David Jones Writes an Extraordinary World War I Poem

Asked to name the great Modernist poets and writers, I might say T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and William Butler Yeats. The name of David Jones (1895-1974) would not come to mind. My Norton Anthology of English Literature, which I read to near shreds in college, makes no mention of him. But Jones deserves to be better known.  

Jones was known for his poetry and his engravings and paintings. He worked as a graphic artist; poetry and art don’t usually pay the bills. He was a veteran of World War I, and he’s increasingly coming to be recognized as one of the “World War I poets.” From 1915 to 1918, he served with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers on the Western Front, and unlike many of his poetic contemporaries, he survived. The poets who didn’t survive the Great War tend to be better known and more celebrated than those who did. Jones himself served in the army longer than any other British writer.

 

Jones waited 20 years to publish his poetic work on the war, In Parenthesis. Reading it is to discover a Modernist masterpiece every bit as astonishing as The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock or The Waste Land. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Poetry Club Tea Date: At the End (poetry prompt) – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“Light Shining Out of Darkness,” poem by William Cowper – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

The Wind Phone – poem by Patricia Clark at Every Day Poems.

 

“The Hill Farm” by John Hewitt and “The Other Side” by Seamus Heaney – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

Poets and Poems: Julien Vocance and “One Hundred Visions of War”

I’ll be honest here. I thought I knew, or was at least aware of, the major poets, British or otherwise, of World War I. I was wrong. I’d never heard of the poet Julien Vocance. One black eye for me.  

He wasn’t just another war poet. Vocance did something that no one had done before. He used the haiku form of poetry to help him understand what he’d experienced in the Great War. And it was his work, collected as One Hundred Visions of War, that first popularized the writing of haiku.

 

Perhaps that’s two black eyes for me – one for not knowing Vocance, and one for not knowing how the haiku form moved into Western culture.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

How J.R.R. Tolkien Met an Obligation – with Poetry

At King Edward’s School in Birmingham, J.R.R. Tolkien because close friends with several other boys. He and three others formed what they called the TCBS, or Tea Club, Barrovian Society. The four would regularly meet at Barrow’s Department Store for tea and discussion, mostly about poetry and literature.  

The TCBS continued meeting, if irregularly, once the four went to university. Even after World War I began, they wrote letters and exchanged poems. Of the four, only two, Tolkien and Christopher Wiseman, survived. One who did not was Geoffrey Bache Smith. Smith managed to survive the horrific and months long Battle of the Somme (July to October, 1916) only to die in December from a shrapnel wound. 

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

C.S. Lewis: World War I Poet

In 1919, the English publisher William Heinemann released a volume of poetry entitled Spirits in Bondage: A Cycle of Lyrics. The collection was part of a flood of poetry works that flowed copiously during and after World War I, joining collections by Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Charles Sorley, Francis Ledwidge, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, and other “World War I poets,” many of them published posthumously.  

The author of Spirits in Bondage published under a pseudonym, Clive Hamilton. His real name was Clive Staples Lewis. The collection wasn’t republished until 1984, and in 1994 it was included in his Collected Poems. Most of the poems were written between 1915 and 1918, when Lewis was in military training at Oxford and then in France on the Western Front. 

 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

“Gas! The Battle for Ypres 1915” by McWilliams and Steel

In 1914, Ypres was a small city in western Belgium, not far from the French border and the North Sea. It had a long history of at least two thousand years; the Romans raided it in the first century B.C. Surrounded by several small villages. The city was known for its production of cloth and especially linen; one of the most imposing structures in Ypres was the Cloth Hall. 

The came World War I. Ypres found itself the focal point of two battles, the first in the fall of 1914 and the second in April of 1915. Technically, the second battle extended into May with additional engagements, but the intense period was April 25-27. 

This second battle became famous for many things, including the first time a colonial army (the Canadian) ever stopped a European army (the German) on European soil. But it is best known for how it started – with the use of chlorine gas by the German army, attempting to break through the Allied lines of defense. Against almost overwhelming odds and chemical warfare (the Germans ignored the Geneva ban), the Canadian, French, and British troops first gave and then regained their ground. Like so many other battles on the Western Front during the war, it subsided into stalemate.

First published in 1985, Gas! The Battle for Ypres 1915 by J.L. McWilliams and R. James Steel tells the story of the Second Battle of Ypres. And it tells the story almost hour by hour, from the first plans by the Germans to the eventual end. 

It’s a thrilling, fascinating account.

