Evasion

Abstract

Some of the poetry written during the First World War seems, at least at first sight, to have little to do with the war itself, and the only link to the conflict is the time of composition. The attempt to look away from war has usually been characterised as an escape, especially with regard to two of the most famous modernist poets, W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. In the case of these two, it was a deliberate choice not to speak of war. The Irishman Yeats was too old to get personally involved in the war and therefore refrained from commenting on the conflict for reasons given in On Being Asked for a War Poem: ‘I think it better that in times like these/A poet’s mouth be silent, for in truth/We have no gift to set a statesman right.’ His only poem directly addressing the war, An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, is not so much concerned with expressing the author’s attitude towards modern war, but rather favours an emotional approach. Consequently, when Yeats edited The Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1935, he only included four poems about the war — W. Gibson’s Breakfast, Grenfell’s Into Battle, Read’s The End of War, and Sassoon’s On Passing the New Menin Gate — arguing in the introduction that ‘passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’.