> 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
|