• The Germans would come close but never quite manage to capture the city of Ypres itself. They did do their best, however, to shell it into destruction. 
• Both the British and the French had first-hand reports, from German deserters and spies, that the Germans were preparing to use gas. Disbelief and incompetence prevented the knowledge from being acted upon. 
• German commanders had no reluctance to use the gas to force a breakthrough. They also had no reluctance to send their own troops too soon into the dissipating clouds. So eager and desperate they were to break their stalled plans to drive to the sea.
• The top commands of the Allied armies were already demonstrating the prodigious incompetence they became known for. Located far to the rear of the fighting and in relative luxury, the generals and their staffs rarely grasped the reality of what was happening during the actual battle. 

Allied soldiers blinded by the chlorine gas

The use of gas would backfire on the Germans, and in two ways. First, the Germans had to wait for a countervailing wind; normally, the winds in the area blew west to east. Second, using the gas freed the Allies from any ethical constraints on their own use of poison gas, and they had the advantage of the prevailing wind direction. Over the course of the war, more German troops would be afflicted with poison gas than what was attempted on the Allies. The Germans had tipped their hand too early and in too an unfavorable position.

McWilliams and Steel are also the authors of The Suicide Battalion: One Remarkable Battalion’s Journey Through the First World War and Amiens 1918: The Last Great Battle.

Gas! The Battle for Ypres 1915 reads like a well-filmed documentary, placing the read right in the middle of all the key events. It’s also a story of the common soldier, who, despite the villainous use of gas by the Germans and the incompetence of their own top generals, stopped what could have easily been a German victory.

Top photograph: an aerial view of the gas attack at the Second Battle of Ypres.

Armistice Day, “Poppy Field” by Michael Morpurgo, and the Poppies at the Tower

Today is Armistice Day. How do you make sense to children (and possibly adults) about a war that happened a hundred years ago? You might focus on a symbol, like British author Michael Morpurgo did with the poppy.

Morpurgo’s Poppy Field is the story about a contemporary boy, Martens Merkel, who lives on a farm with his mother and grandfather in the Flanders region of Belgium. In World War I, the farm was part of the site where the three battles of Ypres occurred. In a very real sense, the battles and the war are still going on; Martens father was killed a few months after the boy was born when his tractor uncovered a live shell from the war. 

The family has a framed fragment of a poem, something that serves as a talisman of sorts for the family. The grandfather’s grandmother, as a little girl, got it from one of the soldiers with the British Army. She was selling eggs and giving away poppies that grew in the family’s fields, and he has crumpled the paper and thrown it away. He told her she could keep it.

The poem turns out to be an early draft the most famous poem of World War I, written by Canadian surgeon John McCrae after the death of his best friend.

In Flanders Fields

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

The grandfather tells the story of the poem and his grandmother, and how the story continued to play through the family and the next world war. And he talks about the poppies. 

Michael Morpurgo

Morpurgo’s moving story is beautifully illustrated by Michael Foreman, a noted British illustrator of children’s stories. The book includes an afterword by the Rev. Nigel McCulloch, former national chaplain of the Royal British Legion and bishop of Manchester. It was through the efforts of an American woman, Moina Michael, that the American Legion came to adopt the poppy as a symbol of remembrance. A French woman, Anna Guerin, inspired by Michael, convinced several governments and the Royal British Legion to adopt the flower.

Morpurgo is one of Great Britain’s best-known and best-loved children’s writers. He’s written some 130 children’s books and won numerous prizes and recognitions. In 2018, he received a knighthood for his services to literature and charity. He’s also the author of the successful stage play War Horse. Michael Foreman has had solo exhibitions in London, Paris, New York, Japan, and Chile, and most recently at the National Centre for Children’s Books, Newcastle, England. He’s won numerous awards for both his writing and illustrations, and has received the Kate Greenaway Medaltwice for outstanding illustration in a book for children. 

Remembrance Day, as Armistice Day is called in Britain, is a much larger celebration than it is in America. For the centenary anniversary of the war, artist Paul Cummins and designer Tom Piper created an exhibition at the Tower of London, entitled “Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red” that filled the tower’s moat with 888,246 ceramic poppies, one for each casualty of World War I from Britain and the Dominion countries. 

We saw it in September 2014, as it was still be assembled. I’m not sure what was more moving: the sight of the installation itself or the profound silence of the large crowds gathered to view it.

The Imperial War Museum has published Poppies: Blood Swept Lands and Seas of Red, a commemoration of the Tower of London installation and the 19 different locations to which parts of the installation traveled in Britain through 2018. Most of the ceramic poppies at the Tower were sold to individuals to raise funds for various charities, and some nine million pounds was realized (we have one of the ceramic poppies in our home), Two parts of the installation, “Weeping Window” and “Wave,” traveled to various cathedrals, museums, public buildings, and even a pier. 

The book chronicles the original installation at the Tower and the installations at the 19 sites in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland. There’s a text for each location and numerous photographs. To read the texts and see the photos is to experience that Tower of London installation all over again. 

A children’s story and a commemorative book offer two different ways to remember what happened from 1914 to 1918, and to honor the men and women who fought and lived and the men and women who fought and died.

