Survivors’ Songs: From Maldon to the Somme

Author(s): Jon Stallworthy

World War I was a very literary war, and Jon Stallworthy, an astute reader of war literature generally, is a specialist in the British poetry of that conflict. A poet himself as well as a student of literature, he has published an anthology of war poetry, produced a biography of Wilfred Owen, and is the foremost modern editor of Owen's poetry. Now he has added to that body of critical work. He has published a collection of his essays, revised and assembled for this volume, that appeared earlier as journal articles.
Survivors' Songs: From Maldon to the Somme, his latest study, is a well-written and insightful discussion of that genre of literature known as "war poetry." His essays begin with the Old English poem "The Battle of Malden" and move beyond the poetry that followed the Battle of the Somme. Nevertheless, British poetry of World War I forms the centerpiece of this volume, and Stallworthy is an expert on and a subtle reader of it.
That I find his essays on Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and David Jones the most telling is due both to the strength of those essays and also to my own admiration of those poets. What's missing, it seems to me, is fuller treatment of the poetry of Isaac Rosenberg and Ivor Gurney, both fine poets and both deserving of fuller discussion. But one can't have everything. He does mention Charles Sorley, one of the early clear-eyed poets of World War I and places him correctly in context. Killed in 1915 at the Battle of Loos, Sorley seems to have understood the mass suffering and death to come. His sonnet, "When you see millions of the mouthless dead," presents a nightmare vision early in the war, a vision which Sassoon and Owen would eventually share.
Beginning with his chapter "The Iconography of the Waste Land," Stallworthy moves from discussions of First World War poets and poetry to their impact on succeeding generations, not all of them British. Thus, much of the last five chapters concerns ways in which the "myth" of World War I played out in the poetry of later poets, such as T. S. Eliot, Randall Jarrell and Herbert Read. The book ends with criticism of the disappointing and often self-important and flatulent poetry, mostly by non-combatants, that came from the Vietnam War.
Those interested in war poetry, written mostly by combatants, will be served very well by Stallworthy's sensitive presentation. It provides both context and intelligent discussion of this troubling genre.