War, Passive Suffering and the Poet

War, Passive Suffering, and the PoetAuthor(s): Jonathan AllisonSource: The Sewanee Review, Vol. 114, No. 2 (Spring, 2006), pp. 207-219Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27549799 .

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WAR, PASSIVE SUFFERING, AND THE POET

JONATHAN ALLISON

I think that all noble things are the result of war

fare; great nations and classes, of warfare in the

visible world, great poetry and philosophy, of invisible warfare, the division of a mind within

itself, a victory, the sacrifice of a man to himself.

?W. B. Yeats, "J. M. Synge and

the Ireland of His Time"

WITH

W. B. Yeats's "The Lake Isle of Innisfree" in mind, an English soldier during the Great War, William Oliphant

Down, wrote "A Picardy Parody (W.B.Y . . ts)":

I will arise and go now, and go to Picardy, And a new trench-line hold there, of clay and shell-holes

made,

No dugouts shall I have there, nor a hive for the Lewis G., But live on top in the b. loud glade.

And I may cease to be there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the mouth of the Minnie to where the

sentry sings; There noon is high explosive, and night a gunfire glow, And evening full of torpedoes' wings.

I will arise and go now, though always night and day I'll feel dark waters lapping with low sounds by the store,

Where all our bombs grow rusty and countless S.A.A.; I'll feel it in the trench-feet sore.

This skillful parody of Yeats's well-known poem brings together

humorously the war on the Western Front and the landscape of

Yeats's poetic imagination, two apparently incompatible spheres. Yeats has told the story of how he came to think about Lough Gill

? 2006 by Jonathan Allison



208 WAR, PASSIVE SUFFERING, AND THE POET

in County Sligo, as he stood in a busy London street, stimulated to reverie by an advertisement for cooling drinks in a shop window,

complete with artificial water fountain. "In dreams begin respon

sibility," he wrote elsewhere: out of this particular dream emerged this poem about escape from the streets of London.

Down's parody, similar to many such parodies of classics to be found in The Wipers Times (the grimly comic magazine pro duced by British soldiers in the trenches), mingles wonderfully the intoxicating rhythms of antimodern, Celtic Twilight pastoral

with the precise diction of the trenches: "trench-line," "shell

holes," "dugouts," "Lewis Gun," "Minnie" (the dreaded mortar bomb the Minnenwerfer). The parody concludes with a spoof on Yeats's irrecoverably romantic "deep heart's core," with the bathetic phrase "trench-feet sore." Clearly some soldiers had read Yeats and carried him with them to Flanders, though he scarcely returned the compliment: when considering the poetry of the

trenches, he judged it unfit for "a country newspaper" (as he said of Wilfred Owen's poems). He condemned what he called its "passivity": Yeats preferred his war heroes to be active, even if

self-destructively active. Standing up to announce your imminent

departure for Innisfree, after all, is the impulse of a free man, at

liberty to turn his back and go wherever he pleases. As the war

time parody suggests, such freedom to choose, to act freely, was not an option for a soldier on the Western Front, surrounded by the weapons of mass

slaughter that made a mockery of nineteenth

century ideals of individual heroism. In a celebrated passage Yeats explained why he excluded the

poems of Wilfred Owen from his Oxford Book of Modern Verse in 1936:

I have a distaste for certain poems written in the midst of the Great War. ... I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold withdraw his Emped ocles on Etna from circulation; passive suffering is not a

theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a

joy to the man who dies. . . .

If war is necessary, or necessary in our time and place, it is best to forget its suffering as we do the discomfort of

fever, remembering our comfort at midnight when our



JONATHAN ALLISON 209

temperature fell, or as we forget the worst moments of more painful disease.

Initially reviewers were surprised by the anthologist's selections and by the exclusion of Owen in particular. H. A. Mason com

plained, in Scrutiny in 1937, that Yeats's choices were "eccentric" and "frankly inexplicable." John Hayward wrote in the Specta tor in November 1936: "I cannot agree that Mr. Yeats's conten tion that 'passive suffering is not a theme for poetry'?surely a

very questionable assertion?is a reason for excluding from his

anthology Wilfred Owen, who, technically at least, has been an

influence, second only to Hopkins, on the young poets of today whom Mr. Yeats pretends to admire." John Sparrow wrote in

the Times Literary Supplement: "The whole tribe of 'War' poets is scarcely noticed?Rupert Brooke has but a single poem, and that not a 'War' poem; 'passive suffering,' says Mr. Yeats, 'is not a theme for poetry,' and they are

accordingly excluded. Perhaps a sounder observation would have been that poets whose inspira tion comes from some overwhelming catastrophe like the war, and

who are caught by it before they have evolved a definite style or

attitude, are likely to produce poetry which, not having in it the seeds of influence or change, is but a dead-end in the history of literature."

