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4

Literary Influences

4.1. The Impact of the First World War Poetry on the Brigadists

This chapter takes a general look at the influences of the poetry from the First World War on the legacy written by the Brigadist and Retrospective groups, because the majority of the authors included in the Abroad group were already canonical. As will be seen in this chapter, these influences range from the Georgian style to Imagism and Modernism through some of the poetical devices or themes that are used.

World War I was known as mechanized warfare. Soldiers were destined to trenches for long periods of time; therefore, their mobility was minimal. It was a war fought mainly by ground forces using artillery and machine guns and supported by tanks and scout planes. However, nearly twenty years after the Great War finished with the Peace of Versailles in 1917, a coupe d’état provoked another war in the south of Europe, this time in Spain. The Spanish war was the scenario for new destructive tactics, such as the blitzkrieg war, and modern weaponry: submarines, bombers, ground attack planes, tanks, flamethrowers and so on. Therefore, the International Brigades, that joined the popular army as a shock force, did not remain in the trenches for a long time; consequently, they had less chances of survival and barely had time to write poetry. In spite of this, I do have some of their poetry, in some cases just one poem, in others two or more. The only long period when they stayed in trenches was at the Jarama front. The International Brigades remained for four months after the victory against the rebel forces in order to hold the line which protected the main road to Valencia, the NIII.

In the first place, dealing with Georgian poetry which emerged during the first years of King George’s rule, which began in 1910, between the Victorian era and Modernism. The Georgian poets rejected the imperialist rhetoric; they wrote about the subtleties of nature which is intimately perceived. It is a source of inspiration and the English landscape, crucial in this poetry, is often the subject of the poem. The poems generally have regular rhythm, sweetened vocabulary and traditional verse structure. However, this poetry could not survive the cataclysm of the First World War and the new aesthetic values introduced by Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot. Some of these Georgian poets, such as Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Charles Sorley, Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brook, died in the war, but others survived. However, all of them, in one way or another, adopted warfare as a subject of their poetry. The loss of idyllic landscapes gave way to the crudeness of war. The surviving poets, such as Siegfried Sassoon or Robert Graves, were appalled to see how their bucolic universe had suddenly turned into horror.

Harry G. Rusche notes T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound’s admiration for the poetry written by Isaac Rosenberg, who had published a small volume of poems, Youth, before joining the British army as a volunteer, not for patriotic reasons, because he was a pacifist, but to support his family economically. Isaac Rosenberg was a modern poet and painter who introduced substantial changes in his poetry in comparison to other Great War poets. In my opinion, Rosenberg represents the transition between the Georgian poetry and Modernism. He took advantage of his pictorial view to depict the horror of war by using colloquial language and free verse. In his poem, “Break of Day in the Trenches”, Isaac Rosenberg, who still was under the influence of the Georgian style, used irony to criticize patriotism: “Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew / Your cosmopolitan sympathies.” His poetry embodies poetical devices, such as free verse, conversational style, plain language, imagery, adjective phrases, word order inversion, and symbolic references, as for example rebirth in nature.

Isaac Rosenberg, just as other Great War poets and brigadists of the XV Brigade, was also killed not long after he wrote his poems. His poetry portrayed the experiences of ordinary soldiers in war, capturing their humanity under extreme circumstances. Rosen-berg’s stoic sensitiveness helped him to keep his fears and emotions under control to combat the threat of insanity facing the routine of horror. This fragment of “Break of the Day in the Trenches” denotes Rosenberg’s habit of self-command; he gives a way around the crudeness of war, dodging the imagery of carnage: “Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins / Drop, and are ever dropping; / But mine in my ear is safe— / Just a little white with the dust.”

Indeed, this restraint is recognizable in the only published poem in The Volunteer for Liberty, written by the young American journalist Daniel Hutner, “Written During an Airplane Attack”: “Blood has flowed here, has wet this earth / On which we lie, and blood will flow again- / But our thoughts are not on this” is a first-hand account of how men kept their fears under control in their daily routine.

Additionally, Frank O’Flaherty, an American brigadist, also recalls the poem by Rosenberg: “Poppies whose roots are in man’s veins / Drop, and are ever dropping,” remembering his dead comrade John Lenthier to whom he dedicates the poem. O’Flaherty depicts the image of rebirth in wild flowers growing from the warmth of the dead soldiers’ hearts.

