Poetry Archives

Literature and the Great War

June 9, 2013 by Roy Johnson

conflict, culture, language, and literature 1914-1918

Literature and the Great War is a study of the relationship between language, literature, and the events of the conflicts that took place between 1914 and 1918. It also addresses the fact that quite a lot of what we call ‘war poetry’ and ‘first world war memoirs’ was not produced during that period, but many years later – for very good reasons.

With the exception of poetry, which can quickly capture impressions and emotions on the fly, most writing about major events in other genres such as stories, novels, documentaries, histories, and autobiographies require a period of reflection and digestion before they can be properly expressed. This is especially true of events as cataclysmically disruptive as the first world war – which turned the whole world’s view of itself upside down.

There were memorable and enduring works written during the conflict — Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire (1916) and the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas. However, the majority of works which seem to encapsulate both the horrors of the war and the almost universal sense of disillusionment which followed were produced almost a decade later — Robert Graves Goodbye to All That (1929), Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (1929), Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero (1929), Siegfried Sassoon Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), R.C. Sheriff Journey’s End (1929), Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

There are a number of explanations for this delay. Many people felt that the horrors of the war were almost too shocking to write about at the time – especially when official propaganda and the newspapers were telling everybody about ‘heroic’ victories and not mentioning the vast number of men slaughtered (the hundreds of thousands killed were described as ‘wastage’).

After the war very few combatants wanted to talk about their experiences, and those who had survived understandably wanted to simply get back to normal life, often feeling guilty about those they had left behind on the Somme, Passchendale, and Gallipoli.

Because everyone had been persuaded that it had been a ‘war to end all wars’ there was a general sense that optimism would prevail. But then in the 1920s came a period of economic collapse, austerity, and poverty throughout most of Europe. Instead of having fought a war to achieve a better world, it appeared that nothing had been achieved at all, and the huge sacrifice of lost lives had been wasted. .It was the period from late 1920s onward when the spate of angry, critical, and anti-establishment narratives concerning 1914—1918 were produced

Nor should it be thought that during the war itself the public were eager for critical accounts of the carnage, the gassings, and the colossal numbers of people killed. Some of the most popular publications at the time were patriotic and religious works speaking to ‘heroism’, ‘sacrifice’. and ‘victory’.

Stevenson’s (persuasive) argument is that society in the post-war period felt saturated by this sort of language, and writers purged their vocabularies of these now-corrupted abstract generalisations. They used instead a language of concrete nouns, in which only that-which-can-be-known was named. Hence the rise in popularity in the 1920s of writers such as Ernest Hemingway, whose terse and pared-down literary prose style had been shaped by his experience of the first world war:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain … I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago …. Abstract words such as glory, honour, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) were enormously popular at the time, and went on to influence two or three generations of writers (particularly writers of thrillers and crime fiction) until the fashion for this sort of writing faded (following Hemingway’s suicide) in the 1960s.

Stevenson argues that the war produced a fracturing of time and language. Events began to be described as ‘pre-war’ and post-war’; double summer-time was introduced; and ordinary men and women were plunged into a linguistic vortex in which official language in no way reflected the reality they faced every day in the trenches.

An interesting point he makes about the language of the war is that many of the volunteers and conscripts who took part from the early days of 1914 onwards would be young men (almost boys) who at that time had probably never travelled more than a few miles beyond their own towns and villages. Consequently, since there was at that time, no national broadcasting system, they would never have heard speech other than their own regional accents.

In addition to this, they were plunged into Picardy, where the vast majority of them had never heard the French language spoken before. It is not surprising that towns such as Ypres and Auchonvillers were translated into ‘Wipers and ‘Ocean Villas’ and indeed the satirical newspaper produced by the troops was called the Wipers Times. Newly conscipted men also had to grapple with enormous amounts of army slang and jargon – some of it remnants of the imperial past. Words such as cushy, blighty, and dekko were Hindi or Urdu in origin.

