Page:More songs by the fighting men, soldier poets, second series, 1917.djvu/149

THE

REBIRTH OF POETRY

The Daily Telegraph, in the course of a remarkable leading article under the above heading, on June 12th, said:

Then came the war, with its strong appeal to chivalry and hardihood and moral fervour, and our young men responded not only with the hazard of their lives, but with all the warmth and generosity of deeply stirred hearts. And then the miracle happened. For many of these young men, whom the novelty and romance of their lofty enterprise had shaken out of their habitual reserve and their intellectual shyness, discovered that they must join also the great army of singers and bards, and that only by means of poetry could they give expression to all the multiform emotional experience engendered in their minds by the great Crusade.

So it came about that Poetry was reborn in the throes of war, and that Mars once more claimed kinship with Apollo and the Muses. Guardsmen wrote sonnets 5 privates composed odes; corporals and sergeants so unlike the non-commissioned officers of the past relaxed their stern and practical souls in "soldier songs." The phenomenon is not so surprising as at first sight it appears, although no one probably foresaw what large dimensions it would assume. It is only reasonable to suppose that moments of crisis causing a great emotional strain should find their issue in verse. Poetry is, after all, the natural outlet for those who feel deeply, and if hitherto the whole range of feeling and sentiment has been kept under lock and key, owing to a modesty and shame-facedness extremely characteristic of Englishmen, it is not altogether surprising that even those who thought themselves dumb should at such supreme moments suddenly find a tongue.

Mr. Erskine Macdonald, a publisher who has interested himself deeply in this department of literature, produced a series of little books of Georgian verse and Soldier Songs, which have a distinct character of their own, and often astonish us by their fecundity and their power. Sometimes, as might be expected, they are n little rough and uncouth; sometimes they grate on the aesthetic sense by their deliberate disdain of beauty; but they never fail for want of strength. The best of them come hot from excited brains, and are written by those who have:m actual and vivid experience of what modern warfare means, who know its squalor and its hideousness, and yet are able to throw round it a kind of forlorn fascination and charm, thanks to the energy of their kind of their