen? Why are there no poets like Owen and Sassoon who lived with the fighting troops and wrote of their experiences while they were enduring them?

The reasons are psychological, literary, military and strategic, diverse. There are such poets, but they do not write. They do not write because there is nothing new, from a soldier’s point of view, about this war except its mobile character. There are two reasons: hell cannot be let loose twice: it was let loose in the great war and it is the same old hell now. The hardships, pain and boredom; the behaviour of the living and the appearance of the dead, were so accurately described by the poets of the Great War that every day on the battlefields of the Western desert — and no doubt on the Russian battlefields as well — their poems are illustrated. Almost all that a modern poet on active service is inspired to write, would be tautological. And the mobility of modern warfare does not give the same opportunities for writing as the long routines of trench warfare. The poets behind the line are not war poets, in the sense of soldier poets, because they do not have the soldier’s experience at first hand. English civilians have not endured any suffering comparable to that of other European civilians, and England has not been heavily bombed long enough for that alone to produce a body of ‘war’ poetry.

Nor can we produce a body of long range poetry inspired by shocking news items. The poet at home can only make valuable comments on social and political issues, which he may do more easily, both because he can see more clearly and because the censor will be more lenient with him, in retrospect.

Meanwhile the soldiers have not found anything new to say. Their experiences they will not forget easily, and it seems to me that the whole body of English war poetry of this war, civil and military, will be created after the war is over. (Keith Douglas, Poets in This War, 23.4.71, p. 478.)

One’s first reaction to this piece is to notice Douglas’s consciousness of the problems of poetry in an extreme situation. For the average poet, perhaps even for himself, it was still difficult to locate the centre of the war for the purposes of poetic response. He had seen enough horrors to inspire dramatic battle poetry if that sort of reporting had seemed in place. But one feels no liberal withdrawal in Donald Davie’s sense of selling poetry short.

     First of all Douglas saw his situation in a historical perspective in which the dominating event was the Great War; his moral and political dilemma came not so much from the Thirties as from the period when the particular causes and methods of modern warfare were established. Secondly, even though he was in ‘the same old hell’ the mobility of modern war distanced the soldier both from ‘home’, and often from the enemy (as he pointed out in ‘How to Kill’). Thirdly, he seems to have believed that a response was possible and that it would come after the war. Lastly, he felt that the distancing effect of time would produce a greater understanding of war; earlier writers, despite being

. . . versed in the horrors of the current struggles in Spain, were curiously unable to react to a war which began and continued in such a disconcerting way (Douglas, Poets in This War.)

Of course, we do not know whether Douglas would have considered that what was actually written in the post-war period was the response he predicted. But one thing is clear and that is that if Douglas saw the realistic portrayal of battle as potentially tautological in time of war itself then he would hardly have seen it as a possible mode afterwards. The experience, understood and placed in perspective, would have to give rise to a more indirect response — or, put another way, to a response which accurately recorded the developing predicament of the British poet.

     It is significant in this argument that Douglas felt the aesthetic problems raised by the awareness of Europe — no ‘long range poetry’ — and yet he could not be chauvinistic. Consciousness of the ordeal of Europe he saw as necessary, yet he could not hitch an emotional ride on such knowledge. In his own work the dilemma produced a fascination with death and a stoicism which was perhaps a direct result of the tension between the events abroad and one who, as Hamilton puts it, had viewed himself as an ‘isolated artist’. (Ian Hamilton, A Poetry Chronicle, p. 61). Perhaps it was morbid compared with the political sensibility of Orwell — or even Auden — but Douglas was not alone in feeling:

To be sentimental or emotional now is dangerous to oneself and to others. To trust anyone or to admit any hope of a better world is criminally foolish, as foolish as it is to stop working for it. It sounds silly to say work without hope, but it can be done; it’s only a form of insurance; it doesn’t mean work hopelessly. (Douglas, Collected Poems, p. 150.)