The latter part of the book is devoted largely to the reception and evaluation of poetry produced during the war and in the years since, reminding us that at the time religious and patriotic poetry was far more highly regarded, whereas the critical reputation of writers such as Owen, Thomas, and Sassoon has taken much longer to establish

I was glad to see that he put the reputation of Rupert Brooke into perspective. Brooke had glorified a jingoistic sense of Englishness and war prior to 1914 but didn’t actually have any first-hand experience of combat – dying of a rather inglorious flea bite before he reached Gallipoli.

Stevenson does his best to be fair to modernists such as T.S.Eliot and Virginia Woolf, but he misses the opportunity to note that almost the whole of the Bloomsbury Group and its adherents were pacifists during 1914-1918. And this was not based simply on an unwillingness to fight, but on a genuine sense of internationalism and the belief that the war was a huge mistake which need not have taken place. Indeed, before the war had even ended Leonard Woolf helped set up the League of Nations (which went on to become the United Nations) with the sole aim of preventing any further conflicts of its size and kind between nations.

This was an extremely unpopular view to hold at the time – though it has become increasingly sane with hindsight. People were jailed for ‘conscientious objection’ and of course this is a period when young men were executed and crucified in no-man’s-land for crimes of ‘cowardice’ and falling asleep on duty. The only other people to oppose the war on internationalist grounds were figures such as Trotsky and Lenin.

Stevenson’s final chapter considers revisionist histories of the war which have been produced in recent years. He gives their defence of the blundering generals and the gigantic carnage a fair hearing, but eventually undermines their arguments with a few well chosen quotations that emphasise his concluding argument – that we need to read closely and not be swayed by rhetoric and false metaphors.

Revisionist history cannot be accused of ignoring the war’s loss and mutilation. [Gary Sheffield’s] Forgotten Victory is regularly attentive to the ‘callous arithmetic of battle’ and the ‘butcher’s bill’ that resulted. Yet Sheffield also suggests that at one stage that the Canadians’ capture of Vimy Ridge in 1917 was achieved ‘with relatively little difficulty, although at the cost of 11,000 casualties’. Such remarks cast doubt on his promise of ‘analysis based on firm grasp of the facts’. Avoidance of difficulty, even relatively, at the cost of 11,000 casualties, is not fact but interpretation, the kind of interpretation the generals were apt to make themselves.

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Randall Stevenson, Literature and the Great War 1914-1918, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp.262, ISBN: 019959645X

New Oxford Rhyming Dictionary

December 16, 2010 by Roy Johnson

grouped lists of rhyming words – plus cross references

As John Lennard says in his introduction to this godsend compendium for rhymers and poets: “Rhyme is everywhere – because it works. In advertising jingles, football chants, birthday card greetings, tabloid headlines, political slogans, and catchphrases, rhyme makes the sentiments more powerful and more memorable”. You can use the New Oxford Rhyming Dictionary to look up rhymes for specific words; browse sets of words for inspiration; use the tips in marginal notes to create extra sets of rhymes; or learn from examples given throughout the book how other writers past and present have used rhyme. The book is structured in quite an interesting way. First Lennard’s introduction explains the nature of rhyme and its prevalence in poetry and everyday life. He gives a very wide-ranging account of how poets have worked – from the early Renaissance to the present day.

The second part of the book is the heart of the matter – words grouped into sets according to their vowel sound. These are actually listed in the order of word endings – as in -ar, -ee, and -ng. So the listings for -ar run aargh, Accra, afar, aide mémoire and so on. This might sound complicated, but becomes clearer with use, as in the example which follows here.

The third part is an index which runs from Aachen (rhyme words darken and Petrachan) to zymurgy. Can you imagine trying to find a word that would rhyme with zymurgy? I realise you’ve probably never heard of the word – and neither had I. (It means ‘The branch of chemistry that deals with fermentation processes, as in brewing….’) But that’s how thorough the listings are.

