(Forbes 28)

If one sees the 20th century as a century that was scanned (amongst other things) by the “blackest ulcer” of War—the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, the Second World War, the Cold War, various lost colonial wars, Northern Ireland, not to mention the Gulf War or the Balkans—what Akhmatova seems to be saying is not so much that the 20th century experienced the suffering of war, but that it experienced this suffering centrally in a “stupor of fear and grief,” this side of a “relief” promised by both Tragic catharsis and the confidence in the victory of the “Good.” In this perspective the apocalypse of war opens not onto a millennial perspective (the war is not the War to end all Wars, the defeat of the forces of Evil, the triumph of God’s peace and His order), but generates what we now understand (shifting the meaning of the word) as a Holocaust: a meaningless sacrifice of innocents—including soldiers—to a pitiless deity.

In his La Poésie et la guerre (Chroniques 1942-1944), Starobinski suggests that, in a context in which the “forces of right and wrong” are clearly marked, poetry can function, like the Tragic chorus, as witness:

(10, my underlining)

It is this “espoir où tous pourront se reconnaître” that I provisionally see as the heart of the notion of Millennium whose presence/absence in British War poetry is the heart of this article. I do so—as the Millenarist tradition has generally done—conflating the complexities of the Biblical narrative of The Revelation of St John the Divine where Millennium and New Jerusalem are distinct moments. For, in the Biblical configuration, the Millennium, the vindication of the hope of all Christians, the first absolute triumph of good in this world, is preceded by Armageddon (XVI, 16), war on the most vast scale between the forces of good and evil, between the Lamb and the Beast. This penultimate war (after the Millennium, Satan will revolt one last time, only to be utterly destroyed) is one of the templates by which a historically Protestant culture can configure the “real” wars with which it is confronted. It does so partly because most war poetry seems to need to work within a teleological or eschatological perspective, or at the very least, to need an order/discipline (political in the simplest sense, ethical, cosmological) to “contain” the apparently unthinkable chaos of violence that war lets loose and of which it can be an emblem. This need for order could be linked to the fact that poetry, like all art, is a disciplined, a pattern-making activity. But the patterns that emerge inevitably vary historically. It is interesting, for example, that the date given by the Oxford English Dictionary for the entry of the name Armageddon into the English language is 1811 and for Millennium is 1638.

This article will, then, consider the way in which a thirty-year period of the twentieth century (1914-1945) “ordered” its particular experience of war, the way it has seen or has not seen a major eschatological/teleological perspective (a future Millennium) in three major conflicts in which British poets participated and produced some of the most “canonical” war texts of the century: the First World War, the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War.

The article will suggest that, out of the complexity of the experience of the First World War, two important trends emerged, both of which have deep roots in the nineteenth century and neither of which quite fits with the standard narrative of literary history that places Modernism at the heart of the 20th century and sees the First World War as a causal factor in shaping the aesthetic choices of the period. On the one hand a truly Millenarist tradition of war poetry emerges when the First World War is later allegorised as the penultimate disorder of a decadent Babylon, of a capitalist society which has reached its end in a paroxysm of cruelty, and the wastelands of No Man’s Land. This Millenarist perspective (reworked by the Russians—the First World War precedes the Civil War that brings about the New Jerusalem—will serve during the Spanish Civil War and interest at least certain of the Modernists. But its poetic roots are less in the poetry of the First World War than in Romanticism (in, for example, the initial enthusiasm of High Romanticism for the French Revolution as joyful apocalypse—the “bliss was it in that dawn to be alive” of Wordsworth). Indeed it is not for nothing that the late 1930’s saw the rise of a movement called “The New Apocalypse” which is now generally read as a form of neo-Romanticism and which was to dominate the 1940’s.

The other, anti-Millenarist, tradition is more deeply rooted in the reading which the canonised poets of the First World War made of their experience. This will tend to dominate Second World War Poetry, despite the completely different ideological, political and indeed moral context of the two major conflicts. This trend will produce an aesthetically deeply modest reticence about war and its hatreds and enthusiasms without ever being tempted by either pacifism or a radical critique of the civilisation that apparently generated the war. It is this that one finds in, for example, the following, I would suggest typical, Second World War poem by a sub-lieutenant in the Royal Navy, Norman Hampson:

(Gardner Terrible, 121)

It is the “pedigree” of this vision of the “quiet countries” that will interest us here.

