ENGLISH POETRY AND THE WAR
193
"Several statements I have seen ... tend to set up the attitudes roughly
indicated in column II below against those indicated in column I:
I
Patriotism
Will
to Vict!>ry
Hope for a new order (plenty of
room for ideologies here)
Concern with good and evil (pri–
marily moral)
or
with good, sin and redemption
(primarily religious)
II
Ideology (as a substitute for pa–
triotism)
Defeatism
Cynicism or hopelessness
Concern with clinical value, health,
neurosis, and therapy (primar–
ily scientific)
"The case in favour of column I against column II ... ought to speak
conclusively for itself, and does so for 'the majority of Englishmen.' It is
a pitiable delusion for a few among the intellectuals (blessed word) to
suggest otherwise."
Not long afterwards, the Saturday columnist and essay-writer Robert
Lynd wrote in
fohn o' London's
asking why nothing like the "Prisoner of
Chillon" had yet been written, and was demolished pretty effectively in
the next issue by Nicholas Moore. At the same time, on a very different
plane, we have the sorrow of Mr. Orwell over the unwillingness of the
young not to interpret, hut to participate in, the war. In his article I think
Mr. Orwell understated this unwillingness. Of the hundred odd younger
poets in England now, about half, including Nicholas Moore, Robert
Greacen, Peter Wells, Derek Savage and many others, are explicitly paci–
fist and have refused military service; the other, and, with exceptions,
perhaps the more talented half are in the army or air force, for a multi–
plicity of reasons,
hecaus~
they feel that their vision would he crippled by
standing aside from experience, or because the wish to "explore death"
and so forth, hut never because of any enthusiasm to beat Germany or
reconstruct Europe. I think I have yet to meet the "intellectual" English
army officer who had any personal concern in the war.
It is very important that this state of mind should he realised if one
is to comprehend the nature of the attempts at interpretative war poetry
which have been made. These attempts have been genuine, sensitive, and
successful. Their recognition by English critics has been scant. When the
book of Aragon's beautiful poems on the Fall of France reached this
country, I was impressed by the fact that we were working in spite of our
isolation on parallel lines.
The first large-scale attempt to combine interpretation with an appeal
to the public was remarkably successful in its sales, hut not fully repre–
sentative of the field. It was entitled
Poems from the Forces
and came out
last year under the editorship of Keidrych Rhys. It was the aggressive
diffidence of the work in it which struck one most. The war as these poets
(all conscripts) have seen it resolved itself into