Recalling Georgian poetry, Edwin Rolfe, an American poet and brigadist, dedicated an elegy to his fallen comrades, “Elegy for Our Dead,” following the pastoral poetry conventions with images of nature and rebirth: “There is a place where, wisdom won, right recorded, / men move beautifully, striding across fields / whose wheat, wind-marshalled, wanders unguarded / in unprotected places…glowing grapes, the oranges like million suns; and graves / where lie, nurturing all these fields, my friends in death.”

Continuing in this line, Tom Wintringham, a British brigadist who was a veteran of World War I, wrote a love poem, “Poem in the Summer of 1937”, shaped in a pastoral bucolic landscape, with a bitter taste because death and war were always present: “Hay in the meadow cream-folded lies / To darken in the sun, tomorrow and tomorrow, / Richening the scent already heavy / In honey loops on the cream taste of summer.”

In reference to the World Ward I poets, Wilfred Owen graduated from the University of London and enlisted in the Manchester regiment in 1915; that same year he was sent to France. At first he was a Georgian poet and was influenced by the romantic poets Shelley and Keats. Thanks to Siegfried Sassoon’s friendship while they were in the hospital recuperating from shell shock, Wilfred Owen evolved towards modernism. In his poem “Strange Meeting”, the first speaker is a British soldier who escapes from the battle into a tunnel where men are sleeping. As he looks at them, one of those men stares and smiles at him; this German soldier has recognized him and moves towards him with a “dead smile”; the English soldier then realizes they are in Hell. Owen uses imperfect rhyme, a slant or partial rhyme, in which the words have similar consonants before and after unlike vowels. This partial rhyme scheme deepens the melancholic and bleak atmosphere of the poem: “With a thousand fears that vision’s face was grained; / Yet no blood reached there from the upper ground, / And no guns thumped, or down the flues made moan. / “Strange, friend,” I said, “Here is no cause to mourn.” Imperfect rhyme and its variations, were also used to deepen the mood of the poem by the poets from all three groups included in this research.

Owen’s influence is noted on the American brigadist, Joseph Rosenstein, who recalls Owen’s irony about the “old lie” from Horace’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est Pro Patria Mori” in his poem “Twenty of Us.” However, Rosenstein quotes the title of the classical poem in a different sense from that of Owens’s. While Wilfred Owens’s poem denounces the old lie that war is noble and dying for one’s own country is sweet, Rosenstein explains the difference: The International Brigades had not come to fight for patriotic idealism, but to fight fascism: “No hypocritical “Pro Patria” adorns my common last bed / Blinding lunge, a crash- and eternity.”

Equally important is Joseph Rosenstein’s use of different voices in each of the stanzas of his poem “Twenty of Us”, in which brigadists of different nationalities, who joined the XV Brigade and died on Suicide Hill, speak. This poetical device was also used by other brigadists and war correspondents such as Bill Feeley, Laurie Lee, Joe Monks, Edwin Rolfe, Miles Tomalin, Tom Wintringham, Alvah Bessie, Nancy Cunard and David Marshall. From the Abroad group, Kenneth Leslie and Norman Rosten, used this technique as well.

In this sense, George Green, the British violoncellist and brigadist who drove an ambulance in the British Medical Unit, utilizes two voices in his poem “Dressing Station,” his own and the one of his conscience which recalls Sassoon and Owen: “But poet, this old stuff. / This we too have seen. / This is Flanders 1917. Sassoon and Owen did this so much better. / Is this all?” As it has been previously stated, Wilfred Owen employed two voices in his poem “Strange Meeting.”

In the same manner as the abovementioned World War I poets, the brigadists used imagery to depict the landscape of war and their own sensations and perceptions. Their language was simple, but the poems were not, even though they could appear to be simple.

Sometimes nature becomes merciless. Wilfred Owen’s poem “Exposure” (1917) presents the theme of nature as the real enemy because the soldiers have to fight the snow, cold and icy winds first: “Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us… / Wearied we keep awake because the night is silent… / Low, drooping flares confuse our memory of the salient…Worried by silence, sentries whisper, curious, nervous, / But nothing happens.”