Before doing so, I would like to recall that the destructive violence of Armageddon is something which haunts the poems of the period. To take just one small example, the poet and later pacifist Max Plowman wrote, during the battle of the Somme, about the situation of waiting to go up the Line:

(Gardner Up the Line 101)

The poems of this first war thus tend to work within a relatively simple polarity. On the one hand there is an attempt to “render” the “hell of noise and darkness,” the “Last Day” horror that was the average infantryman’s lot—and also to counter this nightmare with what one might call a “golden, dreamy” vision of peace, whose roots lie in the “Georgian” culture of the class that produced the officers who wrote the poems.

And it will be Wilfred Owen (b. 1893, killed in action in France on Nov. 4, 1918) who will be seen by the century to express the heart of this darkness. The aspect of Owen’s work I will be looking at here is the articulation between anger and compassion or pity or the “theology” that informs Owen’s use of religious motifs and symbols.

The articulation of anger and pity is an old theological problem and a crucial one in British poetry particularly during the preceding century—Owen’s back-country. For pity without anger can become mawkishly Angelic just as an anger without pity becomes brutishly Satanic—the ideal marriage being, perhaps, the union of the two and their transcendence in a third term. Owen, to my mind at least, held these two poles together in individual poems in a fine and complex dialogue. But his theology, globally, was simpler (poorer perhaps) than that of the great Romantics like Blake, producing a reading of the causes of the First World War informed by a late 19th century popular dolorous Christian culture.

It will be remembered that Kipling, a father who “sent his son to War” in more ways than one and lost him there, whose Imperial poetry was a mainstay of the doxa of the class that launched and continued the war (see “Dane-Geld” or “The Dutch in the Medway”), wrote famously—and terribly—about the First World War in Common Form:

(Ibid. 150)

This is in some sense Owen’s reading, a reading which he transposes into a Biblical narrative where the Father becomes the bad father who abandons his s/Son to the suffering of the Crucifixion. The father becomes Blake’s Nobodaddy, Jehovah, the God of Exodus and “Revelation,” the God of the “Triumphant Song of Israel,” the LORD who looks with pleasure and pride on the destruction of His enemies, but seems indifferent to the concomitant suffering of His children:

It is this Lord, who is not simply an Old Testament figure since he reappears in Revelation, who figures in Owen’s poem “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young.” The poet—by then no longer a believing Christian though he had been brought up in Evangelical Protestantism and indeed worked as a lay assistant—rewrites the profoundly enigmatic story of Abraham and Isaac:

(Owen 42)

This rewriting moves the poetry from Armageddon to another and in many ways opposed hill of execution: Golgotha. The despair of the s/Son will become a counter-text, particularly its moments, indeed the topos, of abandonment. The fin de siècle aesthetics in which Owen was brought up will translate this moment of abandonment into a reworking of the older, notably baroque, Ecce Homo tradition, a tradition which habitually represents Christ surrounded by men at arms, abandoned to destruction by a “legitimate” authority: Pontius Pilate (John 19,5). And this moment is only one in a series of desertions by figures who have “authority” which will climax in the enigmatic “Eloi, Eloi, lama sabachthani?” which is, being interpreted, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Mark 15,34). It is his refusal to forsake which will keep Owen close to his men in a war he found absurd, and generate the anger at being forsaken that haunts his social critique and satire, as in, for example “At a Calvary near the Ancre” (the river near Amiens where Blunden also fought):

(82)

This aesthetic-political-theological space would need analysing. Suffice it to say here that it has two major consequences. Firstly ordinary soldiers become Christ figures (“bear (the cross) with (listen patiently to) Him”) or at least bear witness to his values. The enemy is thus no longer the soldier on the other side, for the young German conscript is also, in this perspective, “the seed of Europe.” The enemy is now the propagandist journalist/politician and the organised Church of one’s own side, an enemy marked by the 666 of the Beast of Revelation. The German soldier becomes a brother, the object of the famously compassionate gaze that characterises Christ in the “Ecce Homo” tradition. It is this sense of the brotherhood in suffering that is at the heart of what is arguably Owen’s greatest achievement: “Strange Meeting.”

