‘Marching Hexameters’: Alternative WWI Poets for Remembrance Day

As we approach Remembrance Day, we have decided to take a week to examine the relationship between the classical world and the production of poetry in the First World War. This is, of course, not an untapped area of study, as Elizabeth Vandiver’s publication of Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War demonstrates: indeed, just as Vandiver has written that ‘public interest in the First World War remains strong and growing’, the same is true for the wave of poetry produced in the conflict.

Vandiver’s consummate survey of the combatant-poets of the Great War, framed through the lens of classical reception, is remarkable in its grasp not only of the classical influences working upon these poets, but also in its balance of literary criticism and cultural history. One of the most striking elements of the monograph is the ubiquity of classical allusion and template among a wide variety of combatant-poets, regardless of their social background: public-schooled figures like Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Julian Grenfell and Rupert Brooke are not unique in their employment of classical imagery, given that middle-class and working-class poets – such as Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg – also brought ancient echoes to the trenches. 

During the original lockdown period, I gave a lecture to my A Level students that focused on the poets above; at the bottom of this article, I will enclose the list of poems that we discussed, and that would be the basis of an extra-curriculum lesson over the coming week.

However, so as to offer something different to the particular perspective given by these poets – whether fighting at Gallipoli or on the Western Front – I decided to include a variety of other voices whom I felt would offer a different angle to our ‘orthodox’ understanding of the WWI poet. I felt – and still feel – that WWI poetry is too often explored in the dichotomy between the relentless positivism of the early Georgian poets (see Brooke and Grenfell), and the horror-drenched output of later poets such as Owen and Rosenberg. The same was true for the traditional examination of classical motif – I wanted to move away from the image of, say, the poppy, which, spreading back through Dante, Virgil and Catullus, eventually finds its roots in Homer: 

As interesting as these figures and images are, I will instead explore a handful of voices who will rarely feature on a WWI poetry curriculum; these poems are at once naive, tragic, erotic and even humorous. As I will hopefully demonstrate, it can be helpful to re-examine the (poetic output of the) First World War, and, to bastardize Simone Weil, to displace the image of ‘force’ as ‘the true hero, the true subject’ of this conflict, if only for a single lesson.           

Jessie Pope

Jessie Pope (1868-1941) is without doubt one of the most controversial poetic figures to emerge in the First World War. At the outset of hostilities, Pope was published by the Daily Mail, writing jingoistic poems that persuaded and pressured young men to join up; one of her most famous pieces, ‘Who’s for the Game?’, bears a striking resemblance to Henry Newbolt’s ‘Vitai Lampada’ in its equation of war to sport: 

Who’s for the game, the biggest that’s played,

The red crashing game of a fight?

Her poetic output, then, was deeply problematic: not only in its approach to race, but also in its attitude to warfare, which jarred with the hellish images reported by Sassoon and Owen. Indeed, Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ was originally dedicated to ‘Jessie Pope etc.’, and can thus be read as a direct retort to her verse. 

At one point, however, Pope was one of the nation’s most popular poets: her patriotic, sabre-rattling poems reflected both the prevailing national attitude and the contemporaneous cultural centrality of the Georgian poets. Her poem, ‘The Longest Odds’, is thus typical of the early period of the war; drawing a direct link between great heroes of the ancient past – Leonidas of Sparta and Horatius Cocles – and the bravery shown by solitary ‘Highlander’ as he charges a German position, Pope explicitly utilises classical ideals to extol virtue and bravery. (A similar attitude (both poetic and heroic) is evident in Julian Grenfell’s ‘Into Battle’, wherein the poet alludes to the patient horses of Iliad VIII as he waits for the ‘joy of battle’ to take ‘him by the throat and make him blind’).  

The work of Margaret Sackville also bears more than just a mention: an ardent pacifist, whose poems include ‘Nostra Culpa’ (an admonishment of those women who sent their husbands and sons off to war: ‘we mothers and we murderers of mankind’) has been described as akin to Sappho herself:   

“[I]n many of Lady Margaret’s earlier poems the voice of the great woman-poet of Lesbos echoes, and again and again the strange impression recurs that the spirit of one of the priestesses of ancient Greece is speaking through a modern English poet.” 

