Prelims 4 - Second World War poetry

human mass-production

Fussell, 1990, humans and machinery

the war served a generation of Britons and Americans as a myth which enshrined their essential purity, a parable of good and evil

Fussell, 1990, binary roles

it was indescribably cruel and insane

Fussell, 1990, ethical and social norms ww1, vs 2

his is the view of an outsider looking in, a commentator on the engagement with war of the others

Lucas, 2013 - Jarrell as outsider

he looked not to find evidence for his own theories or desires, to condemn, to explain away, to justify, but only to see, and to tell what he saw.

Jarrell, essay on Ernie Pyle (1945)

that men suffer more or less as an irrelevant afterthought of the machines

Dickey (1967)

all poetic representation must also take place, in part, from the position of Pilate, the implicated observer

Schweik, 1987, observer

sense of war as a self-reflecting fight against personal intolerance

Schweik, 1987, Moore and inwardness

the facts of modern warfare are outside normal human experience and strictly speaking only the facts of normal human experience are reproductive in words

Moore, notebooks

figurative or archetypal war of wars

Schweik, 1987, figurative Moore

both convey brutality and represent its necessity, recognise both its justice and its meaninglessness

Schweik, 1987, how Moore's poetry has been read into a canon

she is primarily interested in war's relation to the states of the culture, moral, and supernatural soul

Schweik, 1987, on Moore's interest

jarrell writes within a strong tradition of masculine antiwar protest in which the soldier becomes responsible for transcribing the literal

Schweik, 1987, Literal tradition of Jarrell

They're fighting, fighting, fighting the blind / man who thinks he sees, - / who cannot see that the enslaver is / enslaved

Moore, 1943. enslaver

we devour / ourselves. The enemy could not / have made a greater breach in our defenses

Moore, 1943. inward enemy

"We'll / never hate black, white, red, yellow, Jew / Gentile, Untouchable." We are / not competent to / make our vows

Moore, 1943. vows and guilt

that / hearts may feel and not be numb. / It cures me

Moore, 1943. seeking emotion, not callousness

Shall / we never have peace without sorrow?

Moore, 1943. necessity of war?

all these agonies / and woundbearings and bloodshed - / can teach us how to live, these / dyings were not wasted

Moore, 1943. to make meaning out of death

There never was a war that was / not inward; I must / fight till I have conquered in myself what / causes war

Moore, 1943. inward war

I inwardly did nothing

Moore, 1943, inaction as complicity

Who needs to learn why another man should die? / Who has taught you, soldier, why you yourself are dying? / And there is no time, each war, to learn

Jarrell, Soldier [T. P.] 1945 - reasons for death

shall I say that man / Is not as men have said: a wolf to man?

Jarrell, Eighth Air Force 1955. wolf man

The other murderers troop in yawning

Jarrell, Eighth Air Force 1955 - yawning

and one / Lies counting missions, lies there sweating / Till even his heart beats: One; One; One

Jarrell, Eighth Air Force 1955, counting

But since these play, before they die, / Like puppies with their puppy; since, a man, / I did as these have done, but did not die -

Jarrell, Eighth Air Force 1955, puppies

for this last saviour, man, / I have lied as I lie now. But what is lying?

Jarrell, Eighth Air Force 1955, lying

Men wash their hands, in blood, as best they can: / I find no fault in this just man.

Jarrell, Eighth Air Force 1955, just

Six miles form earth, loosed from its dream of life, / I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters

Jarrell, The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner, 1955

We died like aunts or pets or foreigners

Jarrell, Losses 1955, naivety

but if we died / it was not an accident but a mistake

Jarrell, Losses 1955, responsibility for death

In bombers named for girls, we burned the cities we had learned about in school-

Jarrell, Losses 1955, school

Our bodies lay among / The people we had killed and never seen

Jarrell, Losses 1955, death and sight

When we lasted long enough they gave us medals; / When we died they said, "our casualties were low."

Jarrell, Losses 1955, casualties, collective

the bombs' lost patterning / Are death, they are death under glass, a chance

Jarrell, Siegfried 1955, glass

he, the watcher, guiltily / Watches the him, the actor, who is innocent.

Jarrell, Siegfried, 1955, guilt and innocence

if you are still / In this year of our warfare, indispensible / In general, and in particular dispensable as a cartridge, a life - it is only to enter / so many knots in a window

Jarrell, Siegfried, 1955, being indispensible

Knower of wind, speed, pressure: the unvalued facts / (In Nature there is neither right nor left nor wrong)

Jarrell, Siegfried, 1955, facts and morality

infallible invulnerable / machines, the skin of stell, glass, cartridges

jarrell, Siegfried, 1955, machines as human

And it is different, different - you have understood / Your world at last: you have tasted your own blood

Jarrell, Siegfried, understanding

If you are different, / it is not from the lives or the cities; the world's war, just or unjust - the world's peace, war or peace; / But from a separate war

Jarrell, Siegfried, personal vs public war

Let me not matter, let nothing I do matter

Jarrell, Siegfried, unwished weight of personal action

and are, almost, sublime / In their read ignorance of everything

Jarrell, The Soldier Walks Under the Trees of the University (1945). books vs experience

All that the world would be, if it were real

Jarrell, The Soldier Walks Under the Trees of the University (1945). reality and social change

a pilot or angel looking down

Douglas, Landscape With Figures 1951.

For here the lover and killer are mingled / who had one body and one heart

Douglas, Vergissmeinnicht, 1951