Related:

War Horse by Michael Morpurgo.

The Most Famous Poem of World War I.

Top photograph: A partial view of the poppies installation at the Tower of London in 2014).

“Robert Graves” – A Biography of a War Poet by Jean Moorcroft Wilson

I have a personal definition of what makes a good biography. Solid research and an understanding of the subject are a given, but what separates exceptional biographies from good ones is whether or not I find myself believing that I’m there with the subject, living the scenes, and experiencing the trials and triumphs. A simpler way to say it is, do I identify with the story being told about this person’s life?

Robert Graves: From Great War Poet to Good-Bye to All That 1895-1929 by Jean Moorcroft Wilson is one of those exceptional biographies. Almost all I knew about Graves was that he was the author of I Claudius and Claudius the God, written in the 1930s and popularized on PBS in the 1970s. Derek Jacobi starred in the title role. I was so mesmerized by the TV series that I read both books, learning that Graves had based his fictionalized story on the gossipy account by the Roman historian Suetonius, The Lives of the Caesars. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Poetry, World War I, and Armistice Day

Sunday marks the 100^thanniversary of the end of World War I. The war that was supposed to be over by Christmas (of 1914) lasted four-and-a-half years. Ten million military personnel and almost seven million civilians died. The Habsburg, Romanov, and Hohenzollern empires ended. The Russian Revolution started, with millions more killed over the next four to five years. Even the victorious nations in Europe faced dire financial conditions, broad disillusionment, and the loss of a generation because of the war.

Poetry changed as well. People’s understanding of the war was partially shaped by poetry, and the patriotic poems of the first year of war like Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” and Alan Seeger’s “I Have a Rendezvous with Death” gradually gave way to poems like Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth.” 

And the form of poetry changed during the war. While most war poems followed traditional and formal forms, it was in 1915 that Poetry Magazine published T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” considered by many to have inaugurated the birth of modernism in poetry. It was perhaps no coincidence that Eliot was a transplanted American living in war-time London when he wrote the poem.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Painting: Mustard Gas, oil on canvas by John Singer Sargent (1919); Imperial War Museum. London.

World War I: Mary Borden – Nurse, Novelist, Poet

In 1916, Mary Borden was 30 when she found herself managing a field hospital on the Somme River in France. Casualties were pouring in from the front; the Battle of the Somme started July 1 and would continue for months. Ultimately, more than three million men were involved, with a million casualties. On the first day of battle, the British alone suffered more than 57,000 casualties.

And there was Mary Borden and her hospital staff, watching the carnage pour through their hospital doors. She found solace in writing poetry.

An American, Borden was born in 1886 in Chicago to a man who would make a fortune from silver prospecting in the American West. While she was at Vassar, her father died, leaving her a large fortune. She began to travel, met and married a British missionary in India, and then returned to London with her husband in 1913. She discovered the women’s suffrage movement and became one of its most ardent activists.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

"A Whispered Name" by William Brodrick

You start to read a mystery, one in a series that you’ve been enjoying. You like the detective, you like the way the author writes, you like the interesting stories that are told. And as you begin reading the next book in the series, you discover you’re reading something else entirely. You keep looking for the mystery, the whodunit, and it doesn’t seem to be there. 

You realize as you read on – because you’re compelled to read on – that this is no mystery novel. Yes, it has the familiar detective – Father Anselm of Larkwood monastery in England. Yes, it has an air of mystery about it, because there is a mystery to be solved, or to describe it better, a 90-year-old enigma to be deciphered. And if it can be deciphered, it must also be understood.

A Whispered Name by British-Canadian author William Brodrick is a stunning, serious, literary novel, one of the best I’ve read in years. I should have been prepared for it by the second Father Anselm mystery, The Gardens of the Dead, because that novel, too, broke the boundaries of the genre. But not to the extent of A Whispered Name, originally published in 2008.

Father Anselm, a former barrister, is tending his beehives at Larkwood. He’s approached by a woman and an old man, who ask him if he knew Father Herbert Moore, a member of Anselm’s Gilbertine Order and a founder of the monastery where Anselm lives and works. He did, but, as it turns out, not well, or not well enough. She tells him that if he didn’t know that Moore was an officer in World War I, then he wouldn’t know that Moore participated in a court martial of a young soldier named Joseph Flanigan. And she leaves.

Anselm, at the direction of his prior, begins to investigate. No one in the monastery apparently knew about Father Moore’s military service. Anselm must look farther afield, to old military records stored at Kew Gardens, diaries, and descendants of other officers. Each tidbit of information he’s able to glean comes with its own enigma.

