01/16/2000

By Tom Mayo

Poetry

There was a four-hour "moment" at the beginning of this year when the vast majority of us shared, as we do every year, in the singing of a single poem ("Auld Lang Syne," it hardly needs to be said) by Robert Burns, Scotland's national poet. Burns favored folk ballads, liked his scotch and loved a good time, and so it is a fit tribute to the poet and the man that our singing should be accompanied by such good cheer, much of it liquid.

Another fine New Year's tradition involves making a wish for the coming year. No doubt "peace on earth" was the wish uttered as often as any other goal for the planet. Yet this practice has had little effect over the centuries, each one seemingly bloodier than its predecessor, a fact to which the 20th bore stunning witness.

Let's pause, then, at the beginning of this new century to think about war, and not only about war, but about the poetry of war.

Poetry takes its place in history

As an undergraduate I took a course on war literature, a fashionable topic during the late 1960s when the subject weighed heavily on the minds of college students, draftable or not. I recall Homage to Catalonia, A Subaltern's War and All Quiet on the Western Front, but what I don't remember from that course is a single war poem.

It is hard to understand the reason for this apparent omission (apart from a rapidly degenerating memory). Perhaps it is because war has brought out the worst in some very good poets and the best in some otherwise forgettable poets and the process of selection is notoriously tricky. But starting with The Iliad and The Odyssey, it isn't hard to find the good stuff.

Michael Schmidt offered a different explanation last year in his The Lives of the Poets, in which he asserted without elaboration that wars and revolutions "always come at the wrong time for poets." He later explained that he was thinking not only of the poets who have died in wars but also about history and culture: "Radical moments in poetry usually come in response to a certain staleness in the culture: that staleness can be political as well as cultural [historically] and is often disrupted by war. . . . I am not sure that poetry and history can ever go very comfortably hand in hand."

From battlefields to grainfields

Mr. Schmidt was undoubtedly talking about the Big Picture in poetry, the tectonic shifts that alter the poetic landscape for all time, but he could not have had in mind the poetry that war itself inspires. We are reminded of that poetry in a book such as John Keegan's recent collection The Book of War: 25 Centuries of Great War Writing (Viking, $34.95), which includes 16 poems among the dozens of sketches and stories.

Mr. Keegan shows a discerning eye in his poetry selections. He is right, for example, to favor the tauter, tougher lines of Yeats' "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" - "Those that I fight I do not hate,/Those that I guard I do not love" - over the more sentimental (and more often recited) "Strange Meeting" by Wilfrid Owen - "I am the enemy you killed, my friend./I knew you in this dark." Other poets are represented here by their prose: an excerpt from Robert Graves' autobiographical Goodbye to All That, for example, and the reportorial "The Fall of Saigon" by James Fenton, whose poetic reputation was established by his German Requiem and poems on the Cambodian war.

A thoroughly conventional but still useful anthology is last fall's War Poems (Everyman's Library Pocket Poems, $12.50), edited by John Hollander. This is a collection of the good and the popular (sometimes both) organized loosely within chronological periods. The collection illustrates the timelessness of war writing - the horrors of warfare, its effects on warriors and on those who wait for their return, themes of triumph, patriotism and loss - and documents the ways technology has changed the experience and meaning of war.

There are many others to recommend from this genre, but I will mention only one more: The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry ($12.95, paperback). World War I was arguably the first truly modern war, and the poetry it inspired was both universal and grounded in the modern experience of war. The collection was edited by the poet Jon Silkin, whose introduction alone is worth the price of the book, especially his extended argument that the moral weight of an entire poem, as well as the world view behind it, turns on the placement of a single beat within a line of iambic pentameter. His essay and the entire volume are a tour de force.

One enduring lesson of these poems is the blessing that is peace, but after war, even peace is changed. This is from a poem by Burns' countryman Edwin Muir, on the plow horses recently conscripted into battle and now returned to their village: "Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our loads,/But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts./Our life is changed; their coming our beginning."

Tom Mayo, an associate professor of law at Southern Methodist University, teaches "Law, Literature and Medicine" at the law school and at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.