Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War by Harry Ricketts
| Strange Meetings: The Lives of the Poets of the Great War by Harry Ricketts | |
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| Category: Biography | |
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Reviewer: John Van der Kiste
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| Summary: An examinatio of encounters or near-encounters between the War Poets, from shortly before the outbreak of the Great War in 1914 to a last meeting between two of the longest-lived survivors fifty years later. | |
| Buy? Yes | Borrow? Yes |
| Pages: 278 | Date: November 2012 |
| Publisher: Pimlico | |
| ISBN: 9781845951801 | |
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The majority of recent books on the War Poets tend to focus on their lives during and immediately after the conflict. This enterprising account, borrowing its name from the poem by Wilfred Owen, takes a different approach in spanning a full fifty years or more. It begins with the first meeting of Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke at one of Eddie Marsh’s breakfasts in July 1914. Marsh was a tireless supporter of modern painters and after that promising new writers, particularly poets. The journey, or rather account of meetings, takes us to the western front and back to England, culminating in a reunion of two of the longest-lived, Sassoon and David Jones, in 1964.
Several personalities pass through these pages, and Ricketts draws a penetrating portrait of each as well as their activities when their star shone, often all too briefly. Brooke, Owen and Charles Sorley were all killed in the war, but not before leaving several poems each behind them which would ensure their immortality. He speculates on what might have happened had the fates of Sassoon and Owen being reversed. Owen was the younger by seven years; had he lived into the 1960s, how would his career and writing have developed?
There is not really a dull page in this book. However I was particularly fascinated by the accounts of Robert Graves, who had he died young might have been remembered merely as a poet and not as the classical scholar and novelist that he would become later during his long life. We learn that he was much disliked, probably as he gave the air of being far too clever for his own good with brainwaves on such subjects as who really wrote the Bible. There is a chapter on his controversial autobiography ‘Goodbye To All That’, published in 1929, which with its alleged half-truths and inaccuracies infuriated Sassoon and Edmund Blunden, who both received review copies and fiercely annotated them as well as demanding changes in subsequent editions. Equally engrossing, as well as ironic, is the explanation of how Graves, his wife Nancy and his muse Laura Riding were living together in a curious triangle (or briefly rectangle, if you include the temporary addition of poet Geoffrey Phibbs). After a quarrel one night Riding and Robert Graves both threw themselves out of separate windows in the house. Riding was seriously injured, and the shaken but unhurt Graves had to dash off the book in three months to meet the hospital bills. Fortunately for him it was an instant bestseller.
Although not so well remembered today, the memoirs of Sassoon and Blunden are given due consideration. Blunden, one of the last survivors, died as late as 1974, and in a late interview he admitted that his experiences in the Great War had haunted him throughout his life; for many days I have, it seemed, lived in that world rather than this.
Although she was not a poet, the nonetheless towering literary figure of Vera Brittain, mother of politician Shirley Williams, makes a well-deserved appearance in these pages. A false start as a novelist who turned her bitter experiences of the war and the loss of loved ones were but a prelude to her classic, frequently reprinted memoir ‘Testament Of Youth’, her subsequent life and appearance at a Peace Pledge Union meeting in 1937 alongside Sassoon are well documented. Moreover, while perhaps no author these days can avoid some degree of speculation on the personal relationship between Brittain and her close friend Winifred Holtby, Ricketts deals with the matter concisely without making a major issue of it. He also gives suitable attention to the sad fate of the often overlooked Ivor Gurney, who continued to write but spent the rest of his life as a patient in a mental hospital until death in his forties.
There are regular but reasonably concise quotations from several of the relevant poems throughout this book. As war poetry anthologies and copies of each writer’s work are readily available, I was pleased that Ricketts did not pad out the book to excessive length by relying too heavily on such usage. He is light, and understandably so, on analysis. His main purpose is to fill in the biographical background, and this he has done very well. While there is a case for suggesting that maybe the poems should speak for themselves, I for one am always just as interested to know something about their creators, and the whole story – or most of it - of the War Poets and their place in the literary world after it is faultlessly presented in this volume.
If this book appeals then you might like to try:
Now All Roads Lead to France: The Last Years of Edward Thomas by Matthew Hollis
For King and Country: Voices from the First World War by Brian MacArthur
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