What you are likely to do is look up a term in the 4500 word index. There you will be directed to the rhyming terms listed in part two. These are arranged in order of correspondence, where the first word is a perfect rhyme, and subsequent entries less so. For instance if you look up the word lover in the index you are referred to section 12,87 where you find the following options:

disapprover, hoover, improver, louvre (US louver), manoeuvre (US maneuver), mover, outmanoeuvre (US outmaneuver), reprover, Suva, Tuva, Vancouver
cover, Glover, hardcover, lover, plover, undercover
vulva, triumvir, slipcover, Cordova, baklava, helluva, Ulanova, Genova, Vaishnava, Ostrava, Vltava
fervour (US fervor), Minerva, Nerva, observer, server, swerver
time-server

The choice amongst these terms leads to interesting issues of pronunciation and the politics of accent and language use – which Lennard touches on in his introduction. The examples of good rhyme he gives throughout the book are an interesting and very unstuffy selection which includes classics, modern poetry, and even song lyrics.

The new second edition of this work has added fifty extra pages of recently coined words – such as Americano, iPod, sub-prime,, and vuvuzela. These are drawn from the huge databases held by Oxford Dictionaries as part of the corpus on which their linguistic research is based.

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John Lennard (ed), New Oxford Rhyming Dictionary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, second edition, 2012, pp.448, ISBN: 0199652465

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Philip Larkin biography

September 10, 2014 by Roy Johnson

his life, and a critical re-assesment of his major poetry

Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love is the latest biographical study of arguably Britain’s most popular twentieth century poet. In his Introduction, respected and prolific Larkin scholar James Booth clearly sets out his position and concerns. Philip Larkin he believes is ‘by common consent, the best-loved British poet of the last hundred years’. But three decades after his death, he ‘remains a controversial figure, both as a poet and a man’. Ironically, his posthumous reputation was inadvertently tarnished by his two literary executors. Anthony Thwaite’s Selected Letters of Philip Larkin (1992) (properly) included his ribald and Chaucerian correspondence with like-minded friends, notably Kingsley Amis. The self-appointed literary guardians of public morality were quick to pounce, accusing him of racism, sexism, Thatcherism, misogyny and homophobia.

Andrew Motion’s official biography, Philip Larkin: A Writer’s Life (1993), despite its impressive research, was also disapproving of his alleged character traits and proclivities. More recent ‘Larkin Studies’ have been (to borrow a Larkinian phrase) more precious than valuable, subjecting him to arcane post-modern analysis and exegesis. But the publication of Archie Burnett’s Philip Larkin: The Complete Poems (2012), with its meticulous ‘Commentary’ on the provenance of his verse, has done a lot to restore a Larkin-centred appreciation of his poetic oeuvre.

James Booth now convincingly and gracefully rehabilitates Larkin (whatever his real or imagined personal ‘failings’) as a poet of the people: ‘Phrases and lines from his poems are more frequently quoted than those of any other poet of his time’. ‘Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three’; ‘What are days for?’; ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’; ‘What will survive of us is love.’ Booth argues that ‘For the moment he seems to have had the last poetic word on love, on death, on the Great War, on parents, on ageing, on hedgehogs.’

Booth also suggests that Larkin’s poems feature the most uncompromising reflections on death outside the soliloquies of Shakespeare. With a veiled reference to Larkin’s sanctimonious detractors, he cautions that ‘there is no requirement that a poet should be likeable or virtuous’, but adds that all of his former friends and colleagues remember Larkin as a compassionate, courteous and extremely funny person, certainly not the morose ‘Hermit of Hull’. He was, Booth contends persuasively, ‘an ebullient provocateur with an instinct to entertain’, and ‘the various ideological Larkins who raise the passions of some critics, are provisional personae’. Like other human (and humane) beings, Larkin presented different faces to different people. His epistolary and hilarious ‘obscenities’ to Kingsley Amis, for example, were not retailed to Barbara Pym.

Booth deftly traces Larkin’s early years in Coventry and his relations with his parents, Sidney and Eva. As is well known, Sidney, City Treasurer of Coventry, was a declared admirer of Hitler and the Third Reich. Booth asserts that his father’s political views served only to turn his son away from embracing any coherent political ideology. In fact, his vague political sympathies veered more to the left than to the right, and many of his later poems first appeared in journals like the New Statesman.

On the other hand, Larkin père encouraged his son’s early passion for jazz, and also provided the family home with a decidedly ‘modern’ library: Hardy, Shaw, D. H. Lawrence and Aldous Huxley. But his parents’ obviously unhappy union did instil in the young Philip a life-long fear of marriage – or ‘misogamy’. The lacklustre Eva, although castigated in some of Larkin’s published letters, was to be the recipient of thousands of tender (and as yet unpublished) notes and letters from him for the remainder of her long life.

