Anti-war of words

David Sexton|Literary Editor|Evening Standard

11 April 2012

We really should not be surprised that Tony Blair is looking so very dispirited and harassed. On 5 March, a group called Poets Against the War presented him, at Downing Street, with 10,000 Poems for Peace, on a set of floppy discs. Among these compositions was Harold Pinter's Here They Go Again ("Your eyes have gone out and your nose/Sniffs only the pong of the dead/And all the dead air is alive/With the smell of America's God"). But puzzling out the other 9,999 works must have taken up nearly all Mr Blair's waking hours.

The Iraq crisis, following on from 11 September, has set off an unprecedented explosion of anti-war poetry. A bad time for the world has turned into a boom time for people with an itch to express themselves in lines which don't quite reach the edge of the page.

The internet is much to blame, of course. There are innumerable websites eager to publish these effusions. On 20 January, Todd Swift, the poetry editor of www.nthposition. com, went so far as to invite contributions. Within 24 hours, he had 350 poems; soon after that, thousands.

After a week, Swift had winnowed down the poems into a "chapbook anthology", 100 Poets Against the War. There have now been three successive editions of this e-book and some 50,000 copies have been downloaded, making it one of the most successful e-books ever (a hard copy has now been published by Cambridgeshirebased Salt Publishing).

The volume, improving from one incarnation to the next, now includes work by poets of independent reputation, such as George Szirtes, Adrian Mitchell and Sean O'Brien.

But most of it, however righteous in sentiment, is lamentable in quality. There are, it seems, only a few ways to write a poem against the war and they soon become familiar.

One is the plangent proclamation of one's own extreme sensitivity: "The tear in my eye/ is bigger than time" (by Dawna Rae Matrix). Another is the indignant rhetorical question: "Are there children somewhere/ waiting for wounds/ eager for the hiss of napalm/ in their flesh - / the mutilating lump of shrapnel/ do they long for disfigurement incinerate themselves in ovens/ eagerly ..." etc (by Robert Priest). Answers on a postcard.

Alternatively, the poets bring together cosy domestic details with the brutal facts of war for shock effect: "I might as well have suckled you/ - my babe-in-arms - / On long-range-missiles's noses/ As on the teats of bottles ..." (Hot Milk by Patrick Chapman). There are poems that enjoy imagining what sort of horrid things the Americans beastly enough to be pushing for war might say, such as: "How dare anyone question our Authority,/ our blatantly impatient, greedy Policies?" (We Believe by Hasandra Larsen).

And, of course, there are swathes of poems that joyfully celebrate the peace-loving poet's own rectitude. In Against the War, Susan McMaster discloses what she plans to do today for peace. It includes smiling at her boss until he smiles back, watching the squirrels play, listening closely to a child, cleaning up after her cat, lighting a birch fire, making love in the afternoon and learning to spell "Qur'an".

How have these people all come to believe that these lines that don't reach the edge of the page have some virtue beyond all other communication on this subject? There is an answer to that. It's to be found in another anthology rushed out for the occasion, 101 Poems Against War, edited by Matthew Hollis and Paul Keegan, with an afterword by Andrew Motion (Faber, £8.99).

"For centuries, there was no such thing as a 'war poet' in the modern sense of the phrase," Motion points out. There were many poems about war, as about other subjects, but they were not by "war poets" in the sense we now understand the term - dedicated solely to showing the futility of war.

Towards the end of the First World War "amidst the squalor and tragedy of the Western Front, something fundamental changed", says Motion. Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg wrote poems that rejected war absolutely and chose pacifism. "It was still possible to celebrate individual acts of courage and to commemorate losses, but not to glorify conflict as such," says Motion. That war can never be right is still the absolute presumption among modern poets.

Even Motion admits there are downsides to this. "In certain respects this may seem to imply a narrowing: we can guess what attitude poets will take to a conflict before we read a line they have written about it." Luckily, the anthology takes a more expansive attitude to "war poetry", including work from earlier times.

Here is Housman's tribute to the mercenaries who "saved the sum of things for pay". Here is Hilaire Belloc's epigram on The Pacifist: "Pale Ebenezer thought it wrong to fight,/ But Roaring Bill (who killed him) thought it right."

Outside the small world of poetry, absolute pacifism has prospered. It is astonishingly common for students to say that Wilfred Owen is their "favourite poet". Owen's anguish is so morally right, after all: so easy and cost-free to endorse. You will not find many people to argue now that trench warfare was splendid.

So "war poetry" has become virtually synonymous with the antiwar poetry of 1917-1918. The complex recognition of the nature of war that makes the Iliad - "a poem that lives and moves and has its being in war", as Bernard Knox says - so great has been lost. Who now could write such an essay as Simone Weil's The Iliad, or the Poem of Force, that extraordinary response to Nazism?

The contemporary English poet Geoffrey Hill (who published a superb First World War poem in 1983) was once infuriated to come across a schools competition for an "Armistice Festival", inviting entrants "to write the poem they think Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke or Edward Thomas might have written on war and peace, had they survived to the age of 50, 70 or a hundred years of age".

"Do the organisers of this foolish contest really suppose that they are honouring the achievement of those poets by so assaulting them with notions of relevance and empathy?" Hill raged. But these are, in effect, just the poems we are now being offered in 100 Poets Against the War and all over the internet.

To believe that this is a cultural loss, you don't need to be a warmonger. In 1946, the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein recorded in his notebook this characteristic thought about the protesters against the atom bomb: "The people now making speeches against producing the bomb are undoubtedly the scum of the intellectuals, but even that does not prove beyond question that what they abominate is to be welcomed."

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