'Severity, As Well As a Concision'

“[T]radition, in the eyes of many talented moderns, is what the comedians called ‘so most antimacassar’. She is the mother of the antiquarians, the goddess of the belated, the spirit of the Sunday parlor where Martin Tupper’s illuminated poems slumber with the padded photograph album on gray lace mats.” 

You get the idea, though Tupper (1810-1889) may require a gloss – English poet, popular in his day, notable for having been cited by both Karl Marx and G.K. Chesterton. A Victorian fuddy-duddy. Edmund Blunden is writing in 1929, with literary modernism raging and his brand of verse often judged déclassé by sophisticates. He comes off as neither thin-skinned nor defensively strident. He argues that novelty unto itself is no virtue and originality is likely a myth:

 

“Verse, without further epithets, requires the sanction of natural movement; humanity cannot keep step with the noises of an accidental explosion in an ammunition dump. Ordered experience, recognizable rhythm—and, in addition to these, there is the melancholy fact that a poet must use known language.”

 

I thought of Blunden (1896-1974), best known for his Great War poems, when R.L. Barth sent me a link to the Times Literary Supplement review of the English edition of his most recent collection, Learning War: Selected Vietnam War Poems (Greenwich Exchange, 2021). The reviewer is Clive Wilmer, a good English poet, who writes:

 

“What marks him as a poet is severity, as well as a concision that – the metaphor is inescapable – has the force of a grenade. He is an epigrammatist in a line that runs from Martial through Ben Jonson to J. V. Cunningham, with a hint of Kipling’s Epitaphs of the War (1919).”

 

Excellent company, and accurate. Bob’s poems are astringent, without fat, the opposite of sweet. Often, they are bitter and profane, though tempered with black humor, and are virtually the only poems by an American to come out of the Vietnam War worth reading. Bob is a student of war, his and others’. Learning War is drawn from five previous collections and a broadside, all published between 1985 and 2016. He has written several poems aligning himself with the Great War poets, including Blunden, as in “A Letter to the Dead”:

 

“The outpost trench is deep with mud tonight.

Cold with the mountain winds and two week’s rain,

I watch the concertina. The starlight-

Scope hums, and rats assault the bunkers again.

 

“You watch with me: Owen, Blunden, Sassoon.

Through sentry duty, everything you meant

Thickens to fear of nights without a moon.

War’s war. We are, my friends, no different.”

 

Read that, then read another passage from Blunden’s essay, “Tradition in Poetry”:

 

“We receive before we are aware of it an extraordinary miscellany of verse forms, from the nursery rhyme to the popular success of the music hall. We cannot evade it; our metrical consciousness is traditional. ‘Traditional’ is not to be translated according to the versifying ambitions or discontents of an individual.”