And in eschewing the extremes of language of the new Apocalyptics Douglas was not making a gesture for sanity where that word may seem to imply an Audenesque belief in the ordering qualities of art, an implication one feels in Hamilton’s praise of his ‘determination to be sane in spite of this’. (Hamilton, A Poetry Chronicle, p. 58.) For the looking glass world, in a sense, depended on a wider social madness in which Douglas found himself. His use of contrasting normalities implies no particular acceptance of any:

But among these Jews I am the Jew
the outcast, wandering down the steep road
into the hostile dark square.
(‘Saturday Evening in Jerusalem’)

In the state of total alienation, that seemed to grow as he was forced to accept more and more the soldier’s role, he became a mere ‘figure writhing on the backcloth’ of a dance of death. But he had, too, the power to allocate death and in this he found the roots of a personal guilt that claimed neither scapegoat nor political justification:

NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears
and look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the waves of love travel into vacancy.
                       (‘How to Kill’)

Owen rarely observed his own moral complexity in this sort of way, nor his own ambivalence towards the act of killing, though in ‘Inspection’ he turned the irony against himself:

He told me afterwards, the damned spot
Was blood, his own. ‘Well, blood is dirt,’ I said.
                                              (‘Inspection’)

It was Rosenberg, with whom Douglas seems to have identified in particular (‘Rosenberg I only repeat what you were saying —’), who expressed a desire to remain intellectually in control of the war’s effects; to turn the ‘strange and extraordinary new conditions of this life’ into poetry: (letter to Laurence Binyon, quoted by Jon Silkin, Out of Battle, p. 271). Both Rosenberg and Douglas could accept a wide historical perspective on war as well as their own ambiguous involvement in it.

     We can trace, then, various elements in Douglas’s sense of death which make it difficult to tie to a definite formula. His identification with the Great War poets, with the European predicament, with his enemies, his comrades and, finally, with his own role in the Landscape with Figures create a moral particularity which must qualify Ted Hughes’s characterisation of it as a ‘generalisation’. Though dominated by death he remained bitter and confused by it, aware enough to keep anger, as much as reconciliation, in his voice:

I see men as trees suffering
or confound the detail and the horizon.
Lay the coin on my tongue and I will sing
of what the others never set eyes on.
                              (‘Desert Flowers’)

     There were many other poets who became fascinated by violence and death. Their pessimism and lack of traditional politics link them closer to Comfort and the pacifists than to the Thirties poets but, like Douglas, they were neither defeatist nor pro-Fascist — many were in the army. Even Sidney Keyes, whose attitude to death in both his poetry and prose often seems more dangerously morbid than Douglas’s, made a conscious association between the political situation, as he saw it, and the artist’s necessary individualism. Speaking of the failures inherent in identification with the state in political action he felt he had only one alternative, to

. . . dissociate ourselves from political development completely, and consider every individual, or even every situation, as a separate problem. There is no third way . . . (Sidney Keyes, ‘Notebook: 1942-43’, Minos of Crete, London, 1948, p. 158.)

He spoke, too, of the sense in which an artist could only follow social change; real community and real communication could only come in a restructured society. Ironically, this view has as much of Marxist theory in it as some of the Thirties’ theories which saw the poet both as prophet and reporter. Louis MacNeice could write:

But it is probably true that, for the production nowadays of major literature or of literature on a large scale, a sympathy is required of the writer with those forces which make for progress. The important events outside him must penetrate him in the same way as Euripides was penetrated by the Peloponnesian War or by the intellectual discoveries of the sophists. (Louis MacNeice, Modern Poetry, London, 1968, p. 204: first edition, 1938.)

Just four years later Keyes observed:

In an insecure, unplanned society such as ours, no one has a right to complain that art is obscure or out of touch with the people; this state of affairs is inevitable, and will remain so, as long as the structure of society itself stands between him and his potential audience. While the mass of the people are excluded from full participation in the necessary activities of society, among which artistic appreciation is one of the most important, all Art for the People will be bad art, and nearly all good art will be obscure and exclusive. (Keyes, ‘The Artist in Society’, Minos of Crete, p. 149.)

Growing up with a consciousness that states had ‘literally destroyed their own artists, without material loss’ (Keyes, ibid., p. 140) and entering a war in which the forces for progress had, in a sense, been shelved in a fight for survival, the poet perhaps naturally felt a special sort of threat and a special sort of disillusion with the functional view of art predominant in the Thirties. The philistinism both of fascist states and of the fight against fascism on the one hand and conscription into total war on the other paradoxically brought a new political consciousness to many artists. In this situation it is perhaps not surprising that both Douglas and Keyes held a primary interest in the nature of poetry as poetry. MacNeice had commented:

Good poets have written in order to describe something or to preach something — with their eye on the object or the end. (MacNeice, Modern Poetry, p. 4.)

