Robin, I may be missing some other poems by Rosenberg, but Louse Hunting
still seems to me to fit into my remark of a poetry, set beside Ungaretti's,
that belongs to an earlier century - its vocabulary, for all that the
grotesquerie is deliberate ("Yelling in lurid glee" etc.) and its
capitalized personification ("Sleep's trumpet") all feel quite archaic...
Where the "what if" matters - is that Rosenberg may well been able to
develop further along the lines of his Break of Day whereas Sassoon, though
living, wasn't really able to go further. (It's a long time since I've read
any of them so I don't make any great claim to accuracy.)
Jamie
----- Original Message -----
From: "Robin Hamilton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, May 13, 2010 3:15 PM
Subject: Re: "Cambridge Poetry and Political Ambition" by Robert Archambeau
>> Just following David's lead (if we can still call him that)
>
> Actually, I was thinking of the Birk as I replied to you, and wondering
> what his take on this will be, him being notably pro-Rosenberg. <g>
>
>> But though I've tried to find other poems of his that can really stand
>> beside it in its modernity I've never really done so.
>
> How about "Louse Hunting"? Modernity via Rosenberg's background as a
> painter? But dave-now-Joseph will be better able to respond to this than
> me.
>
>> It could also be taken into consideration that Ungaretti survived where
>> Owen and Rosenberg didn't.
>
> Yeah, "What if?" has to be a factor here. Time has given some answers,
> though -- Sassoon as a writer was made by the War, and didn't
> (metaphorically) survive it. Edward Thomas (another class traitor, who
> having signed up as a ranker, died before the war ended) was probably the
> most settled as a writer before it began, so the poems he wrote then are
> more of a coda to his earlier work than is the case with the others.
> Robert Graves (officer class) totally disavowed the poems he wrote in the
> course of the War, and waited till 1923 before he wrote _Goodbye To all
> That_. David Jones didn't publish _In Parenthesis_ till 1937.
>
> So time is at play here, in various ways.
>
> Robin
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