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Abstract
Recent scholarship has delved into the impact of newspaper press upon Crimean War poetry and highlighted the challenges of war representation facing non-combatant poets. The Crimean conflict (1854–56), this essay will show, was not only a ‘media war’ but also a ‘literary’ one, during which mid-Victorian commentators and poets consciously reworked an array of established traditions of war poetry, especially those of Tyrtaeus, the Greek martial poet of the seventh century, to negotiate the duties and artistic endeavours of the civilian poet. Tracing the construction of a ‘Tyrtaean’ tradition from the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), it explores how a Romantic reworking of Tyrtaeus’ war songs served as a precedent for the civilian poets of the Crimean conflict, and how newspaper reports of the suffering of soldiers intensified a widespread scepticism of the civilian’s knowledge and bodily experience of war, which in turn instigated a reconfiguration of the ‘Tyrtaean’ poet. It argues that whilst the poetic efforts of Tom Taylor, Louisa Shore, and Alfred Tennyson to refashion the figure of the civilian manifest Crimean War poets’ anxiety about their non-combatant status and the use of poetry, they evacuated the ‘Tyrtaean mode’, a poetic mode intended to arouse people’s patriotic sentiment and exhort them to military action, forging a new image of war poet within their work marked by the civilian’s detachment from the spectacle of war and critical engagement with distant suffering.
Notes
1. Letter to Thomas Hughes, in Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life, ed. by Frances Kingsley, 2 vols (London: 1877), i, 434 (18 December 1854).
2. See, for example, the comment from The Scottish Review: ‘He is no Tyrtaeus […] and yet he has attempted war-poetry of that bare, stern style’. ‘Bailey and Tennyson’, The Scottish Review, October 1855, 347–57.
3. Bennett’s dedication reads: ‘To The Reverend Charles Kingsley, These Songs Are Dedicated in Admiration of the Beauty and Power of the Too Few Lyrics with Which He has Enriched Our Literature.’ See William Cox Bennett, War Songs (London: 1855).
4. Charles Kingsley, Two Years Ago (London: 1898), pp. 398–99.
5. By contrast, OED’s first and third examples derive from reviewers’ eulogies of Sir Walter Scott and Wilfred Owen immediately after the Napoleonic Wars and WWI respectively. See ‘War Poet’, OED <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/225,589?redirectedFrom=war+poet#eid110471518>[accessed 10 June 2014].
6. ‘Street-Ballads of the War’, Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, May 1856, 305–09.
7. For a discussion of the ‘poetic oppositions’ between Victorian and Modernist war poetry, see Matthew Bevis, ‘Fighting Talk: Victorian War Poetry,’ The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. by Tim Kendall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 7–33 (p. 9).
8. Robert Graves, The Common Asphodel: Collected Essays on Poetry, 1922–1949 (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949), p. 307.
9. Santanu Das, ‘Reframing First World War Poetry: An Introduction’, in The Cambridge Companion to The Poetry of the First World War, ed. by Santanu Das (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 3–34 (p. 5).
10. For the canon formation of the soldier-poets, see Hugh Houghton’s ‘Anthologizing War’, The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry, ed. by Tim Kendall (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 421–44; an exception to this dominant criticism of war poetry is the 2015 ‘Wordsworth, War and Waterloo’ exhibition held at Dove Cottage which showcases Wordsworth as a war poet and his poetic responses to the Napoleonic Wars. Simon Bainbridge and Jeff Cowton, ‘Wordsworth, War and Waterloo’, Wordsworth Trust,<https://wordsworth.org.uk/attend-events/2015/03/16/exhibition-wordsworth-war-amp-waterloo.html>[accessed 20 November 2015].
11. Trudi Tate, ‘On Now Knowing Why: Memorializing the Light Brigade,’ in Literature, Science, Psychoanalysis, 1830–1970: Essays in Honour of Gillian Beer, ed. by Helen Small and Trudi Tate (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), pp. 160–80 (p. 178).
12. Stefanie Markovits, The Crimean War in the British Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 3.
13. Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), pp. 49, 51.
14. Theocritus, The Idyllia, Epigrams, and Fragments, of Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, with the Elegies of Tyrtæus, Translated from the Greek into English Verse, trans. by Rev. Richard Polwhele (Exeter, 1786), p. 9.
15. The Gentleman’s Magazine, May 1787, pp. 427–28 (p. 428).
16. Polwhele noted that ‘every copy ought to preserve the character of its original’ (Elegies of Tyrtæus, p. 9).
17. For a survey of the myriad English translations of Tyrtaeus’ war elegies circulating in the 1830s, see [William Maginn], ‘The Martial Elegies of Tyrtaeus’, Fraser’s Magazine, June 1835, pp. 621–29 (p. 621).