As compared with Owen, James Jump, a British brigadist, also suffered the harsh conditions of nature. In his poem “Sun Over the Front” the enemy is neither the rebel army, nor the cold which froze the trenches, but the extreme heat caused by a pitiless sun in July during the offensive of the Ebro River: “Now the suffocating silence is frightening. / We try to forget our friends out there. / We make ourselves concentrate on our own plight / As we lie, face down on the angry earth. / We force ourselves to think of our fight / Against the sun.”

In the following subheading we will describe an overview about the influences from Imagism and other aesthetic currents of the early decades of the 20th century.

4.2. Influence of Imagism and Aesthetic Currents of the Early Decades of the 20th Century

The first publications, where the name “image” related to a poetic current emerged, are dated between 1914 and 1917 by a large part of the most important figures of Modernism in English as well as a certain number of other modernist figures in different areas other than poetry, such as sculpture, painting and cinema, among others. Originally from London, the Imagist movement continued throughout Great Britain, Ireland and the United States. Some of the greatest imagists were women, which was not very current at that time. Imagism was the first organized intellectual literary movement of modern English literature. According to T. S. Eliot: “The point of reference, usually considered as the starting point of modern poetry, is the group known as Imagists in London in 1910.”

As a matter of fact, the economy of language focuses on the “image” to reveal its essence. This technical device substantiates the contemporary evolution of avant-garde art, especially cubism, which synthesizes multiple planes in a single image, and the eagerness to experiment with new forms of poetry.

Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, both Americans, met in England in1914, the year when World War I began. Eliot was influenced by French symbolists and Ezra Pound’s imagism. Pound travelled to Japan and other Asian countries where he discovered a new poetic discourse. Deeply influenced by the Japanese Haiku, Pound preferred the natural sound of human speech to the artificial rhythm of fixed lines.

Michael Roberts, the editor of The Faber Book of Modern Verse, published in 1936, lists some technical innovations of Imagism in the introduction:

Civilization was becoming ‘a few score of broken statues, an old bitch gone in the teeth’ or ‘a heap of broken images’. It was necessary to sift out from the mass of habits, institutions and conventions the traditions which were worth preserving. For the moment all that the poet could do was to concentrate upon surfaces: in a world in which moral, intellectual aesthetic values were all uncertain, only sense impressions were certain and could be described exactly. From such minute particulars perhaps something could be built up. In 1913 a few poets, shocked at the vagueness and facility of the poetry of the day, determined:

1. To use language of common speech, but to employ always the exact word, not the merely decorative word.

2. To create new rhythms as the expression of new moods. We do not insist upon ‘Free –verse’ as the only method of writing poetry…We do believe that the individuality of a poet may often be better expressed in free verse than in conventional forms.

3. To allow absolute freedom in the choice of subject.

4. To present an image. We are not a school of painters, but we believe that poetry should render particulars exactly and not deal with vague generalities.

5. To produce poetry that is hard and clear, never blurred or indefinite.

6. Finally, most of us believe that concentration is the very essence of poetry.

(1936: 14-15).

Regarding Modernism, it results from a world characterized by social-economic, political, philosophical and technological upheaval, inseparable from the shock of the First World War. Modernist literature develops from the crisis, upsets the representation of reality and implements a language which reflects this transitional process.

4.3. Overview of some Canonical Poets’ Influence on this Poetic Legacy

This section begins with Edgar Lee Masters, an American poet who published the Spoon River Anthology in 1915. Masters brings a cast of characters in the town of Spoon River to life. Written in free verse and in conversational style, the poet introduces the reality and drama of small-town life with the intrigue and crime that flows through it. Joseph Rosenstein, an American brigadist, acknowledges Edgard Lee Masters at the beginning of his poem, “Twenty of Us,” in which he uses the same structure, style and original idea as Edgar Lee Masters.

Another canonical poet, Carl Sandburg, was born to a family of Swedish immigrants. At the age of twenty he studied at Lombard College, a school for adults. He shared his studies with different jobs, that is why his poetry reflects the social protest and the labour problems of the 1920s and 1930s. His poems portray the reality of the working class. Sandburg, as well as Frost and Lee Masters, shares the honour of using a new language, the language of Americans. The American brigadists employed this simple language with either simple or complex diction.