Secondly, since Christ is opposed to the God of Battles, the truly loving (Christian or at least Christ-like?) persona/poet refuses this Father’s “Word.” His flamboyantly violent apocalyptic symbols and language consequently become problematic as the poems centre on “gentle,” often elegiac, metaphors and language. Now, the Book of Revelation is a space from which elegy is excluded (as is pity)—no voice expresses compassion for the forces of Satan, or even for the suffering of the righteous whose triumph is so radical, whose translation into Heaven so immediate that their suffering is as if abolished. It will be remembered that in the “Triumphant song in heaven” of Revelation XIX (13), The Word of God manifests itself in the figure (Christ) on the White Horse who

If one may be allowed to interpret the “sharp sword” in the mouth as a certain type of wrathful, “dipped in blood” apocalyptic imagery, Owen refuses this “rod of iron” rhetoric (and the Christ in glory of the Parousia), preferring to deploy counter-metaphors of mourning and love, the sort of metaphorical texture one finds in

(44)

We are here in the space of the Pietà, a configuration found on certain (secular) war memorials where the body of the sacrificed young soldier lies in the lap of a sorrowing female figure. And it is this potentially pietistic tradition that one finds, in a less angry mode, in another, but for our purposes here crucial, poet of the First World War: Edmund Blunden (1896-1974).

Blunden is indeed a fine, if minor poet, and important to us here largely because he writes the positive side of the polarity, the voice of what Owen called “the sad shires” (ibid.), or Plowman the “golden, dreamy, peaceful afternoon(s).” In this he incarnates most clearly the “English line.” Blunden is a poet who sang not only Golgotha but also the Garden: England. Rather than quote one of his famous First World War poems, I would like to recall here an extract from a Second World War poem published in 1944. This is typical in its rendering of a certain type of “landscape/mindscape,” a certain mode of “gentleness,” the maintenance of certain core values in the midst of or under the shadow of nightmare:

(Graham 52)

What we have here is the epiphany of some (hypothetical in its “perhaps”) “first divine intent” that “floats” in the form of (royal) swans islanded (tussock) like England within the vulnerable, defensive, protection of dykes. The poem is a “prospect” in the double sense of a vision of past and future, illuminated by a cosmic order that contains, endemically it seems, the violence of “steel and bronze” and enshadowed by the fallen world of an industrial culture (economy?) that continually sacrifices the “sons of man” who are also Son of Man. What interests us in the context of the present article is that the lesson of the First World War is essentially an apocalypse in the contemporary sense of a chaotic cataclysm. Opposed to this is not a Millennium (a better future world) but a past Paradise of “poise,” of “proportion,” of well-being. This paradisiac (primeval) vision presents the perfect divine and political order as a continuity, refusing to distinguish between the nature of the enemy in the First and Second World Wars just as it perceives England as a space of scarless continuity, a civilisation whose space, place and guarantee is the English countryside (the “prospect” is also a genre in landscape poetry). This is a profoundly conservative vision in all senses of the word and one which, combined with Owen’s, will inform much of the poetry of the Second World War.

(Cunningham 311)

MacDiarmid is wrong, of course, for there was indeed a fixed scale of values, a “conservative” vision of the “good order” but he is right in his strong sense that this scale of values was in some sense (politically) inimical to that of the committed poets of the Spanish Civil War. For it is precisely, I would suggest, the Millennialist perspective of so much Spanish Civil War poetry that not only gives it its “fixed scale of values” but its particular aesthetic texture.