E.E. Cummings

Not many people would consider this modernist writer as a WWI poet, but, upon graduation from Harvard, Cummings enlisted in the Norton-Harjes Ambulance Corps; his service was cut short when he was arrested on suspicion of espionage by the French military, but not before he spent a formative five weeks in war-girt Paris. Cummings’ work from this period is quite distinct from ‘traditional’ war poetry: as Alison Rosenblitt has written here, he chooses to foreground issues of sex and gender in his depiction of his wartime experience, reducing the war into the quite distant background.

Cummings, however, did not always engage so obliquely with the Great War: rather, his juvenilia from his time at Harvard betrays a rather more ‘Georgian’ approach to the burgeoning conflict, and especially in his employment of the classics (his principle field of study at university). See, for example, ‘HELEN’, where the eponymous queen is depicted as leaning ‘upon immortal battlements / To watch the beautiful young heroes die’. Here, Cummings grounds the war in a Homeric and heroic context; simultaneously, the poem highlights his long-held interest in female sexual interest in male conflict, which would feature repeatedly in his poetry.  

That interest resurfaces in an untitled sonnet which is not unique for its focus on prostitution among Cummings’ war output. He pictures a ‘twilight smelling of Virgil’ through which ‘march hexameters’, as the poet lies next to ‘huggering rags of white Latin flesh’; as Rosenblitt comments, there are classical suggestions in the reference to ‘Paris’, as well as the forced rhyme between ‘kiss’ and ‘taxis’ which uncovers ideas both of battle lines and syntax. The erotic subversion, coupled with the obscure use of classical motif, fails to align with the ‘traditional’ male perspective of the Great War: in some ways, it is almost Catullan in its eroticism and undercutting of the political context, and, given the reintroduction of Catullus to the A Level set texts in the coming year, worthy of exploration.   

‘M.R’

Quite a different take on classically-imbued WWI poetry can be found on a different battlefront: the Gallipoli campaign. Gallipoli was of sustained interest to the poet-combatants who served there, given its physical proximity to the site of Troy: several poets both aligned and distanced themselves from their Homeric warrior forebears, among them Patrick Shaw-Stewart, Nowell Oxland and even Rupert Brooke, from whose notebook the following fragments are taken:

‘They say Achilles in the darkness stirred’ 

‘Priam and his fifty sons / Wake all amazed’ 

In these poems, we can see their authors struggle with the burden of poetic legacy, and the appositeness of Homeric images and ideology as a template for their own work: they serve as springboards for criticism of ancient warfare and values, and thus they are invaluable resources for the classroom. 

One unlikely (and far less known) piece of classical reception can be found in The Anzac Book (1916), the trench publication that contained illustrations, stories, cartoons and poems created by those Australian and New Zealand troops serving at Gallipoli. Within it we find ‘The True Story of Sappho’s Death’, written by the anonymous M.R – a soldier clearly versed in his classics (and Byron!). The sing-song poem, which reimagines Sappho as a music-hall performer driven to suicide, plays a ‘reception game’ with its audience; it is prefaced with the claim that it has been:

‘Deciphered – with much labour – by a bomb thrower of the New Zealand Infantry Brigade from a very old tablet dug up in the trenches of Quinn’s Post’.

And it closes with:

‘The epic loses much of its beauty through a hurried translation from the Ancient Greek during a Turkish attack’.

The poem stands alone as a humorous interjection into the bleakness of the Great War, yet there is much that a class can unpick. Ideas of classical literature and issues of translation are interrupted by the confusion of the contemporary; perhaps fittingly enough for a poem written near to Troy, the themes of discovery and loss are underlined by the poet-discoverer-translator. 

The above are just a tiny selection of some of the alternative ‘classical’ voices that would be the perfect focus for any remembrance-themed lesson. Should you wish to explore ideas of commemoration, conflict and classics beyond the First World War, however, you can find a further collection of poems for students looking for wider reading here.

A substantial amount of classical literature concerns war: not just the conflict itself, but the idea of commemorating that conflict too. From Achilles’ desire for an everlasting name to Apollo’s adoption of the laurel tree in memory of Daphne, there is a persistent desire for permanence; Horace’s monument, ‘more lasting than bronze’, proves just that.

As a result, there is something fitting about modern authors using classical tropes as means of remembrance; in a field of study dependent upon precarious survival of text and material culture, each and every act of reading becomes a commemoration too. But, in the same moment, reading is naturally the way that we revive and maintain our subject, just as Sappho desired:

And I say to you someone will remember us

In time to come…