Charles Hamilton Sorely. A footnote poet of the First World War

Charles Hamilton Sorely. 1895-1915

So poor so manifestly incomplete

And your bright promise, withered long and sped

Is touched, stirs, rises, opens and grows sweet.

And blossoms and is you, when you are dead.

                                    (Such, Such is death).

Sorely is a footnote poet for the saddest of reasons. He was killed in 1915 during the Battle of Loos. He was 20 years old. A book of poems, Marlborough and other Poems (1916), and a collection of his letters (1919), were published posthumously, both seen through the press by his parents. The letters are prefaced by a ‘biographical chapter’ written by his mother.

In Goodbye To All That,  Robert Graves names Sorely as one of the three poets of importance who were killed in the First World War, the other two being Rosenberg and Owen. It’s a throwaway line rather than a considered judgement, but Graves’ enthusiasm was personal. In a letter to Edward Marsh (dated 24^th February 1917) he wrote:

‘I’ve just discovered a brilliant young poet called Sorely whose poems have just appeared in the Cambridge press Marlborough and other Poems and who was killed near Loos on October 13^th as a temporary Captain in the 7^th Suffolk regiment. It seems ridiculous to fall in love with a dead man as I have found myself doing but he seems to have been one so entirely after my own heart in his loves and hates, besides having been just my own age and having spent the same years at Marlborough as I spent at Charterhouse. He got a classical scholarship at University college Oxford, the same year I was up, and I half remember meeting him’.

Sorely has not fared as well as other ‘Great War Poets’: Rosenberg, Owen and Edward Thomas (not mentioned by Graves who either didn't know or wasn't interested) are all currently available in the kind of scholarly edition that has 'Established Reputation’ flashing above it. Suggesting that Yeats was right about Wilfrid Owen can bring the thought police to your door.

Sorely was the subject of a biography by Jean Moorcroft Wilson (1985), who also edited a new edition of his letters (leaving out Mrs. Sorely’s biographical chapter) (1990), and his collected poems(1985). Although there are scattered poems on line, and the original version of the letters is available to download as a free pdf,  Wilson's books are hard to find, and currently there’s only a thin glossy pamphlet type book of Sorely’s poems available, which looks like it has been badly scanned.  You can find second hand copy of Marlborough and other Poems…..which I did….1917 reprint of the 1916 edition which adds a short piece of prose, ‘Behind the lines’ and an additional poem, ‘There is such change in all those fields’.  The 1917 version is prefaced with an anonymous poem which is a response to the verse letter ‘I have not brought my Odyssey’.  

Rather than argue the toss about the poems, the biography and Marlborough and other Poems raise interesting questions about literary reputations.

Biographies begin with their end in sight. The early years are narrated to explain the achievements and the character of the adult subject. Graves’ biographers read back from the end of his long life to make much of his mother and his (miserable) years at Charterhouse in order to trace, retrospectively, the origins and development of perceived traits in the adult’s personality.

But Sorely’s biography is painfully thin; just over two hundred pages, or ten pages per year. In the absence of the next fifty or so years: the writer’s career, the arguments, scandals, achievements, relationships, there are no criteria against which to select what is important, no way of knowing if, for example, his relationship with his landlady in Schwerin, was indicative of things to come. (‘Relationship’ here with no sexual connotations.)  or if, after the war, he would have continued to write.  

So instead of biography we have chronicle. Events are narrated. People are introduced. Even that milestone in the poet’s career, the first collection, is not part of the biography. The literary biographer’s habit of discussing the schoolboy’s ideas on literature is revealed to be as shallow and predictable as the schoolboy’s ideas. 

Ironically, this makes Sorely into a representational figure: he stands for all the literate, affable young men who went from school to the Western Front and died there. His character shines through his letters. Graves would later say that Sorely died before he became disillusioned. But the letters suggest that Sorely had no illusions about the war before he joined the army. He liked Germany and the Germans when he stayed there as a student. He had no faith in the righteousness of the Allied Cause and was unimpressed by what he saw as Rupert Brooke’s patriotic posturing.

His parents had suggested he publish, and he declined. He had sent poems home from the front, but acknowledged they were unfinished. His most famous poem, ‘When you see millions of the mouthless dead’ was found in his kit after he was killed and it reads like something in draft. These are the poems of an intelligent, well read, literate young man, but there’s no way of knowing if he would have improved them had he prepared them for publication. Written in conditions that would silence most people, by someone who knew his death, if not inevitable, was probable, it feels awkward to assess them as consciously finished works of art.

If you do compare Marlborough and other Poems, with Graves’ first book, Over the Brazier, also published in 1916, two things seem obvious. They did have a great deal in common. Both writers had admired Masefield and it shows. Both books contain poems written while their authors were still schoolboys. Both play the trope of longing for home. Both respond to the war in ways that are different to the more well-known poems of Owen and Sassoon. 

