War and Poetry

I have a strange relationship with poetry.   I've never read it for pleasure, although these days I rarely read anything for pure pleasure.  Either by design or subconscious leading everything, it seems, feeds into my academic interests.  Or I read half a chapter of a kid's book as a nightcap.  

But when I do get around to reading poetry, mostly for the classroom, it can give me such intense pleasure I wonder why I don't read more.  I realized this year that  I teach a lot of poetry for someone who seemingly works with the novel and is nervous about discussing or writing about poetry.  I've been fortunate enough to teach some spectacular novels, but no prose ever makes me feel as swoony and rapturous as Keats's descriptions in "Lamia."   I think my nervousness about poetry stems from traumatic early-college experiences with Wordsworth, a blowhard Romantics professor, and Paul Fussell.  For years I couldn't read "We Are Seven" without feeling profoundly stupid.

Although early 20-cent. literature is perhaps my least favorite period, I do love the war poets. On a fundamental level my research is devoted to ripping apart any pretense of an idyllic pastoral 19th-cent. Britain, and yet I have tremendous sympathy for the power of that vision.  Or at least, I understand the nostalgia for certain kinds of pasts.  I came across one of my favorite Edward Thomas poems today while sifting through mounds of paper, and reading it took me back to a summer I spend it Cambridge several years ago.  I remember standing on a bridge looking at the fens and feeling an pleasurable ache for being.  Although I find parts of it a bit schlocky, it's still a haunting piece of verse. 

The Glory

The glory of the beauty of the morning--

The cuckoo crying over the untouched dew;

The blackbird that has found it, and the dove

That tempts me on to something sweeter than love;

White clouds ranged even and fair as the new-mown hay;

The heat, the stir, and sublime vacancy

of sky and meadow and forest and my own heart:--

The glory invites me, yet leaves me scorning

All I can ever do, all I can be,

Beside the lovely of motion, shape, and hue

In beauty's presence.  Shall I now this day

Begin to seek as far as heaven, as hell,

Wisdom or strength to match this beauty, start

And tread the pale dust pitted with small dark drops,

In hope to find whatever it is I seek,

Hearkening to short-lived, happy-seeming things

That we know naught of, in the hazel copse?

Or must I be content with discontent

As larks and swallows are with wings?

and shall I ask at the day's end once more

What beauty is, and what I can have meant

By happiness?  and shall I let all go,

Glad, weary, or both? Or shall I perhaps know 

That I was happy oft and oft before,

Awhile forgetting how I am fast pent,

how dreary-swift, with naught to travel to,

Is Time? I cannot bite the day to the core.

It makes me wonder what sorts of literature will emerge/is emerging from the current spate of global crises.