Chairman's Speech at the Launch of the WPA at the British Embassy, Paris, 9 July 2004
Ambassador, thank you very much for those words, and I would also like to thank you and Lady Holmes for welcoming us here at your magnificent residence and for the kindness and generosity of your hospitality this evening
The War Poets Association was founded by a small group of us who were already involved in individual societies dedicated to individual war poets, but who, particularly after the excellent war poets exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London, ['Anthem for Doomed Youth'] felt that there was a need for a separate association which would bring together societies and individuals interested in war poetry.
The WPA is also unique in being interested in war poets of all periods and nationalities, though the primary focus on conflicts since 1914 - mainly the First World War, the Spanish Civil War, and the Second World War.
Poets have written about the experience of war since the Greeks, but it was the young soldier poets of the First World War established war poetry as a literary genre. Their combined voice has become one of the defining texts of Twentieth Century Europe.
Although 'war poet' tends traditionally to refer to soldiers or other active combatants, war poetry has been written by people caught up in conflict in other ways: Cesar Vallejo and W H Auden in the Spanish Civil War, Margaret Postgate Co1e and Rose Macaulay in the First World War, James Fenton in Cambodia. In the global, 'total war' of 1939-45, which saw the Holocaust, the Blitz and Hiroshima, virtually no poet was untouched by the experience of war.
In choosing a single poem to include in today's programme, we have decided to emphasise this aspect of war poetry - 'The Company of Lovers' is not a typical war poem. It is, for a start, written by a woman and by someone not directly involved in any military conflict. Judith Wright is one of Australia's most significant poets, who happened to be in Europe at the outbreak of the second world war, and who was clearly caught up in the emotional turmoil of those events. Her poem, I think, has a universal quality in its response to war and the way it affects everyone, not just those in uniform. It also highlights the curious symmetry that exists between war poetry and love poetry - the clearest example being Robert Graves, whose two major subjects are war and love - and just as the best of his war poems are about the bond of love between sensitive men thrown together in battle, his love poems are largely about the battles he fought (and for the most part lost) with forceful women.
War poetry is not necessarily 'anti-war'. It is, however, about the very large questions of life: identity, innocence, guilt, loyalty, courage, compassion, humanity, duty, desire, death. Its response to these questions, and its relation of immediate personal experience to moments of national and international crisis, gives war poetry an extra-literary importance. Owen wrote that even Shakespeare seems 'vapid' after Sassoon: 'not of course because Sassoon is a greater artist, (he said) but because of the subjects' .
War poetry is currently studied in every school in Britain. It has become part of the mythology of nationhood, and an expression of both historical consciousness and political conscience. The way we read - and perhaps revere - war poetry, says something about what we are, and what we want to be, as a nation.
It is problematic to talk about celebrating war poetry. By definition, we would prefer that none of it existed. The price of becoming a war poet was, for most of them, violent death. To appreciate war poetry is not, however, to endorse the circumstances that led to its writing - usually quite the opposite, in fact. That said, much war poetry is itself celebratory of things that matter most in life: love, friendship, concern for one another, innocence, goodness - and it is for this reason we value the war poetry of Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden and Siegfried Sassoon, whose poems we are going to hear shortly.
Their writings marked a transition in English cultural history. And they themselves have become icons of innocence, vulnerability, courage and integrity, in a world which after the war felt that these values were increasingly under threat.
Paul O'Prey