18. Life, Letters and Journals of Lord Byron ed. Thomas Moore (London: Murray, 1844), p. 74.
19. The War-Elegies of Tyrtaeus, Imitated: And Addressed to The People of Great Britain, trans. by Henry James Pye (London, 1795), pp. 19–20.
20. John Young, a Professor of Greek at Glasgow University, who also published a rendition of Tyrtaeus’ war songs, referred to Pye’s version as an ‘elegant one’. See Martial Effusions of Ancient Times (London, 1804), p. viii.
21. Thomas James Mathias, The Pursuits of Literature: A Satirical Poem in Four Dialogues (London, 1798), p. 123.
22. Joseph Fawcett, ‘War Elegy, Better Suited to Our Circumstances than the War Elegies of Tyrtaeus’, New Annual Register, January 1795, pp. 187–89 (ll. 61–64).
23. See Franklin Lushington, Points of War (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1854).
24. ‘Laissez Aller!’ lines 1–2, in Points of War, p. 20.
25. ‘Our Patriotic Poets’, Punch, 18 March 1854, p. 110.
26. ‘Up with the standard of England’, quoted in English Ballads through National Library of Scotland <http://digital.nls.uk/english-ballads/pageturner.cfm?id=74,893,657&mode=transcription>[accessed 10 June 2014].
27. Martin Parker, quoted in [Charles Mackay], ‘English Songs: Ancient and Modern’, Nineteenth Century, December 1884, pp. 965–83 (p. 970).
28. The songwriter Charles Mackay praised Parker’s song as one ‘not only excellent in itself, but entitled to double gratitude for having served Thomas Campbell as the model on which he built “Ye Mariners of England”, one of the noblest songs ever written in language’. See Mackay, ‘English Songs’, 970; [Thomas Campbell] ‘Alteration of the Old Ballad, “Ye Gentlemen of England”’ Morning Chronicle (1801), 233–34; for a discussion of Campbell’s prominent role and war poetry during the Crimean War, see Tai-Chun Ho,‘The Afterlife of Thomas Campbell and ‘The Soldier’s Dream’ in the Crimean War’, 19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth-Century, May 2015, pp. 1–18 <http://www.19.bbk.ac.uk/article/view/ntn.714>[accessed 14 July 2016].
29. OED’s first cited reference to the term ‘stand at ease’ comes from Charles James’ A New and Enlarged Military Dictionary. According to James, ‘Ease, in a military sense, signifies a prescribed relaxation of the frame, from the erect and firm position which every well-dressed soldier should observe.’ See ‘Ease, n.5’, OED <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/59,073?redirectedFrom=stand+at+ease>[accessed 28 February 2014]; ‘Ease’, Charles James, A New and Enlarged Military Dictionary; or, Alphabetical Explanation of Technical Terms (London, 1802).
30. Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 16.
31. Letter to Ottilie von Goethe, 20 October 1854, in Letters of Anna Jameson to Ottilie von Gothe, ed. by George Henry Needler (London: Oxford University Press, 1939), p. 247.
32. For a discussion of Kingsley’s literary responses to the Crimean War, see Louise Lee, ‘Deity in Dispatches: The Crimean Beginnings of Muscular Christianity’, in Religion, Literature, and the Imagination: Sacred Worlds, ed. by Mark Night and Louise Lee (London: Continuum, 2009), pp. 57–74.
33. Philip Knightly notes: ‘It was true that Russell wrote movingly about the sufferings of soldiers […] but it was actually Thomas Chenery […] with his descriptions of conditions at the base hospital in Scutari, who created the biggest impact in England’. See The First Casualty: The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, And Myth Maker (London: Andre Deutsch, 1975), pp. 13–14.
34. [Thomas Chenery], ‘The Crimea’, The Times, 12 October 1854, p. 6.
35. For instance, on 8 November, one newspaper reprinted it below an article entitled ‘The Wounded’ and, one week later, included an excerpt to raise money for the Patriotic Fund. See ‘The Wounded’, The Bury and Norwich Post, and Suffolk Herald, 8 November 1854; ‘Patriotic Fund,’ The Bury and Norwich Post, and Suffolk Herald,’ 15 November 1854.
36. See Malvern Van Wyk Smith Drummer Hodge: The Poetry of the Anglo-Boer War (1899–1902) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 13.
37. Taylor’s Punch poem is often wrongly attributed to William Makepeace Thackeray. The confusion of the authorship might be caused by Friswell’s note to the poem in his Crimean War anthology published at the time: ‘We know not whether we be right in our conjecture, but we believe that the following beautiful verses, (extracted from Punch of 28 October 1854) are from the pen of Thackeray.’ See Songs of the War, ed. by James Hain Friswell (London: Ward and Lock, 1855), p. 29. Patrick Waddington has identified its authorship based on the Punch office ledger for 1854–1855. See ‘Theirs But To Do and Die’: The Poetry of the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava, 25 October 1854 (Nottingham: Astra, 1995), p. 29.
