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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