Fascinating on Leavis, Max, whose work I once read but began to find
his sense of poetry simply wasnt mine....
Doug
On 23-Jul-08, at 7:36 PM, Max Richards wrote:
> As Jean Moorcroft Wilson points out in her capacious new biography,
> Isaac
> Rosenberg: The making of a Great War poet, while most of the War
> Poets wrote
> empathetically as officers about the men under their command,
> Rosenberg was
> himself one of those men: “when he recalls \[in “Dead Man’s Dump”\]
> how ‘a man’s
> brains spattered on / A stretcher-bearer’s face’, he was the
> stretcher-bearer.
> And when, in the same poem, he records how ‘the wheels lurched over
> sprawled
> dead’, he was the driver of the limber-carriage referred to, and not
> the officer
> ordering or witnessing the incident”.
>
> Peter Parker, TLS 2 July
>
> Though two of my uncles were at Gallipoli and in France, I never
> heard them
> reminisce. But briefly attending classes circa 1974 at the
> University of York
> given by F.R.Leavis (born 1895 like Robert Graves). Leavis had
> retired from his
> Cambridge U post and worked a little for York. I was struck by how
> lines in
> Eliot's Four Quartets (L's book, The Living Principle, offers his
> readings of
> the Quartets) sometimes set him off into the past. He'd gone from
> school into
> being an ambulance-man at the Front. 'Midwinter spring is its own
> season...'
> Suddenly the old man was murmuring about some such day he'd
> experienced in the
> trenches.
> 'People, when they hear me say I don't sleep, ask was it because I
> was gassed in
> the War. Not so. It's the things I haven't said.'
> We understood it was his continuing sense of outrage at the state of
> British
> culture, much of which he had denounced, but in vain.
>
> Max in Melbourne
>
>
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>
Douglas Barbour
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http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
Latest books:
Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
Wednesdays'
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Poetry always was, and always
should be, pre-eminently that:
significant sound.
D.G. Bridson
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