38. [Tom Taylor], ‘The Due of the Dead’, Punch, 28 October 1854, p. 173 (ll. 1–16). Further references to the poem will be cited parenthetically by line number.
39. War Music’, The Spectator, 25 November 1854, p. 8; ‘War Music’, in A. and L. [Arabella and Louisa Shore], War Lyrics (London, 1855), p.11 (ll. 1–8). Further references to the poem will be cited parenthetically by line number.
40. See the note of Christopher Ricks and Edgar Shannon, ‘‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’: The Creation of a Poem’, Studies in Bibliography, 38 (1985), 1–44 (p. 5).
41. ‘To the Cambro-Britons, and their harp, his Ballad of Agincourt’, in The Oxford Book of War Poetry, ed. by Jon Stallworthy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), p. 38 (ll. 60, 64).
42. The Times, leader, 13 November 1854, p. 6.
43. [William Howard Russell], ‘The Cavalry Action at Balaklava’, The Times, 14 November 1854, p. 7.
44. The Times, leader, 14 November 1854, p. 6.
45. Hallam Tennyson, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1897), i, 381.
46. Richard Hooper, a Drayton scholar, was one of the earliest critics to make this claim. Richard Hooper, ‘The Metre of Tennyson’s In Memoriam’, Notes and Queries, December 1872, p. 338. Another precedent for the metre of Tennyson’s poem – which has escaped critical scrutiny – is Byron’s Canto IX of Don Juan (1819–1824) which uses the rhyme ‘wonder’, ‘thunder’, and ‘blunder’ to denounce the Duke of Wellington. See Byron’s satirical portrait of Wellington: ‘They say you like it too – ’tis no great wonder:/He whose whole life has been assault and battery,/At last may get a little tired of thunder;/And swallowing eulogy much more than satire, he/May like being praised for every lucky blunder.’ George Gordon Byron, Don Juan, in Lord Byron: The Complete Poetical Works, ed. by Jerome McGann, 7 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–93), v, 410 (ll. 34–38).
47. W. F. Rawnsley, quoted in Lives of Victorian Literary Figures: Tennyson, ed. by Matthew Bevis (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2003), p. 84.
48. The word ‘volley’ which matches with ‘thunder’ also appears in Russell’s account of the charge:
As they passed toward the front, the Russians opened on them from the guns in the redoubt on the right, with volleys of musketry and rifles […] the miscreants poured a murderous volley of grape and canister on the mass of struggling men and horses (‘The Cavalry Action at Balaklava’, p. 8; emphasis is mine);
49. [Charles Kingsley], ‘Tennyson’s Maud’, Fraser’s Magazine, September 1855, pp. 264–73 (p. 273).
50. Compare the description of The Times leader and Russell: ‘It charged batteries, took guns, sabred the gunners, and charged the Russian cavalry beyond’; ‘Through the clouds of smoke, we could see their sabres flashing as they rode up to the guns and dashed between them, cutting the gunners as they stood’ (The Times, leader, 13 November 1854, p. 6 and 14 November 1854, p. 7).
51. In Jerome McGann’s reading of the poem, the phrase ‘All the World’ refers to the French ally. He quotes the French general Bosquet’s famous comment: ‘C’est magnifique, mais ce n’est pas la guerre!’. See ‘Tennyson and the Histories of Criticism’, in The Beauty of Inflections: Literary Investigations in. Historical Method and Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), pp. 173–203 (pp. 198–99).
52. Compare the newspaper version with the one printed in book form. In the former, Tennyson wrote ‘Someone had blunder’d’ and ‘‘Take the guns,” Nolan said.’ In the latter, in addition to removing the key line and the reference to Nolan’s name, he rendered the order of the charge more ambiguous: ‘“Charge,” was the captain’s cry.’ See ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, The Examiner, 9 December 1854, p. 780; ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade,’ in Maud and Other Poems (London: Edward Moxon, 1855), p. 151.
53. Benedict Lawrence Chapman, letter to Tennyson in The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. by Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon Jr, 3 vols (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1981–90), ii: 1851–70 (1987), p. 117 (3 August 1855).
54. Letter to John Forster, Letters of Tennyson, ii, 117 (6 August 1855).
55. For Tennyson’s note, see letter to John Foster, ii, 118 (6 August 1855) No. 5.
56. David Masson, ‘Maud and Other Poems’, British Quarterly Review, October 1855, pp. 467–98 (pp. 492–3). For a discussion of Tennyson’s treatment of Tyrtaeus in Maud, see Tai-Chun Ho, ‘Tennyson’s Echoes of War-Cries in Maud’, Tennyson Research Bulletin, November 2016, pp. 443–66.
57. Stirling Observer, 31 July 1856.