Being picky, Jamie, but when you say:
"[Ungaretti] wrote some of the finest poetry of the First World War in a
modernist idiom which makes Owen and Rosenberg look as though they belong to
a previous century",
... is Rosenberg the best example to cite here along with Owen? If you'd
said "Owen and Sassoon", I wouldn't have blinked, and probably agreed. But
Rosenberg? Wherefore Rosenberg, of all possible cases?
Which reminds me, though it's a slightly different issue than how avant or
retro an individual Great Patriotic War poet is, I'm fascinated by the
curious way they break up into Officer Class (Owen, Sassoon) and Other Ranks
(Rosenberg, Ivor Gurney, Saki), in whereabouts in the military hierarchy
they chose to enlist, especially as this doesn't correlate with their social
background. (Sasson and H.H.Monro being distinctly upper class in
background, the others from a range of positionings among the middle
classes.)
But this doesn't quite match the positions taken up by the poetry they
write, and for all of me, much the most politically effective, in terms of
agit prop, was Sassoon who was, at the same time, the least poetically avant
of the lot.
But then again, as a poster poem for the GPW, nothing quite overtook
Brooke's "The Soldier", which still may, outside the teaching of First World
War English Poets alongside the Metaphysical Poets at A-level, be the most
familiar.
And *that in turn managed to drive Thomas Hardy's much more complex "Drummer
Hodge" (which was making exactly the opposite "political" point to Brooke,
though Brooke ripped off Hardy's central image), out of consciousness.
But the classic case of a quite stunning exemplification of the whole
Officer Class / Other Ranks / Lesser Races set of assumptions around at the
time (though it was written before) still has to be Henry Newbolt's "Vita
Lampada" which can still be found read with a total lack of irony,
especially among sports faculties at UK universities.
Play up, play up, and play the game indeed!!
Robin
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