The reader has a slight advantage over Father Anselm. Not only do we get the story of Anselm’s investigation, we also get the story of Herbert Moore as it unfolded at the time. The two lines of narrative move back and forth, until they finally converge. And what looks to be a fairly straightforward court martial during the Battle of Passchendaele in 1917 turns out to be anything but. And what happened in 1917 still has its clutches around the present.

William Brodrick

Brodrick was a friar in the Augustine order before he became a barrister and a writer. He’s written eight of the Father Anselm mysteries, with A Whispered Name winning the Crime Writers’ Association Gold Dagger Award in 2009. He lives in France. (And the Gilbertine Order was a real order of monks but was disbanded by Henry VIII during the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s.)

In the last 50 to 75 pages, there were few times I wasn’t moved to tears. I knew what had happened, and I knew why, in all of its convolutions. And when I finished, I knew I had read a story of substitution and redemption. 

A Whispered Name is a marvelous novel, a novel of war and family, national passions, bravery and cowardice and how the two may often be confused. And it's a novel about human decency surviving in the face of some of the worst conditions imaginable.

Related:

My review of Brodrick’s The 6^th Lamentation.

My review of The Gardens of the Deadby William Brodrick.

“War Horse” by Michael Morpurgo

Before it was a stage playthat won five Tony awards, before it was a moviedirected by Steven Spielberg, it was a book, a book for older children. It was first published in 1982, and it remains in print. A new centenary edition, to mark the anniversary of the start of World War I, was published in 1914. By any measure, it’s a beloved book.

It’s War Horse, by Michal Morpurgo.

War Horse is the story of Joey, a horse separated from his mother at a young age. And it’s the story of Albert Narracott, the son of a Devon farmer who raises the horse, trains the horse, rides the horse, and loves the horse.

And it is the story of the First World War, told from the perspective of Joey.

It seems almost unbelievable today, but the beginning of the First World War in 1914 saw armies across Europe using cavalry troops. It was long at all before horses were replaced by machines, but horses played an important role. 

In the case of Joey, and unbeknownst to Albert, Albert’s father sells Joey to an officer preparing to leave for the fighting in France. Devastated, Albert soon learns he’s too young to enlist. But Captain Nicholls, Joey’s new rider, promises Albert he will look after the horse. 

Joey describes his training, in England, his transport to France, his friendship with the black stallion Topthorn, and his first engagement in warfare, during which Captain Nicholls is killed. The experiences of the two horses tell the story of what happens to British soldiers, German soldiers, and French civilians.

Michael Morpurgo

Morpurgo is one of Great Britain’s best-known and best-loved children’s writers. He’s written some 130 children’s books and won numerous prizes and recognitions. Earlier this year, he received a knighthoodfor his services to literature and charity.  

I could say more, a lot more, but that would be giving the story away. Suffice it to say that War Horseis a simply marvelous story, the story of a horse and the boy who loves him. 

The trailer from the 2011 film:

Top photograph: A scene from theWar Horse stage play at the National Theatre, London. 

Alan Seeger: The American Poet in World War I

It’s a poem that used to be included in high school English textbooks and anthologies. It was a favorite poem of President John F. Kennedy. It became something of a national sensation, once America entered World War I. The poem is “I Have a Rendezvous with Death.”

The poet was an American, born in New York, and raised in both New York and Mexico. He was a roommate of T.S. Eliot at Harvard (Eliot was two years ahead of him). After graduating from Harvard, he drifted to Greenwich Village in New York City (where any American serious about becoming a poet went) and then to Paris. When World War I broke out, he joined the French Foreign Legion, part of the foreign brigade fighting for France. He died at the Battle of the Somme in July 1916 and was buried in France. The poet is Alan Seeger.

In War Poet: The Life of Alan Seeger and His Rendezvous with Death, author, producer, and historical consultant Michael Hilltells Seeger’s story. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Top photograph: the young Alan Seeger.

Francis Ledwidge: Reconsidering a War Poet

Francis Ledwidge (1887-1917) has not been one of the better-known poets of World War I. At first glance, this seems puzzling.

He saw action at Gallipoli, in the Balkans, and in the trenches in France and Flanders. His first collection of poetry was published in 1914, entitled Songs of the Fields. A second was being prepared for publication when he was killed during the Third Battle of Ypres (also known as Passchendaele) on July 31, 1917, just shy of his 30^th birthday. He was known, rightly or wrongly, as the “peasant poet,” which did him some injustice but which also helped to sell his poems and his poetry book. He didn’t come from the British upper and upper middle classes, like so many of the war poets, but his lack of reputation wasn’t a class thing.

Instead, it was a political thing. Ledwidge was Irish, and an Irishman who volunteered for the British Army. He was also an Irish Nationalist, but not like his more radical countrymen. He believed that fighting for Britain against the Germans would help Ireland gain independence. The fact that he was Irish didn’t help him or his reputation with the British, and the fact that he fought for the British didn’t help his reputation with the Irish.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.