His years at Oxford introduced Larkin to Kingsley Amis and a circle of friends who made jazz their secular religion. Following his war-time job as a librarian in Wellington, where he met his first love, Ruth Bowman, Larkin went to the University College of Leicester and encountered the formidable and voluble Monica Jones. She was to remain his increasingly embittered partner until his death in 1985.

After a happy spell at Queen’s University, Belfast, where he had a brief sexual liaison with Patsy Strang, daughter of a South-African diamond-mining magnate, Larkin moved to the University of Hull, and embarked on affairs with the shy (and devoutly Roman Catholic) Maeve Brennan, and in the 1970s a much happier one with his common-sense and attractively mature secretary, Betty Mackereth. Larkin’s love life receives sensitive but also critical treatment from Booth. None of these women were his intellectual equals, but each, successively, became his poetic muse. No one (apart from Larkin himself) has written more insightfully about these complicated relationships.

However, perhaps the greatest strength of the book is Booth’s analyses of Larkin’s major (and minor) poems. A few examples must suffice. A Study of Reading Habits is a didactic warning against subliterary escapism. But there is an oblique subtext of self-mockery. Now, his status safely established, he ensures that one of his most quotable lines will be: ‘Books are a load of crap’.

In Church Going ‘The Church represents a moribund authority to which the poet sulkily refuses to defer. [But] his tone allows his pious readers to imagine that the poet himself shares their superstitious self-deception.’ He argues that The Whitsun Weddings, as the train journey unfolds, ‘becomes an Ode to Incipience.’ And on the notorious This Be The Verse Booth comments: ‘This must bid fair to be the funniest serious English poem of the twentieth century’ [and] must also already rival Gray’s “Elegy” in the number of parodies and pastiches it has generated.’

Larkin once said ‘I like to think of myself as a funny man’. A minor criticism of Booth’s book is that more space could have been given to Larkin the wit – and less, perhaps, to his early experiments with decidedly soft porn, as revealed in Trouble at Willow Gables, written under the pseudonym Brunette Coleman. Booth sees them as ‘high camp comedy’. Not all readers would agree.

He is on firmer ground with such Larkinesque bons mots as: sexual intercourse is ‘like asking someone else to blow your nose for you’, and [to Barbara Pym] ‘On Tuesday I have to address the freshers on “books” (“How to Kill, Skin & Stuff Them’). Or [to Kingsley Amis] after Larkin had declined the Poet Laureateship which was then accepted by Ted Hughes: ‘The thought of being the cause of Ted’s being buried in Westminster Abbey is hard to live with.’ The Selected Letters, and his poems offer many other revealing and ludic examples of Larkin the ‘funny man’.

Elsewhere, Booth offers nuanced interpretations of Larkin’s infamous assault on ‘modernism’ in the arts in general and jazz in particular, evaluates his two completed and published novels [Jill and A Girl in Winter], and points out that much of his poetry reflects ‘the twelve-bar blues formula’ so that a reader ‘plays’ a Larkin poem just as one might ‘play’ a recording of Bessie Smith or of Louis Armstrong (his great hero).

Booth also relates Larkin’s awareness of and empathy with the plight of African-Americans, and his increasing deafness – as well as his love of animals and, not least, his professional achievements as Librarian at the University of Hull. We are reminded that Larkin is probably unique among twentieth-century poets in writing in Toads in a `natural, first-hand way about work in the sense of paid employment. No other significant poet, except Wallace Stevens, held down a nine-to-five job with no expectation of becoming a `full-time’ professional writer.’

Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love is the best biography we have or are likely to have for a long time – until possibly the eventual release of hundreds, if not thousands, of his currently embargoed letters. Even these are unlikely to contradict Booth’s apt conclusion: ‘What will survive of him is poetry. But the thought of his literary afterlife was never any consolation to him.’