Critics continue to agree the pronouncement was misguided, but stress that it reveals Yeats's antimodernist views on the proper

language and subject of poetry. Jon Silkin, writing in 1979, argued that "Yeats's formula . . .

begs so many questions, and rides rough shod over them, that I think it best not to argue with it; except to

question the notion that all suffering is passive, and that a recre

ation ofthat suffering in art is mere passive 'activity.'" Some years earlier John H. Johnston had written: "Yeats's judgment, though it refers in passing to a certain physical or historical effect?the theme of passive suffering?is really an aesthetic judgment; it

may be applied, as Yeats's actual selections seem to indicate, to

nearly the whole range of poetry directly inspired by the war." As

Johnston explained, the typical figure in war poetry was indeed the

ordinary passive victim, not the active hero: "this figure, elevated

by his obscurity, his sufferings, his patience and endurance, is the anonymous hero of contemporary poetry. He is, however, a




passive rather than an active figure; as a mere unit in a vast military machine, he is controlled by directive intelligences remote from

the field of battle. As the poet depicts him, he is a victim rather

than a hero; what he does is not so important as what is done to

him."

What does Yeats mean by "passive suffering"? It certainly sug

gests not doing anything about what is happening to one, no mat

ter how unpleasant. Auden would write of the wounded: "They are and suffer, that is all they do." But they were hospitalized,

bandaged, incapable of moving. Owen's men are not so confined,

although the trenches did constitute a prison house or grave for

many. Yeats seems to say that Owen's men, surrounded by gas and carnage, merely endure their lot helplessly. It suggests they

obey orders, accepting there is no choice. In a more cosmic sense, it implies resignedly accepting one's fate; it might be based on

a deterministic belief that actions are preordained, or it might not. It is a terrible reduction of Owen's poems to rest on such a

hypothesis. The opposite of passive suffering would be to act against suf

fering and its source, to fight the enemy willfully. Active suffering would imply struggling against things as they are. One thinks of a heroic figure from Irish mythology, like Cuchulain, fighting the waves: from an early stage, Yeats believed in heroic willpower

as

a primary theme. We might think of the participants in the 1916

rebellion who, in Yeats's view as conveyed in "Easter 1916," were

turned to stone in the very act of struggling with oppression. In

that poem Yeats voices decidedly ambivalent views on this petri faction?he is torn between celebration and condemnation of the

heroic sacrifice, as the participants created the "tragic play" of the

Rising by resigning their parts in "the casual comedy." By 1936,

however, when he writes the introduction to his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, Yeats is more disposed to commend the heroic

ethos, and is more in tune with the note struck in his other poems about the Easter Rising, such as "The Rose Tree," in which he

argues, through the voice of James Connolly, "There's nothing but our own red blood / Can make a right Rose Tree." That is a sentiment one will never find in a poem by Wilfred Owen or

Siegfried Sassoon.

In defending his exclusion of Owen from his anthology, Yeats




made the analogy with Matthew Arnold's rejection of his poem

Empedocles on Etna: "passive suffering is not a theme for poetry." The reference is to Arnold's rejection in the preface to his 1853

Poems: "What then are the situations, from the representation of

which, though accurate, no poetical enjoyment can be derived?

They are those in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in

which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unre

lieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done."

For Arnold, depicting suffering without any vent in action is

morbid, monotonous, and painful to behold, but not tragic?

"tragic" is clearly an approved epithet, suggestive of the cathartic

Sophoclean shock of classical drama. On the other hand it is worth

remembering that painful inactivity and inertia are modernist

themes, frequently regarded as appropriate responses to the bur

den of modernity. Eliot's Prufrock provides a locus classicus of the

theme, and Arnold's very phrase nothing to be done echoes ironi

cally through Waitingfor Godot, opening as it does with those very words, voiced by Estragon. The phrase would appear to proclaim Beckett's defiance of Arnoldian aesthetic doctrine, as much as they express any existentialist ennui.