The feeling here is of a crusade which nevertheless starts from an ivory tower. To the younger poet in wartime it seemed both that the crusade had failed and that the ivory tower was no protection. Particularly as a poet he stood isolated and vulnerable:

Nearly all artists have to choose the second way [individualism]; this has always been true, but now the choice is more pressing, since politics have invaded every sphere of life. Hence, the frankly anti-social attitude of so many artists today, the non-co-operation of the rest, the apathy of all about a war which is being fought — ultimately — to preserve our own values. We have given up hope of gaining anything except our own extinction (like the candles) from society and its expedients. (Keyes, ‘Notebooks’, p. 159.)

The ‘important events’ had indeed penetrated the sensibility of Keyes. And if there was a sense in which the fight for progress was never more important than in the war itself it was a measure of the trauma of the war that self-definition, withdrawal even, could reach the point where it seemed a plausible political act. From a relatively secure position Auden and the rest could go out to find politics. Auden, in the guise of a communist, wrote:

Comrades to whom our thoughts return,
Brothers for whom our bowels yearn
          When words are over;
Remember that in each direction
Love outside our own election
Holds us in unseen connection:
          O trust that ever.
                        (‘A Communist to Others’)

Keyes, although suffering from an equal degree of self-dramatisation, recorded how this sort of optimism went wrong:

I am the man who looked for peace and found
My own eyes barbed.
I am the man who groped for words and found
An arrow in my hand.
             (Keyes, ‘War Poet’, Collected Poems, p. 82.)

Thus, wartime fascination with death produced, explicitly, a critique of the Thirties.

The difference between a political line that one could choose and one which was imposed was crucial. For Douglas and Keyes such middleclass security as was possible in the Thirties was broken by pressure to join the armed forces. In terms of the poet’s personal experience this left few choices on moral or political grounds; to opt out or to join up and fight. In any case personal freedom was lost and one’s personal feelings about killing and being killed were brought to the foreground of imagination. Alun Lewis, however, had already had more direct contact with the effects of the political exploitation. More closely linked to a place of class tension by birth, his expression of the fatalistic atmosphere of the times and the alienating effect of army life is fuller than that of Keyes and possibly even than that of Douglas. Ian Hamilton quotes and comments as follows:

‘The industrialisation of Wales has ruled the Welsh people as tyrannically as Hitler is ruling the continent today,’ he was to write, and along with nearly every other notable Welsh writer of the period, Lewis grew up to a bitter resentment of the destruction by industry of the old continuous agricultural communities, the conscription of farmers to the servitude of pit and slum and, with the Depression, their forced migration to England, their near-starvation at home. (Ian Hamilton, Introduction to Alun Lewis, Selected Poetry and Prose, London, 1966, p. 9.)

     In seeking the moral centre of his involvement in violence it is interesting that, like Douglas, Lewis testified to the emotional impact of the Great War. But because he could neither enter the war as a hero, nor blindly as a cog in a machine, he illustrates clearly how impossible it was to reproduce the mental background of the poetry of the Great War:

Sometimes I am like dead wood, longing to be snatched up and crashed on the rocks, and pounded into the pulp of blood and khaki. But I’ve been worse in the past. This has only been a reminder of my mortality. Not the absolute and final thing. There may still be time to profit from it. I must go on writing, sometime. But it must be real. It mustn’t be a dogged persistence. It must be natural. We shouldn’t join up in a spirit of renunciation. The world doesn’t get better through that sort of heroism. 1914-18 showed that. What’s to do then? I’ve a terrible feeling that I shan’t be able to answer that question. I don’t want to kill. Is it a victory over myself, to go and kill, to do something terrific like bayoneting a man? Really I am uncivilised. I don’t accept in my soul the implication of being British, or believing in the League. It’s funny that to believe in the League you must be willing to bayonet a man. A highly civilised soul would feel the connection. D’ you know what I shall probably do? Register as an objector and ask the judge for non-combatant work. That is not right, in my soul, but it’s the sensible thing to do in the face of such terrible facts. (Lewis, Letter to Richard Mills, December 1939, quoted in Selected Poetry and Prose, p. 20.)

