Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

F. R. Leavis began his epoch-defining book, New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), with the confident assertion that ‘poetry matters little to the modern world’. Even allowing for Leavis's deliberate provocativeness and the subtlety of his subsequent argument this would seem, on the face of it, a little overstated. For Leavis was writing at a time in which poetry was experiencing a popularity that it will probably never exceed. The reasons for this popularity can be traced back to the First World War and to the needs of an educated, literate population, exposed to a print (though not yet a broadcast) mass media, for a language adequate to the unprecedented experiences of modern war. The sheer bulk of the outpourings of verse that appeared in newspapers, popular songs, and in the memorial volumes of the work of soldier poets, on commemorative cards and war memorials, that was spoken and sung in remembrance ceremonials, testifies to a widespread belief in the ritual and consolatory powers of poetry. To read the elegies of soldier poets like Edmund Blunden and Robert Graves for dead comrades, or the poems in Vera Brittain's Testament of Youth (1933), or those collected by Catherine Reilly in Scars Upon My Heart: Women's Poetry and Verse of the First World War (1981), is to experience and be moved not just by the poetry itself but by a recognition that poetry is the most appropriate ... log in or subscribe to read full text