Yeats first formulated the phrase passive suffering in "J. M.Synge and the Ireland of His Time" (1910). He had mentioned to Synge that "I liked The Shadow of the Glen better than Biders to the Sea, that seemed for all the nobility of its end, its mood of Greek

Tragedy, too passive in suffering, and had quoted from Matthew

Arnold's introduction to Empedocles on Etna to prove my point." The argument expressed in 1936 echoes this point, thus applying to poetry a viewpoint elaborated in relation to drama. The tone

of fatalistic resignation evinced by Maurya in her final speech of Biders to the Sea communicates stoical, tragic dignity, as the

mother recalls her husband and sons drowned in the vengeful sea

("What more can we want than that? . . . No man at all can be

living for ever, and we must be satisfied"). Yeats, however, wants

his protagonists to be less pliant, more resistant than that. He notes with pleasure that the "passive" English audiences preferred Biders, whereas the Irish audiences preferred Shadow of the Glen. He relishes pointing out that his enemies who hated The Playboy have grown to love Biders to the Sea, and he bolsters his own




judgment by claiming that it represents a national revulsion from

the passivity which he attributes to those benighted English audi ences. One presumes that such a myth is relevant to his judgment on the English officer Wilfred Owen fighting in a war which Irish nationalists understood as imperialist to the core.

Yeats's strictures against passive suffering may seem perverse in

1936, but this point of view had wide currency during the Great

War on both sides, particularly among those who expected a heroic

response to war. Wolfgang Natter, in his study of the German war

machine and the publishing industry (Literature at War, 1914-1940, Yale University Press, 1999), has shown how German art that did not conform to a heroic aesthetic (what wartime Germany called

"the spirit of 1914") was censored or suppressed, as in the case of

Cotta, the distinguished publishing house of Goethe, Schiller, and

Bismarck. Cotta turned down numerous manuscripts during the war because they depicted soldiers in precisely the manner Yeats

attributes to the British war poets, as for example Curt Moreck's

short-story collection, Men in Battle (submitted in August 1915, but

rejected). These were stories which, in Natter's words, "bespoke an accurate military analysis of trench conditions in that phase of

the war as reflected in the work's motto that 'to hold out and be

patient, this is modern heroism.'" Moreck's commitment to accu

racy, patience, and resignation was out of fashion among publishers, as it was in the War Office and the Reichstag. Cotta insisted that war

stories should be "infused with traditional, not passive, heroicism

and a sense of the 'higher' spiritual mission motivating the German war effort." Yeats's infamous remark on "passivity," which aligned him unwittingly with German imperialist points of view, resembles

the editor Karl Rosner's prescription offered to an unsuccessful author in January 1915: "The passive heroes of the past who allowed

themselves to be borne by life will presumably not recapture the

preferred spot in narrative literature they previously occupied. The new hero of the novel will be an active person, who masters life." As

Natter remarks, Rosner is foreseeing a rebirth of heroic literature and the end of naturalism and expressionism. One feels compelled to point out he must have been disappointed.

There is further resemblance between Yeats's views, evinced in the thirties, and the view expressed by many warmongers in Germany throughout the period from the Great War to the




ascendancy of the Nazi party, which suppressed Remarque's All

Quiet on the Western Front, that brilliant novel of unremitting

complaint. Presumably British generals, too (had they time or

inclination to expostulate on the theme), might have preferred Rupert Brooke to Owen and Sassoon. The jingoistic Henry New bolt certainly did. It is surprising that Newbolt was much admired

by Yeats, who included the famous "Drake's Drum" in the Oxford Book of Modern Verse. Newbolt himself had written disparag ingly of the war poets in 1924: he complained about "Owen and the rest of the broken men [who] rail at the Old Men who sent

young men to die. They have suffered cruelly, but in the nerves

and not the heart." Written before neurasthenia was widely under

stood, the diction is telling, suggesting revulsion at the prospect of "broken men" and jangled nerves. This is a patriotic revulsion

perhaps, though based on the dubious distinction between nerves

and heart, masquerading as literary evaluation. To some extent

Yeats and Newbolt are in agreement. National bards of opposing nations, they may seem strange bedfellows, though less so if we

recall Yeats's letter of 25 April 1901, when he praised Newbolt's second book of poems, The Island Bace (a title oddly compatible

with the nationalist fervor on both sides of the Irish Sea): "You

have set many wise & true & beautiful things to rhyme. Yours is

patriotism of the fine sort?patriotism that lays burdens upon a

man, and not the patriotism that takes burdens off. The British Press just now, as I think, only understands the other sort, the sort that makes a man say T need not trouble to get wisdom for I am English, & my vices have made me great.'" A patriotism that