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James Booth, Philip Larkin: Life, Art and Love. London: Bloomsbury, 2014, pp.544, ISBN: 1408851660

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Philip Larkin letters

October 5, 2014 by Roy Johnson

witty, erudite, and scurrilous correspondence

Philip Larkin was very much a glass half empty sort of person. Even when things were going reasonably well in his life, he would find a reason to look on the glum side. He satirically called himself ‘the Hermit of Hull’ and generally moaned about everything – the weather, his neighbours, the state of his health, and even the plebeian food he chose to consume. Yet in his heyday he had three lovers at the same time; public honours and popular success were showered on him as a poet, and he even had more money than he knew how to spend. Yet despite the persistent gloominess, these letters also reveal that he could be entertainingly irreverent and very funny indeed.

The editor Anthony Thwaite is at pains to point out that this is only a selection from Larkin’s complete correspondence – and it is so selective that there’s a potential danger of creating a lopsided picture of the man himself.

For instance the figure of Monica Jones hovers in the background of many letters, but there are very few addressed to the woman herself – she who played such a significant role in Larkin’s erotic and intellectual life. (There is a separate collection – Letters to Monica.) However, the few which are reproduced make very uncomfortable reading. In one Larkin gives an ‘honest’ but excruciatingly self-centred account of a weekend visit from a former lover (Patsy Strang) which verges on the sadistic – written to a woman who devoted her emotional life to him.

Of course the letters also reveal what were considered inappropriate character traits when they were first published – his penchant for soft pornography, his tendency to smut and behind-the-bike-sheds swearing – particularly in his correspondence with Kingsley Amis. But it’s worth bearing in mind both the stifling mediocrity of much British culture in these post-war years, against which these attitudes were a healthy antidote, and the fact that a fellow son of the midlands (Joe Orton) was revving up by writing in exactly the same manner a few miles down the road.

What underlies a great deal of the correspondence from a sociological point of view is that once having established himself at Oxford there is ever afterwards a network of relationships, employment, and social connections which has the British university system at its core. It emphasises Oxbridge as a system which provides a three year membership that lasts a lifetime.

Yet despite his persistent gloom and claims of being neglected, he was well connected with Faber & Faber, the BBC, and prestigious journals such as The Spectator, The Listener, and New Statesman. But to do him credit, a great deal of his early work was published by small independent presses by whom he sometimes wasn’t even paid.

The year 1955 appears to have been something of an annus mirabilis for him – first a series of publications edited by admirers such as Robert Conquest and D.J.Enright which were followed by good reviews. Then there was the move to Hull. His first impressions were not very favourable: ‘It’s a frightful dump … The village smells of chips. The town smells of fish … Life here varies from dreary to scarcely-bearable’. Yet in the end it turned out to suit him well enough (‘It’s very nice & flat for cycling’) though his regard for the University might have shocked his colleagues had they known at the time:

But in the main this institution totters along, a cloister of mediocrities isolated by the bleak reaches of the East Riding, doomed to remain a small cottage-university of arts-and-science while the rest of the world zooms into the Age of Technology. The corn waves, the sun shines on faded dusty streets, the level-crossings clank, bills are made out for 1957 under billheads designed in 1926, and the adjacent water shifts and glitters, hinting at Scandinavia … That’s a nice piece of evocation for you.

He also had no time for the business of ‘lit crit’ and the pampered existence in university academic departments. Commenting in a letter to Barbara Pym he observes: ‘If you were in university life you would be familiar with the phrase ‘crushing teaching load’ — i.e. six hours a week six months a year’.

In terms of literary development it’s interesting to note that he started in the realm of fiction, and even produced two novels – Jill and A Girl in Winter – before disenchantment set in following an unfinished sand abandoned third and fourth novel. He then settled to poetry alone, which seemed better suited to his temperament.

Yet before he had even reached the age of forty he was writing: ‘I really have no sense of the future now, except as the approach of death’ and on reaching fifty he thought it was a miracle he was still alive. As if to confirm his own sense of the sands running out, he produced less and less poetry as he got older, and yet perversely devoted huge amounts of time and effort into compiling the badly-received Oxford Book of Twentieth Century English Verse (which he referred to satirically as ‘really the Oxford Book of Nineteen & Half Century’s Right-Wing Animal-Lovers Verse.

