Guy Cuthbertson's Reading List

"He became the quintessential war poet, certainly in a British context. Not during his lifetime. But in England, Owen is a poet that everyone will have encountered in some way. He was born in 1893, and famously—this is part of the legend of Owen—he died just a week before the end of the war, on the 4th of November, 1918. His parents got the telegram telling them that he had died on the 11th of November as the bells were ringing to celebrate the end of the war. Owen’s poetry sometimes gets described as ‘anti-war’. I don’t think I’d go that far. It’s important to note that he was not a conscientious objector, he was in uniform. He won a Military Cross. So he was actually quite a successful soldier, later on in his service. But he is a poet who highlights the horror of the war for many people, and is sceptical of ideas of heroism, service, duty, and all those other concepts brought to the fore by the government, church, and the right-wing press in terms of encouraging people to join up. It combines realism—an almost journalistic, unblinking focus on the realities—with very poetic language, which partly came from the strong influence of the Romantics , particularly Keats, who was the poet he was almost in love with. Saying that, there’s also interest from some people into Owen’s sexuality. This has been quite a controversial topic, but it gives the poetry another dimension if we see him as a gay poet. There is not a lot of evidence of him having sexual relationships, but certainly he is interested in men, especially young men suffering; he takes quite a corporeal interest in their bodies and in the idea of strong, young men being killed. There are some poems that I think are quite clearly gay poems, and put in context are probably about male sex workers. It’s just another dimension to Owen’s work. Owen’s poetry got picked up during the 1920s and 1930s. But it was really after the second war when Owen became the poet. In the 1960s, with Benjamin Britten and the Vietnam War , that’s when he started turning up on school curricula… He has an interesting identity as he can be used by both right and left, pro-war and anti-war, establishment and anti-establishment. He’s a radical voice, a disaffected youth longing for a better world, and also a successful soldier, a good officer who cares for his men and dies in battle fighting for his country. So some of his success has been because of this capacity to appeal to all sorts of different people. He’s often misrepresented and misread as well, of course. In some ways you can refashion him to suit your particular worldview. An important thing about Owen is that although he’s seen as the poet of the trenches, actually most of his poetry was written in England or Scotland, not in France. He’s writing after he’s been fighting, or before he will be fighting. The most important phase in his life, really, was when he was at Craiglockhart Hospital, just outside Edinburgh. That’s where he met Siegfried Sassoon and J.B. Salmond—who was in the Scottish anthology. Salmond, was a graduate of St Andrews and a journalist. They produced a magazine at the hospital together. Owen talks about Craiglockhart as his “free and easy Oxford,” because he didn’t get to go to university—a great regret of his—but he ended up at this hospital, where he had a lot of leisure time and was surrounded by educated officers who spent a lot of time talking about books. The he went into Edinburgh and hung out with all the Bohemian artists of the time. Then to Scarborough, Ripon after that, and that’s when all the war poems really got written. It was not a man in a trench, scribbling while shells were flying all around. Some of the poems are about the home front, and consciously so. Others are about the war, but written from memory, in a state of comfort. Edward Thomas is also a war poet at the home front."

"Thomas is someone who might not always be thought of as a war poet. Many of his poems are not directly about the war; although he did die in the First World War, the poems were written before he went to France. He was only in France a short while before he was killed. Thomas has become almost an antidote to Wilfred Owen-type poetry. For those who get fed up with trench poetry or Western Front poetry. Thomas’s poems are much more conversational, simple. They’re about the war years, rather than war itself. There are a few that are quite consciously war poems, but even then he is looking at the war from a different perspective. There’s a famous little war poem by Edward Thomas called ‘In Memoriam’, which is about the fact that there’s nobody to pick flowers anymore, because the soldiers are off at the front: The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood This Eastertide call into mind the men, Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should Have gathered them and will do never again. So although it’s a war poem, it’s a different type of war poem. It’s the First World War as seen from Hampshire. It’s the reverse of the classic Scottish idea of the ‘flowers of the forest’, often referred to in war poetry—the men of Scotland all mowed down in battle, the flowers of the forest are cut down in that song. Here, it’s the reversal, the flowers remaining is itself evidence of wartime. Thomas was older. He was born in 1878, so he was 39 when he died, and had three children. That makes it unusual; the usual idea of the war poet is young, unmarried, possibly gay. Owen wasn’t married, didn’t have kids. Sassoon married later in life, although he was gay, of course, as well. Ivor Gurney, Rupert Brooke, weren’t married. Whereas Thomas’ oldest son was old enough to be in uniform. Thomas’s family life comes in quite a lot. There are poems written for his children or his wife—who would survive him by 50 years. So there’s a real sense of family, although he was someone who chose to join up. He was a great countryside writer before the war; Robert Macfarlane is a big Edward Thomas fan, and you can see him as a kind of proto-Robert Macfarlane! There’s a connection between Owen and Thomas, as they both joined the Artists Rifles. Thomas, being an older man, got a cushy job as a tutor for orienteering and map reading. He was teaching in a camp where Wilfred Owen was, and was probably in a classroom with him although they may never have had a proper conversation. Owen did buy a book of prose by Thomas on Keats, as both Thomas and Owen were very interested in Romantic poetry, which fed into war writing all over the place. You asked at the start: why particularly this war? Well, the nearest comparison would be a hundred years previously, in the revolutionary and Napoleonic era . Then Wordsworth, Coleridge were engaging with that conflict, often from the point of view of home, so you can see that continuity again with Thomas. Thomas has his own particular poetic voice. One that has become very popular in recent decades. Partly too because of his great friendship with Robert Frost, America’s favourite poet. They were great friends, and neither were necessarily interested in the war if there were other things to talk about. Thomas’s walking poem ‘The Sun Used to Shine’ is about walking with Frost in 1914 in England: We turned from men or poetry To rumours of the war remote Only till both stood disinclined So some of the attraction is the way war is kept at arm’s length. Well, the best is applicable to all sorts of conflicts. That’s often what we find—Wilfred Owen continues to be quoted and read—he was used during the Gulf War, during Iraq, Afghanistan, and so forth. And Edward Thomas seems a very 21st-century poet because of his ecological dimension, he’s very alert to the changes in the natural world. There’s the poem ‘As the Team’s Head Brass’ —a kind of war poem, in England, talking to a man with a team of horses farming in Essex, talking about the change in the countryside. Thomas is sitting on a fallen tree, and they can’t move it because the farmer’s friend has died in the war. It’s an elm—the tree of the dead, the wood of coffins. And there’s ‘In Memoriam’, that four-line poem, and how the First World War is seen through the environment. There are many poems, which are about man and the natural world, which might be read as war poems, or might be read as ecological poems. Then, as I said, with Owen, for some people he has a voice in terms of his sexuality. That applies to Sassoon, and others like Scott Moncrieff—the translator of Proust and significant gay writer in his own right, and a war poet in uniform. So there are different ways in which these war poets can be refashioned or revisited to see their significance in the present moment. But it will change, as we are less concerned about whether that particular war was just or right. People might be less concerned about remembering the dead, perhaps because that might now be their great-grandparents or great-great-grandparents’ generation. So there is a greater distance. But there are poets who speak to 21st-century concerns as well, I think."