"lays burdens upon" the individual entails certain responsibilities. It rouses people to activity, makes them masters of their lives, and differs from a sheltering patriotism that does all the thinking and

fighting for you. Admiration of the individualist "man of action" was central to

Yeats's thinking from an early age, and it was later at the heart of his critique of modernity as evinced in the Oxford Book and else where. He finds that modernity?industrialism, economic devel

opment, modernization, and the resulting damage to community, which he calls elsewhere "the filthy modern tide"?is responsible for the diminution of individuality: "The mischief began at the

beginning of the seventeenth century, when man became passive




before a mechanized nature; that lasted to our own day with the

exception of a brief period between Smart's Song to David and

the death of Byron, wherein imprisoned man beat upon the door"

(Introduction, Oxford Book of Modern Verse).

The prisoner must struggle romantically against the prison house

of a rational Newtonian universe, or become enslaved by another man's system. According to this argument, modern thought had

been "passive" in this sense, against which Yeats's generation revolted; too much poetry had been realist, as if the mind were a

mechanical recorder rather than a vital shaping force. This critique of passive art (section eleven of the essay) lays the foundation for

his critique of Owen (section fifteen). Browning's The Bing and

the Book fails because "great intellect analyses the suffering of one

passive soul." Tennyson's poetry is marred by "an exquisite passiv

ity": it is allegorical and dull as dishwater. In Hemingway's work

"the chief character is a mirror." Yeats aims to shatter the mirror

of naturalism, which he lays at the door of artistic "passivity." "An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" is one of the few poems

Yeats wrote about the Great War, an elegy for Lady Gregory's son, Major Robert Gregory, killed in action in Italy, in January 1918. The poem is not patriotic in Newbolt's sense: the speaker serves no national abstraction such as England. His motives are

self-directed without any idea of consequence. Whereas the poem evinces confidence in an inevitable fate, to which the speaker is resigned, it is not an instance of suffering. Death is vaguely

imagined and embraced, judged no greater or lesser than life

itself?death is irrationally but compellingly put on a par with

"life." The speaker's certainty is conveyed authoritatively through

rhyming iambic tetrameters: "I know that I shall meet my fate /

Somewhere among the clouds above, / Those that I fight I do not

hate / Those I serve I do not love."

Despite Yeats's evident contempt for the war poets, compare these remarks on not hating Germans?"Those that I fight I do

not hate"?with the wartime sentiments of a poet such as Edward

Thomas, expressed in the poem "This is no petty case of right or

wrong": "I hate not Germans, nor grow hot / With love of English men, to please newspapers." Yeats, who despised newspapers and

associated the devil with the Irish Times, would have applauded




the brusque energy of this sentiment. Not hating Germans and not loving the British were certainly compatible with the views of

many Irish nationalists during the war. Yeats's Irish airman speaker is not swayed by patriotism of any kind, but he aims only to please himself, to follow his own "impulse of delight." The persona is

courageous, but does not feel the hatred that Yeats associated with a self-destructive form of advanced nationalism. The pilot is both

philosophical and self-delighting, master of himself and yet impul sive, disillusioned with life yet embracing the tumult wholeheart

edly. He pays tribute to the barony of Kiltartan (near the Gregory family seat at Coole), yet is detached from sentimental emotions

about what he means to those people. Combat, suffering, and pity

play no part in the poem, and as such it lies at furthest remove from the trench lyrics Yeats despised. It is a poem of the act of the mind, in Wallace Stevens's phrase, and is more in tune with the mind than

with the war. Such a poem would not have been published by Cotta in Berlin, lacking "the spirit of 1914"; but it does show the warrior

accepting a fate he seems to be instrumental in creating; hence it is a poem of mastery and self-control. Much anthologized in war

books, it could not be mistaken for a poem about combat. The Yeats poem we now know as "On being asked for a War

