I found the contrast between our reading sets this week quite striking—jarring even—because we moved from some very traditional WWI poetry such as Rupert Brooke into the avant-garde world of Dada.  I must say that I am by nature firmly an admirer of the former, but I also find it interesting how my impressions of movements such as Vorticism and the avant-garde have become, if not quite sympathetic, at least more nuanced and understanding, throughout this past academic year.   Last fall in our Modernism course we studied Dada for a class period and learned Tristan Tzara’s tried-and-true method regarding “How to Make a Dadaist Poem” and it was quite entertaining working out just how the result was “like me.”  I also enjoyed discussing the “Dada Manifesto”, which taught me that everyone must listen for and move to the sound of his or her own “boom boom.”  Last week, when poring over the pages of BLAST magazine I couldn’t help but stand back in something of incredulous awe of the self-appointed Vorticists, who claim to build through destruction, all the while yelling VERY LOUDLY.  

Facetiousness aside, however, I have been fascinated by the vitality and conviction of these artists, but I must admit I have a difficult time connecting these movements in my mind to the events of WWI.  I can honestly say that until encountering the dichotomy of our war poetry this week I had not yet been able to connect these somewhat self-indulgent artistic movements (to my mind) with the terrible brutality of an ongoing and devastating world war.  Take, for example, a section of the 1917 Wilfred Owen poem, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” in which Owen discusses the horror of dreaming again and again of a man dying in agony due to a failure to get his gas mask on in time: “In all my dreams before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning” (l. 15-16), before addressing himself to the reader:

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;

…

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori. (l. 17-20, 25-28).

Why it is so difficult for me to associate poems such as this above with avant-garde works on the same topic?  Perhaps because, as Marjorie Perloff notes in her article, “The Great War and the European avant-garde,” many avant-garde poets actually understood the war in an entirely different light.  Perloff highlights Guillaume Apollinaire’s poem on “War” in which he argues, “Before the war we had only the surface / Of the earth and the seas / After it we’ll have the depths” (l. 7-9).  Perloff notes that such early optimism may correspond to the inexperience of the for many involved, who, not realizing that many of their number would be soon killed in the fray.  However, according to Perloff, “What the Italian movement lacked, however, was a built-in critique that would have made poets, artists, and architects understand the downside of novelty and ceaseless change” (150).  It is not surprising, then, that, thirsting for an avenue their Manifesto “becomes a celebration of ‘the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness’” (145).  But what I find most interesting in this matter is Perloff’s statement that it is for the modern reader “accustomed to equating ‘war poetry’ with ‘anti-war poetry’” that “the response of the avant-garde to World War I must seem problematic” (161).  Thus, the poets of WWI—both those of the more “traditional” variety and those involved in the quest to “make it new”—were not of one mind chiefly because the poetry written during the war represents not simply one united whole, but instead a myriad of individual human experiences.