Keyes talked of death to some extent as a generalisation. He was fascinated by the ‘death wish’ of the German people — a very unparticular notion. But Lewis, perhaps because he had political insight into the oppression of man by man that was rooted in the culture of South Wales, could also objectify and particularise his own psychological state with greater precision. Though the public events and the private nightmares were obviously inextricably linked there was a sense in which Lewis’s progress into the army and then to India was consciously made to serve a personal development:

A new occasion like a star has risen
Though all we knew and valued has declined
Below the unattainable horizon
Whose cornfields swish in every landless mind.

But Life insists . . .
(‘Sonnet’, Selected Poetry and Prose, p. 138.)

And one feels that the increased consciousness of self was not a mere passive response to depersonalising army life. He, in a sense, cast off the past, asking his wife not ‘to withdraw into the hard core of waiting and lacking, but to project herself — to all waking and surprising sights, all sadness and relaxities, all cruelties’. (Unpublished Journals, quoted in Selected Poetry and Prose, p. 41.) He felt a growing insensitivity and yet there was a conscious element of self-effacement.

     History took on a vastness which cut Lewis off from the convenient motives for action bestowed by Europe:

And I quite impersonally watch upon events. ALL EVENTS; vile state. (Unpublished Journals, Selected Poetry and Prose, p. 51.)

And we can see yet another variation of the stoical attitude growing from the clash between a British background and the violence of the world abroad. This time it was the lot of the Indian peasant that moved him, the history of oppression in India and the role India was caught up in in the World War:

Across scorched hills and trampled crops
The soldiers straggle by.
History staggers in their wake.
The peasants watch them die.
(‘The Peasants’, HA! HA! Among the Trumpets, p. 57.)

He commented in a letter to Robert Graves:

. . . England is ‘easy’ compared with India — easier to corrupt and easier to improve. There are few deterrents at home: the inclination isn’t continually oppressed by the cosmic disinclination, the individual isn’t so ruthlessly and permanently subject to the laissez faire of the sun and the sterility. India! What a test of a man! (Letter to Robert Graves quoted in HA! HA!, p. 11.)

In the same letter he said that he was becoming used to a rhythm of ‘periods of spiritual death’ and a desire to

. . . go East and East and East, faire le tour; there is a consummation somewhere. After it is over, then I can be particular and exact; meanwhile I learn to fire a revolver with either hand and try to suppress the natural apprehensions of the flesh at a thing so long delayed and postponed and promised and threatened. (HA! HA!, p. 10.)

Lewis remained amazingly aware of his own failings and the ambivalence of his relationships with people at home, and he also avoided the dangers of a sentimental defeatism which could so easily have accompanied the desire for a mystical ‘consummation’. Writing to his wife he insisted on how the poems were to reflect the situation in the wider world, not be confined to an unattainable inner self:

They’re universal statements if they’re anything. They feel the world and they mean all that is involved in what is happening. (HA! HA!, p. 12.)

And he gave one of the best characterisations of the predicament of the war poet fascinated with the ‘single theme of Life and Death’:

Acceptance seems to spiritless protest so vain. In between the two I live. (HA! HA!, p. 12.)

     It would be difficult to summarise the views of Lewis, Keyes and Douglas. Their attitudes to war and to the increasing problems of maintaining personal identity and moral consistency are clearly complex. We must remember to look first and foremost at the poetry to see what it tells us about the problems of political consciousness in art. In one sense there was both disillusion and withdrawal from traditional party allegiances. But if total war and mass conscription pre-empted choice of more radical personal stances the resulting poetry is not to be passed over as a moral failure. In fact, it is moral awareness in the poetry of the tensions in politics that is interesting, and we can sense the exploration of new problems of commitment, new responses to the human condition for the world after 1945.

     Of course there were several ways in which the critiques of the political dimension in poetry made in the Forties took a grip on later writing. Disillusion with Apocalyticism seemed to inspire a sort of desperate moderation and this, in the Movement, thrived on what appeared to be the death of political poetry in the Forties. But what I have tried to suggest is that political poetry did not die and the best of the war poetry, however pessimistic, grew directly from the sense of response and responsibility to the world outside Britain which the Movement philosophy was to eschew. Further, in the work of Douglas and Lewis in particular, one senses how a conscious and committed discipline in language developed alongside a painful, alienating self-examination. The progressively increasing path of risks which refined the moral awareness of their poetry may have been imposed from outside in one sense but it was also psychologically assimilated and worked on. In so far as writers since the war have continued this process one is made aware in interestingly diverse ways, of how political consciousness can manifest itself in poetry and how Douglas’s prediction is being fulfilled.