As has been seen in the previous point, Ezra Pound is considered the poet who opened the way to the modernist aesthetic in poetry. In the early teens of the twentieth century, he promoted meetings between British and American writers to share their ideas and doubts. Ezra Pound catalysed the new literary tendencies which would influence his contemporary poets such as Hilda Dolittle, Mariane Moore, Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, T. S. Eliot and so on. T. S. Eliot dedicated “The Waste Land” to Pound, calling him “il miglior fabbro” (the better craftsman) because, before its publication, Pound had revised Eliot’s poem and made editorial modifications, giving it its definite form.

Stephen Spender, who was already a prominent poet of the 1930s and member of the Oxford Group of poets when he joined the International Brigades, was a devoted reader of T. S. Eliot. In his study of Eliot, Spender deals with theme innovations and techniques introduced by Eliot. In Chapter I, “A Ritualist Sensibility,” Spender commented it would be absurd to guess who was the best poet in the English language in the first third of the 20th century, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound or T. S. Elliot:

Eliot was different from either in being a poet who brought into consciousness, and into confrontation with one another, two opposite things: the spiritually negative character of the contemporary world and the spiritually positive character of the past tradition. He was obsessed with time. The past and the modern co-exist in his poetry as an imagined present of conflicting symbols to which are attached values for spiritual life or death (1975: 9).

Spender stated more in depth about the different stages of Eliot’s poetry:

Secondly, “The Waste Land” - a poem of many voices - in which consciousness is completely conditioned by the circumstances of civilization, and unable to escape them. The civilization is fragmented. To be fully conscious is to be aware that consciousness itself is an object created by historic conditions within which it exists (1975: 11).

T. S. Eliot was disillusioned with World War I and its consequences and his vision of the future was very pessimistic. However, that war was the main source of inspiration for the poem, “The Waste Land”. Semy Rhee (2012) states that this is the most emblematic poem of Modernism, in which the poet shows the conviction that people cannot really live in this modern world because modern man is spiritually dead.

Eliot, as a modernist poet, exceeded the use of imagery by describing the shift from life to death and the renewal of death into life. The “The Waste Land” is a long and complex poem divided into sections which may appear to be disconnected. However, the structure is based on sequences, as if it were the sequences of a film. Apparently there is no connection among the sections and they shift back and forth in time. Eliot links the sections of the poem by using juxtaposition and giving clues to see a structure in the poem. Each section has a different name and the poet also uses myths to help the reader to see the connections of the pieces. Eliot develops other patterns by using literary, historical and biblical allusions, quotations, and imagery as elements of cohesion.

Regarding the British brigadist Laurie Lee, he used some of Eliot’s techniques to construct his poem “A Moment of War,” such as imagery, metaphor, allusion and different voices, in this case, the voice of the poet and that of the Spanish boy’s conscience.

In the introduction to the anthology, Cary Nelson states that the American poet and brigadists, Edwin Rolfe, quotes the name of section IV from Eliot’s poem “The Waste Land” as the title of his poem “Death by Water” and one phrase from Eliot’s poem: “the cry of gulls” (Nelson, 1996: 28). The poem begins with an epigraph and is divided into two sections. There are also other devices, such as imagery, enjambment and allusion, which also serve to construct the poem and its meaning.

Clive Branson, a British brigadist and painter, wrote poetry and drew sketches of his comrades while he was imprisoned in the concentration camp of San Pedro de Cárdeña. One of those poems, “Prisoners” is very innovative due to the lack of extra words and punctuation marks, except the final full stop. The poem itself is the image:

Like stones on stones / peeling potatoes / prisoners were / seated in a circle…

The imagery is also relevant in the description of the scenario of war in the poem, “Battle of Jarama 1937,” by the British journalist, John Lepper. The lack of punctuation marks, until the end, works as a device to construct the poem and also to provide meaning. It is used to show that the battle does not stop until the end of day: “With the coming of darkness / Deep in the wood / A fox howled to heaven / Smelling the blood.”

The Neglected Poetry

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