Poem" was written in February 1915, published initially as "Rea son for Keeping Silent," in Edith Wharton's anthology The Book

of the Homeless (1916). The revised title clearly appears more

open-ended, making readers wonder what indeed he will say about being asked for a war poem; it makes the fact that he has been asked to comment on the war explicit, downplaying the fact he is "keeping silent." The original cumbersome title in draft was

"To a friend who has asked me to sign his manifesto to the neu

tral nations." Henry James had requested a poem, to which Yeats

replied, in August 1915: "It is the only thing I have written of the war or will write, so I hope it may not seem unfitting. I shall keep the neighbourhood of the seven sleepers of Ephesus, hoping to

catch their comfortable snores till bloody frivolity is over." "Bloody frivolity" is an outrageous remark, but it highlights how the conflict in France was downplayed by many on the Home Front?and

especially in Ireland?before the horrendous losses of Gallipoli in

1915 and the Somme in 1916. Such ignorance was a major theme of writing about the war not only at the time but in later writings




by veterans, such as Erich Maria Remarque and Robert Graves, in works that have become classics of the period.

Certainly Yeats was blas? about the war in a way that now seems

strange, but may have been common in parts of Ireland at the

time. Roy Foster has noted, however, that Yeats's reactions in 1914

to the outbreak of war were personal. He worried about Maud

Gonne, who was nursing wounded soldiers in France, and about

the inevitable dwindling of Abbey Theatre audiences. He pon dered how the war would change national culture and his readers:

"I wonder how the war will effect the minds of what audience it

leaves to us. Nietzsche was fond of foretelling wars for the posses sion of the earth that were to restore the tragic mind, & banish the

mass mind which he hated." The concern about audience echoes

anxieties voiced in a poem written in 1910, "At Galway Races"

("We, too, had good attendance once, / Hearers and hearteners of

the work"). His fondness for the first immoralist foreshadows his own prophecy of war, invoking John Mitchell, in the late poem "Under Ben Bulben": "You that Mitchell's prayer have heard, /

'Send war in our time, O Lord.'" Yeats's later concern to "restore

the tragic mind" is implicit here, in spite of mass culture and

what he dubbed "the filthy modern tide." His view of England on the outbreak of war is suggested by his unsympathetic judg

ment?amplifying his familiar theme of British philistine material

ism?"England is paying the price for having despized intellect."

Foster's brief vignette about the bankers' lunch is very telling: "Back in London, he happened to be in the Bank of Ireland dur

ing the first Zeppelin raids, and was invited to take refuge with

the directors, but his chief reaction was to note the modesty of

their lunch."

"On being asked for a War Poem" possesses a ratiocinative

explicitness rare in Yeats's most successful poetry, generally avoided

by this poet of vision, but perhaps demanded by the urgency of

this occasion: "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." To use a poem to say a poet ought to be silent is odd, but it

might be read as an attempt to maintain art's integrity by refusing to enter a political squabble, something allied to the rhetoric that

Yeats scorned. The poem does not express a point of view Yeats

held for long, nor often. Setting statesmen right was an important




goal of the cultural movement Yeats spearheaded in the 1890s, and when he recalled elsewhere that Ireland after the fall of Parnell was "soft wax" awaiting a mold, he expected political men and women to take a lead from cultural arbiters like himself. Yeats made several memorable speeches in the Irish senate during the

1920s, in which he certainly hoped to set statesmen right. Keeping silent is a phrase one could not unambiguously associate with the author of the letter to Ethel Mannin in 1936: "I have not been

silent; I have used the only vehicle I possess?verse." The closing lines of this lyric return to the consoling notion of poet as spinner of romance and conveyer of wisdom to the aged, and yet it is ironic that the next four years would kill off a generation of young men.

In the final couplet Yeats juxtaposes a girl "in the indolence of her

youth" with "an old man upon a winter's night." Terence Brown has remarked that Yeats's antipathy to the poets

of the Great War "was less that their poetry took passive suffer

ing for a theme, but that it did not take tragic joy." In response to the outbreak of war, Yeats held to Nietzsche's opinion that war

might "restore the tragic mind & banish the mass mind." Samuel

Hynes has noted the chilling words from a 1931 Yeats story (later

transposed into A Vision): "Dear predatory birds, prepare for war,

prepare your children. . . . Test art, morality, custom, thought by Thermopylae.

