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war poets revisited
Oct. 26th, 2013 09:00 amToday's Guardian includes the results of a project created by British poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy, who invited contemporary poets to respond to the work of First World War poets.
There's a hint of arrogance about the project that troubles me: the original poems responded to a horrific and unprecedented kind of warfare. There is nothing, nothing comparable in modern experience, and I'm not sure we can adequately or honestly respond to the art of that time. Especially in those cases where people can't be bothered to get the history right; Carol Ann Duffy's expression, in her poem's introduction, of sadness at the death of Wilfred Owen "during the second world war" makes me wince.
Even when more thought seems to have been put in, some inadequacy or incommensurability shows up in the modern poems, which are almost uniformly less interesting than the originals. The best ones work with that historical distance, contextualizing the war within modern concerns. I recommend Simon Armitage's "Avalon" (responding to Ivor Gurney), Blake Morrison's "Redacted" (responding to Ewart Alan Macintosh), Daljit Nagra's "The Calling" (responding to Sarojini Naidu), and particularly Andrew Motion's "A Moment of Reflection" (responding to Siegfried Sassoon), which I found the most satisfying, poetically, of the modern poems. But I must admit to my bias: I don't generally like contemporary poetry, so I may not be the ideal audience for these modern revisitings.
There's a hint of arrogance about the project that troubles me: the original poems responded to a horrific and unprecedented kind of warfare. There is nothing, nothing comparable in modern experience, and I'm not sure we can adequately or honestly respond to the art of that time. Especially in those cases where people can't be bothered to get the history right; Carol Ann Duffy's expression, in her poem's introduction, of sadness at the death of Wilfred Owen "during the second world war" makes me wince.
Even when more thought seems to have been put in, some inadequacy or incommensurability shows up in the modern poems, which are almost uniformly less interesting than the originals. The best ones work with that historical distance, contextualizing the war within modern concerns. I recommend Simon Armitage's "Avalon" (responding to Ivor Gurney), Blake Morrison's "Redacted" (responding to Ewart Alan Macintosh), Daljit Nagra's "The Calling" (responding to Sarojini Naidu), and particularly Andrew Motion's "A Moment of Reflection" (responding to Siegfried Sassoon), which I found the most satisfying, poetically, of the modern poems. But I must admit to my bias: I don't generally like contemporary poetry, so I may not be the ideal audience for these modern revisitings.