Even though he was writing in a number of different linguistic registers to people who reflect quite distinct relationships in his life – friends, lovers, publishers, public figures – he had an amazing gift for throwing off witty epigrammatic statements:

I don’t think I write well — just better than anyone else

Personally I should need only 2 words to describe English poetry since 1960 — ‘horse-shit’

I should like to change my address in Who’s Who from ‘c/o The University of Hull’ to ‘c/o Faber & Faber , 3 Queen Square, London, WC1N 3AU’, and I hope this will be acceptable to you. My reason is to make it even more difficult for people to get at me.

This attitude even extends into the darker areas of his life. After travelling regularly at weekends for years to the nursing home in Leicester where his mother was confined, he mentions to a friend:

My mother, not content with being motionless, deaf and speechless, is now going blind. That’s what you get for not dying, you see.

He was fiercely loyal to old friends such as Kingsley Amis, Robert Conquest, and Anthony Thwaite; he helped other writers notably Barbara Pym and his old school friend Colin Gunner locate publishers; and he was amazingly diligent, well-informed, and persistent over the rights of published writers to their royalty entitlements and re-publication fees. He even registered himself for VAT when it was introduced.

In many respects he was a figure of contradictions – which these entertaining letters bring out very well. He was the recluse who (within the UK) traveled widely and socialised regularly; the confirmed bachelor who maintained sexual relationships with a number of women – often at the same time; the radical anti-establishment figure who accepted public honours by the bucketload; the prolific writer who produced only a handful of well-known poems; and the anti-materialist who was much-depicted with an old-fashioned bicycle but who actually drove a four litre Rolls Royce Vanden Plas.

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Anthony Thwaite (ed), Selected Letters of Philip Larkin 1940-1985, London: Faber & Faber, 1993, pp.791, ISBN: 057117048X

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Rupert Brooke biography

September 21, 2009 by Roy Johnson

national icon of the young ‘doomed’ poet

Rupert Brooke (1887—1915) was only ever on the fringe of the Bloomsbury Group – but he was well acquainted with its central figures, such as Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey. He was born in Rugby in Warwickshire, where his father taught classics and was a housemaster at the famous public school. He himself attended the school, along with Duncan Grant. The boy soon grew into a man whose handsome figure transfixed admirers of both sexes. He was almost six foot tall, academically clever, and good at sports – representing the school in cricket and rugby. He was also highly creative: he wrote verse throughout his childhood, having gained a love of poetry from reading Browning.

In 1906 he won a scholarship to King’s College at Cambridge University, and whilst there he became a member of the Apostles, a semi-secret debating society whose other members included Bertrand Russell, E.M.Forster, Lytton Strachey, Leonard Woolf, and John Maynard Keynes. He helped to found the Marlowe Society drama club, acted in plays, and wrote poetry.

In 1910 his father died suddenly, and Brooke was for a short time in Rugby a deputy housemaster. Thereafter he lived on an allowance from his mother. His first intimate relationship is thought to have been with Denham Russell-Smith, the younger brother of one of his close friends at Rugby.

In 1911 Brooke published his first collection of verse, Poems, and his work was featured in the periodical Georgian Poetry, edited by his friend, Sir Edward Marsh. Over the next twenty years, the book sold almost 100 000 copies. He became famous and popular in both literary and political circles.

He was a leader of a group of young ‘Neo-pagans’, who slept outdoors, embraced a religion of nature, and took up vegetarianism. Astonishing though it might seem, at one time Virginia Woolf joined them in Grantchester to swim naked at midnight in Byron’s Pool where Lord Byron used to bathe whilst a student at Cambridge. Other Neo-Pagan hangers-on included Augustus John, then in his heyday of wandering gypsy-Bohemian. Virginia Woolf wrote of this phase in a memoir:

Under his influence the country near Cambridge was full of young men and women walking barefoot, sharing his passion for bathing and fish diet, disdaining book learning, and proclaiming that there was something deep and wonderful in the man who brought the milk and in the woman who watched the cows.