I can here sketch only certain of the aspects of what we understand by a (necessarily secularised) Millennialist poetry, and suggest that it was the fact that the culture of the British Left was/is so deep-rooted in Protestant dissenting culture that poets were able to have relatively (too?) easy access to Biblical prototypes. Nor is it here possible to mention, except in passing, the contemporary aesthetic debate around socialist realism that justified a project/aesthetic characterised by an insistence that what is perceived as the hidden future pattern is more important than the chaotic surface of the present. Nor can we, finally, show how the radical wedge that the First World War had driven between political discourse and poetry was removed as a new articulation of the two was forged in the heat of permanent crisis, when poetry would once again become, for better (as in Picasso’s Guernica), or for worse, “propagandist.” Suffice it therefore to draw attention here to a rising scale of investment in Millennialist types of thinking.

It is worth noting, for example, that certain motifs and symbols from the New Jerusalem tradition resurface. One of these is a dream of transparency that is also part and parcel of inter-war social utopias and can be seen in the last stanza of Orwell’s description of his strategic encounter with an anti-fascist Italian soldier that also forms the introduction to his Homage to Catalonia and the end of “Looking Back on the Spanish War”:

(Ibid., 310)

This is an unusual expression of enthusiasm from Orwell and perhaps a little “unreal” (bombs do shatter crystal). However one reads it, this type of imagery has old roots in the Bible. The crystalline, “transparent glass” is a central Millennial symbol of the better society as—to take just one example—in “Revelation” 21

Thematically, the certainty that the good order was at stake in Spain meant that certain themes like “the hero” (Michael as Archangel) re-emerged pristine—though they had been apparently discredited by their ruthless exploitation in the First World War and the period that led up to it. This enthusiasm for the (male) heroic (which was pandemic in the thirties, emblematically in Malraux) was notably prevalent in British poems about the combatants of the International Brigade. We will see that this theme is rarer in Second World War poetry despite (paradoxically) the fact that the same political ground was in many ways being fought over once again.

But it is perhaps above all in the attempts to “imagine,” to “configure” a “New Jerusalem” which they felt was being built in and through the war in Spain that the Millennial tradition surfaces most vigorously in the left-wing poetry of the 1930’s. I can mention here two examples, one the ideal of the future expressed in an extract of what is perhaps the most interesting individual poem produced by this war: Auden’s “Spain”; the second in a (then) very popular poem by Jack Lindsay.

What is striking about Auden’s text is its tonal uncertainty (a reflection, maybe, of his growing political hesitation), its constant veering from high seriousness to camp, its presentation of the future society as a sort of “quaint” space where an Edwardian upper middle class dream and aspects of a certain sentimentalised working class culture could meet (“the breeding of terriers”), inscribing the structural difficulties of the Millennial in poetry where the rendering of destruction appears to be endemically stronger than the vision of the New Jerusalem:

(Cunningham 99)

Much could be said of the problematic nature of this dream-millennium. This to-morrow—to take just one example—invests the dream of transparency with

raising uneasy questions about the hoped-for functioning of political life, a potentially sinister delight in vast majorities (“the beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome”), the problematic “transparency” of “eager” elections that take place with none of the “retrograde” “formalities” of “bourgeois” democracy such as secret ballots, the holding-off until “to-morrow” of this political freedom—such as it is (direct democracy in Spain was, as we know, a source of conflict between the Stalinists and the Trotskyists or Anarchists).

An even more telling text is perhaps the non-combatant Jack Lindsay’s “On Guard for Spain! A Poem for Mass Recitation”:

(Cunningham 262-3)

This poem encapsulates much that I understand by the Millennial in poetry. Over and above the sporadic references to “hell” or the “O hear our call” of the dissenting tradition, the vindication of struggle/war (it is war that “forges unity”), the typically “thirties” metaphors like “the meadows of the future’s plenty,” there is the use of free verse rhythms, the slow imperial unfolding of syntax and metaphors, the massive use of anaphora that recall the founding “free-verse” rhythms of Biblical prose and poetry. Beyond this even, there are two characteristics which had been absent in the First World War. Firstly hatred of the enemy becomes legitimate once again. The enemy is “beyond the pale,” abject, radically other, irredeemable, under an irrevocable death penalty, not covered or protected by understanding, compassion or forgiveness. As Revelation had said

But it is perhaps, secondly, the “mass recitation” side of Lindsay’s work which is central to the spirit of the Millennial. For this poem (and the phenomenon is world-wide) was recited in vast demonstrations by massed choreographed choirs. The choir (cf. Auden), whose theatrical presence recalls the founding tragic chorus of Greece, physically enacts the “unity” that the New Jerusalem would bring about, erases the alienations and isolations of Capitalism, guaranteeing the merging of the individual into the mass in a musical/mystical fusion that is beyond or below rational thought.