. . . Love war because of its horror, that belief

may be changed, civilization renewed." The Yeatsian embrace of

tragedy is implicit in a remark on the war poets in the Oxford introduction: "tragedy is a joy to the man who dies." Some of this is encapsulated in the great poem of 1938, "Lapis Lazuli": "they know that Hamlet and Lear are gay; / Gaiety transfiguring all that dread." Yeats used the phrase tragic joy in "The Gyres" (1936), in which he contemplates the passage of history into a new age of violence and irrational force. It is a cosmic transition embraced with a boldness some have considered too ruthless, too distant from the compassion that were the wellsprings, for example, of Owen's poetry. In his brutal embrace of the future Yeats seems to

celebrate, whereas in earlier verse he lamented, the destruction of civilization: "Irrational streams of blood are staining earth; /

Empedocles has thrown all things about; / Hector is dead and there's a light in Troy; / We that look on but laugh in tragic joy."

Few modern poets would risk such rhetoric. Indeed certain




contemporary poets, such as Seamus Heaney, have articulated a

response to destruction predicated precisely upon a rejection of

that triumphant posture. In a poem in Electric Light, "On His

Work in the English Tongue," Heaney offers a riposte to Yeats's

strictures on passive suffering, while alluding to his own transla

tion of Beowulf and to Ted Hughes's semiautobiographical book

about his relationship with Sylvia Plath, The Birthday Letters.

(Heaney's poem was first published in the New Yorker with the

Keatsian title "On First Looking into Ted Hughes's Birthday Let

ters.") For Heaney, Ted Hughes has revitalized English with a

spirited and violent language:

Passive suffering: who said it was disallowed

As a theme for poetry? Already in Beowulf The dumbfounding of woe, the stunt and stress

Of hurt-in-hiding is the best of it?

As when King Hrethel's son accidentally kills

His older brother and snaps the grief-trap shut

On Hrethel himself . . .

Here passive suffering is not merely allowable but central to

the English poetic tradition from its Anglo-Saxon origins to the

present. For Heaney unavoidable suffering?what he calls "the

grief-trap"?is intrinsic to the original poem, in which the victim

ized characters are shocked or dumbfounded by grief. Heaney's

language echoes the alliterative Anglo-Saxon line, keeping faith

with the original, even as he remakes it: "stunt and stress / Of

hurt-in-hiding." Hrethel's suffering is inescapable: he cannot fight it. No soldier

poet in Passchendaele endured a sense of entrapment more over

whelming than the king who was honor-bound to execute his own

son?"a weird tale / Of a life and a love balked." This "balked" love

and life ("balked" is just right, derived from Middle English, Old Norse, and Old English, suggesting ignored, frustrated, or disap

pointed) provide the basic materials for the poem. In the poem's fourth section, which stresses Hrethel's misery, the victim must

follow the path to self-destructive punishment of his son for his

accidental, fratricidal crime. He is miserable and helpless: "The

wisdom of age is worthless to him."




Section three opens with the phrase "who said it [passive suf

fering] was disallowed?" The poem concludes with the words "A

thing allowed." For Heaney, who has elsewhere distanced himself

from Yeats, the prohibitions of his precursor are dismissed out of

hand, though direct conflict is avoided by a rhetorical expression of pseudo-amnesia. If there are things not to be said in everyday life, they may be announced to God?or to poetry, "Which is, as

Milosz says, / 'A dividend from ourselves,' a tribute paid / By what we have been true to. A thing allowed."

Yeats's position is implicitly rebuked, while Heaney's allowance

is extended and paid in full to Plath and particularly to Hughes, whose account of suffering in The Birthday Letters might be illu

minated by recalling his powerful earlier elegies to his father, a

Gallipoli veteran. In disconsolate Hughes elegies such as "Anthem

for Doomed Youth," "For the Duration," and "Dust As We Are," it

is precisely the inarticulate suffering of the father, whose traumas

the boyish persona of the poem absorbs, that forms the emotional core of the poetry. Heaney pays "allowance" to Hughes, Owen, and the Beowulf poet, who focused on those who cannot fight or

avoid the "trap" set for them. He applauds poets who see in over

whelming suffering an appropriate poetic subject and theme.



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