In 1911 Brooke was secretly engaged to Noel Olivier, five years his junior. The affair was for all participants frustrating and subsequently Brooke had an affair with the actress Cathleen Nesbitt. Overworked and emotionally empty, Brooke suffered a nervous breakdown.

In the spring of 1912, Brooke and Ka Cox went to Germany, where in a mood of homesickness he wrote a poem about his home ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’, which is among his most admired poems.

Oh, is the water sweet and cool,
Gentle and brown, above the pool?
And laughs the immortal river still
Under the mill, under the mill?
Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain?… oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

It is interesting to note that Brooke’s method of poetic composition was to first of all assemble a list of pairs of rhyming words, and then fill in the lines which preceded them. The Old Vicarage is now occupied by the Cambridge physicist Mary Archer and her husband Jeffrey, the ‘novelist’, former politician, and ex-jailbird.

The group of five sonnets called 1914 that Rupert Brooke wrote in December 1914 and finished in January 1915 became, within a few months, some of the most praised and widely read poems of their day. They glorified England and the idea of dying for England.

IF I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

In fact, he never saw active service.

His poetry gained many enthusiasts and he was taken up by Edward Marsh, who brought him to the attention of Winston Churchill, who was at that time First Lord of the Admiralty. Through these connections he was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve as a temporary Sub-Lieutenant shortly after his 27th birthday and took part in the Royal Naval Division’s Antwerp expedition in October 1914.

He sailed with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on 28 February 1915 but developed sepsis from an infected mosquito bite. He died on 23 April 1915 off the island of Lemnos in the Aegean on his way to a battle at Gallipoli. As the expeditionary force had orders to depart immediately, he was buried at in an olive grove on the island of Skyros, Greece.

Bloomsbury Group – web links

Hogarth Press first editions
Annotated gallery of original first edition book jacket covers from the Hogarth Press, featuring designs by Vanessa Bell, Roger Fry, and others.

The Omega Workshops
A brief history of Roger Fry’s experimental Omega Workshops, which had a lasting influence on interior design in post First World War Britain.

The Bloomsbury Group and War
An essay on the largely pacifist and internationalist stance taken by Bloomsbury Group members towards the First World War.

Tate Gallery Archive Journeys: Bloomsbury
Mini web site featuring photos, paintings, a timeline, sub-sections on the Omega Workshops, Roger Fry, and Duncan Grant, and biographical notes.

Bloomsbury: Books, Art and Design
Exhibition of paintings, designs, and ceramics at Toronto University featuring Hogarth Press, Vanessa Bell, Dora Carrington, Quentin Bell, and Stephen Tomlin.

Blogging Woolf
A rich enthusiast site featuring news of events, exhibitions, new book reviews, relevant links, study resources, and anything related to Bloomsbury and Virginia Woolf

Hyper-Concordance to Virginia Woolf
Search the texts of all Woolf’s major works, and track down phrases, quotes, and even individual words in their original context.

A Mrs Dalloway Walk in London
An annotated description of Clarissa Dalloway’s walk from Westminster to Regent’s Park, with historical updates and a bibliography.

Women’s History Walk in Bloomsbury
Annotated tour of literary and political homes in Bloomsbury, including Gordon Square, University College, Bedford Square, Doughty Street, and Tavistock Square.

Virginia Woolf Society of Great Britain
News of events, regular bulletins, study materials, publications, and related links. Largely the work of Virginia Woolf specialist Stuart N. Clarke.

BBC Audio Essay – A Eulogy to Words
A charming sound recording of a BBC radio talk broadcast in 1937 – accompanied by a slideshow of photographs of Virginia Woolf.

A Family Photograph Albumn
Leslie Stephens’ collection of family photographs which became known as the Mausoleum Book, collected at Smith College – Massachusetts.

Bloomsbury at Duke University
A collection of book jacket covers, Fry’s Twelve Woodcuts, Strachey’s ‘Elizabeth and Essex’.

