Leavis at War

F. R. Leavis as a member of the Friends Ambulance Unit Jessica Meyer’s talk at Leeds last week was about the Friends Ambulance Unit. She mentioned that, especially later in the War, the main work of the Unit was on the ambulance trains that took the wounded from the war zone to the channel ports. […]

Kipling Collected – and misunderstood

The excellent news is that a new three-volume edition of Kipling’s poems is being published by Cambridge University Press. It is edited by Thomas Pinney, who knows just about everything there is to know about Kipling, and it contains, apparently, some fifty previously unseen poems,  including several from the War years. The less good news? […]

Sassoon and ‘Atrocities’

An article in today’s Observer describes a batch of Sassoon manuscripts, coming up for sale at a London auction-house. The poems seem mostly to be from the twenties, but the article describes a hitherto-unknown draft of ‘Atrocities’, his poem about the brutal killing of German prisoners, and claims that Sassoon toned down his first draft […]

Rupert Brooke, competitor

I’ve just been alerted by Bill Greenwell to his new blog, about the history of the New Statesman competitions (of which he has been the monarch for several decades). It’s very much a work in progress, and so far he hasn’t got much beyond some general thoughts and accounts of the earliest comps. It’ll be […]

Raymond Chandler, wan Georgian?

In this week’s Times Literary Supplement, Michael Dirda writes an interesting review of a new biography of Raymond Chandler. One phrase irked me, though.  Dirda refers to Chandler’s early poetic attempts as ‘wan Georgian-style verse’. Since most of the published ones were written before 1910, they are not even Georgian by chronology – but I […]

‘If Winter Comes’ – by Billy Bennett

It has been suggested that Ford’s Parade’s End owes much to the example of  A.S.M. Hutchinson’s 1921 novel If Winter Comes, an earlier book about a good man stuck in an unhappy marriage and trying to maintain his integrity in a discouraging and corrupt world.  Hutchinson’s novel was a phenomenal success and led  led to many spin-offs, […]

P. G. Wodehouse on Maud Allan’s ‘Salome’

A major scandal of 1918 was the Pemberton-Billing libel case. In February 1918 Maud Allan, an expressive and sensuous dancer, presented her version of Wilde’s ‘Salome’ to a select audience. Noel Pemberton-Billing fumed about her in his paper, The Imperialist, suggesting that she was a lesbian, and that her audience was packed with the sexual […]

Frederic Manning as war poet

Frederic Manning is generally acknowledged as the finest novelist of the Western Front, but Her Privates We was not written until ten years after the War. During the War years he saw himself as a poet rather than a prose writer. I find most of his poems, with their archaisms and delicate Nineties texture, difficult […]

For your diary

Updated with changed dates. Have you bought your 2014 diary yet? If not, you should probably do so, as the year promises to be crammed with commemorative occasions. The most promising I’ve come across so far is a conference on First World War poetry at Wadham College, Oxford, September 5th to 7th. It’s organised by […]

Hounding the laureate

In a recent interview, Andrew Motion declared how relieved he was to no longer be poet laureate. He’s a dutiful man, and clearly felt the strain of meeting expectations. Hearing him, I almost regretted being so critical of his feeble poem about Harry Patch and his ‘found poem’ about war’s horrors. Mind you, he had […]