(Selwyn 220)

This sort of sentiment, which derives directly from Owen’s “Strange Meeting,” is so general (see, for example, Keith Douglas’s better “Vergissmeinnicht”) as to be striking, indeed surprising, given the now dominant tendency of the culture (in the cinema, for instance) to transform the second world war German soldier into the abject.

This refusal of all flamboyant (Apocalyptic) rhetoric, gesturing or posturing articulates with, is perhaps the reflection of, a refusal to formulate a vision of any new (European) order. In some ways the poets seem to root themselves, as had those of the First World War, but even more defensively (a question of “survival” perhaps), in some ways, in a consensual “Englishness” (cf. contemporary art historians like Pevsner, painters like Craxton or Piper, filmmakers like Michael Powell and musicians like Vaughan Williams). And what they build is a surprisingly modest view of English history, a search for small epiphanies in gentle landscapes. This suggests that their reading of what is happening in the Second World War is determined not only by the nature of the enemy and the political context but also by the grids a particular genre inherits or chooses to use (here the dominant model of First World War poetry).

The following are just two examples of this reading. The first, from a poem by Dorothy Sayers, written in the period when Britain found itself totally alone in the war against Nazi Germany, and when—if at any time—the stark nature of the tragedy in which it found itself might have encouraged an emphatic rhetoric. But Sayers does not enter this space:

(Gardner Terrible, 46)

This is indeed a modest Millennium, a foretaste, perhaps, of the Welfare State, certainly not a Brave New World.

Finally I would quote the first two stanzas of a work which is one of the most popular of British poems, although often taken to be strangely marginal in its Surreal (the author had contacts with the Surrealists) or “nonsense” perspective on the war. It is, to my mind, in many ways central to British (but not American) Second World War poetry. It is Henry Reed’s “Naming of Parts”:

(Gardner Terrible, 35)

It is precisely in the chastened sense of “not having got” the eloquent gestures, in the sense that such gestures, insofar as they exist, are held by a certain type of landscape (gardens) which not only refuses to exclude but actually includes the enemy (Japonica) that I see a major structuring direction of the poetry of the period.

This profound reticence (which has its exceptions) is something that had existed marginally in writing on the Spanish Civil War, in Orwell notably, but also in Spender. It gives an aesthetic configuration which will not only protect it from the excesses of the Millennialist perspective, but will, in its defence of a rather conservative “honest living,” paradoxically marginalise British Second World War poetry in the great flowering of European poetry of the time (in poets like Milosz, Rozewicz, Pilinszky, Quasimodo, Herbert, Levi, etc.). It is probable (if one excepts those like Levi, Baczynski or Radnoti who experienced the Holocaust) that this distinctive British tone is not linked directly to the nature of their experience since one blitz resembles another, and the tank battles in Normandy in which Keith Douglas died were, in their way, as daunting for the combatant as those in which a poet like Boris Slutsky was involved on the Eastern Front. It is perhaps that the “pedigree of the quiet countries” (a chosen and not a genetic pedigree) is one which—because it works in the grain of the consensus and thus falls too easily into a network of consentience and anodynes—will leave an impression of “weakness,” excluding poets from the renewing, tragic sweep that informs so much of the best European poetry of the war, a poetry that preferred to write, as Ted Hughes said of Pilinszky, “from the disaster-centre of the modern world” (231). In 1940 Akhmatova wrote a poem in Leningrad in honour of the Londoners undergoing the Blitz that begins:

(Graham 62)

It is perhaps this ability to take on the daunting space occupied by, in Hampson’s words, “tragic actors great in structure” like Hamlet, Julius Caesar or Lear, a space beyond that in which the Millennium – and perhaps tragic catharsis—is even conceivable, which gives its particular density to European—as opposed to strictly British—Second World War poetry.