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More on the Bloomsbury Group
Twentieth century literature

T.S.Eliot biography

November 29, 2010 by Roy Johnson

education, poetry, marriages, Bloomsbury

T.S.Eliot (Thomas Stearns) was born in Saint Louis, Missouri in 1888. His father was a successful businessman, and his mother wrote poems. From 1898 to 1905 he attended Smith Academy where he studied French, German, Latin, and Ancient Greek. At the age of fourteen he began to write poetry, heavily under the influence of The Rubiyat of Omar Khayyam which enjoyed a vogue around that time. He published his first poem in the Smith Academy Record when he was fifteen.

From 1906 to 1909 he studied philosophy at Harvard University, where he also discovered the poetry of Jules LaForgue, Arthur Rimbaud, and Paul Verlaine. and the French symbolists. He wrote some of his early poems, including ‘Portrait of a Lady’ and the beginnings of ‘Prufrock’ and published in the Harvard Advocate.

He worked as a post-graduate teaching assistant in philosophy between 1909-1910 and then went to study philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris. There he attended lectures by Henri Bergson and read poetry with Alain-Fournier.

He then returned to Harvard to study Indian philosophy and Sanskrit, and was awarded a scholarship to study at Oxford University. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 cut short a visit to Germany and his plans to study in Marburg. His short satiric poems. ‘The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock’ were published in Chicago, and in 1915 he married Vivienne Haigh-Wood, a Cambridge governess. By 1916 at Oxford he completed his PhD thesis on Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F.H.Bradley, but he did not turn up for the viva voce examination.

He became resident in London, and took up a number of jobs, including being a teacher, a bank clerk and assistant editor of the literary magazine Egoist. He also lectured at Birkbeck College which specialised in the teaching of adult students at the University of London. Bertrand Russell took an interest in Eliot’s work, introduced him to the Bloomsbury Group, and allowed the young married couple to stay in his London flat. This also gave Russell the opportunity to have an affair with Eliot’s wife.

He also taught French and Latin at a private school in Highgate where one of his students was a young John Betjemann. In 1917 he took a job working in the foreign accounts department of Lloyds Bank. ‘Prufrock and Other Observations’ was published at this time. Then on a visit to Paris in 1920 he met both James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis, forming lasting friendships with both of them.

He became the London correspondent for the American literary magazine The Dial. and editor of The Criterion in 1922 when it was founded with the financial backing of Lady Rothmere, the wife of Lord Rothmere, owner of the Daily Mail. This was a highpoint year for Eliot, with the publication by the Hogarth Press of The Waste Land. In 1925 Eliot joined the publishing firm Faber and Gwyer, which later became Faber and Faber, where he remained as a director for the rest of his life.

Despite his literary success, Eliot’s private life was not happy, and he considered divorcing Vivienne, who was showing signs of mental instability. In 1927 he converted to a form of High Anglicanism and at the same time became a British citizen. Then when Harvard University offered him a visiting professorship for a year in 1932, he took the position, leaving Vivienne behind. On his return he arranged a legal separation from her and she was admitted to a mental hospital in Stoke Newington. He never visited her, and she died there in 1938.

In the 1930s T.S.Eliot turned his attention from lyric poetry to the production of verse dramas. Murder in the Cathedral and The Family Reunion are open apologies for Christian religious belief. These were followed by essays and criticism which reaffirmed his belief in conservative traditionalism, then later The Cocktail Party (1949) and The Elder Statesman (1958). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1948.

From 1946 Eliot shared a flat with his friend John Davy Hayward, who became his literary archivist, gathering many of the poems Eliot had written whilst a student at Harvard. These were not published until after Eliot’s death as Poems Written in Early Youth. In 1957 Eliot suddenly married his secretary at Faber – Esmé Valerie Fletcher, who was thirty-seven years younger than him. The marriage was held in secret at 6.15 in the morning. Hayward moved out, taking his Eliot papers with him. He dedicated them to King’s College Cambridge the following year.

Valerie took over the role of literary custodian, and has dedicated her life to preserving a very tight control over Eliot’s papers ever since. In his later years Eliot suffered from ill health – bronchitis, tachycardia, and emphysema – all made worse by his heavy smoking. He died in 1965, was cremated at Golder’s Green Cemetary and his ashes taken to St Michael’s church in East Coker, the village in Somerset from where his ancestors had emigrated to America.