The big difference is that Sorely’s book contains some memorable poems. What Graves’ reputation would be if he had died when he was reported dead in 1916 is mere speculation. But it’s difficult to believe anyone would have bothered to remember him. Over the Brazier gains its significance because of the poems that followed. It shows the beginnings of features that became characteristics of Graves’ later verse.

Sorely’s school poems lack Graves’ enthusiastic chummy diction and late 19^th century aesthetic posturing. Unlike Graves he enjoyed school. He had also been reading Hardy and Hardy is good for poets of all ages. His evocation of landscape is far more specific and local than Graves’.  England for Sorely was the Downs. He has more in common with Ivor Gurney in this respect, whose Severn And Somme was published in 1917. For both of them, England is not a vague idea but a specific place.

If you placed those three books together, Severn and Somme, Marlborough and other Poems, Over the Brazier, as individual books regardless of their writer’s subsequent reputations, they probably belong in that order. Gurney’s diction and syntax are more interesting than either of the others, and his poems feel less like literary exercises.

Graves as critic was often wayward. In the letter I quoted, he links Sorely’s poems to ‘Rupert’s method’. But in his poems he tended towards a better, what he might have called 'poetic' judgement.  In the same month he wrote that letter to Marsh he wrote ‘Sorely’s Weather’.

It’s only twenty lines, so the whole thing:

When outside the icy rain       

  Comes leaping helter-skelter,

Shall I tie my restive brain      

  Snugly under shelter?           

           

Shall I make a gentle song               

  Here in my firelit study,       

When outside the winds blow strong 

  And the lanes are muddy?    

           

With old wine and drowsy meats       

  Am I to fill my belly?                    

Shall I glutton here with Keats?         

  Shall I drink with Shelley?   

           

Tobacco’s pleasant, firelight’s good:  

  Poetry makes both better.     

Clay is wet and so is mud,              

  Winter rains are wetter.        

           

Yet rest there, Shelley, on the sill,      

  For though the winds come frorely, 

I’m away to the rain-blown hill          

  And the ghost of Sorley.               

The Foot note poets: Richard Aldington 3/4

Joseph Campbell’s output, if the tiny collected is anything to go on, was small.  Not all the poems work as well as ‘Night and I passing’.  When Austin Clark collected his poems he included nothing from the first collection.  And Campbell had other things to do.

However, Footnote poets aren’t always unjustly relegated to the footnotes.  Quite often, reading them is a good way of approaching literary value from a different direction. Richard Aldington (1892-1962) is more than just a footnote. If you accept the standard narrative, then Imagism (with or without the final e) was the precursor of literary modernism and one version of the narrative is that Pound coined the term to describe H.D’s work and then used it to promote H.D and Aldington.

Aldington’s biographical information is easily found on line and he turns up in most histories of Modernism or biographies of other famous poets. But if Campbell is a salutary warning about the dangers of the lyric (see previous posts), Aldington demonstrates much of what can go wrong with ‘free verse’.

He might have been an influential figure in literary circles in his time, but reading his Collected Poems it becomes obvious something was missing. At a time when a mountain of awful poetry was being published, he was good enough to be still readable. His erotic poems can be more direct than you might expect for the period, the war poems are an honest, literate response to horror, but as poetry, as something other than a literate response to erotic feeling or terror, they don’t convince.

A Ruined House

Those who lived here are gone

Or dead or desolate with grief;

Of all their life here nothing remains

Except their trampled, dirtied clothes

Amongst the dusty bricks

Their marriage bed, rusty and bent

Thrown aside as useless;

And a broken toy left by a child…

 It’s not a bad poem, nor is it a great one. So it will do to consider what’s wrong with Aldington’s poems.

Perhaps we’ve seen too many pictures of ruined houses since the 1920s. It’s hard to imagine what this must have done to a reader who had not seen the damage caused by the First World War before the Second World War conditioned every one to scenes of urban destruction. But Aldington is working too hard. He’s not trusting the reader, or confident enough to let the image do its work.  

The second and third lines are clumsy:

Or dead or desolate with grief,
Of all their life here nothing remains

They push the reader towards the poet’s preferred reading: ‘this is sad. This is the terrible effect of the war on civilian populations’.  But the second line invites too much disagreement. They are gone or dead? It’s obvious ‘they’ are gone, but it’s obvious the poet doesn’t know them personally, nor does the poet know what’s happened to them and ‘dead or desolate with grief’ are obviously not the only possibilities. ‘Desolate with grief’ is unnecessarily literary. ‘Nothing remains’ is qualified by ‘except’…and while ‘nothing remains’ may be an attempt to evoke Ozymandias the except seems to list a lot more than nothing.

The  'things that remain' are selected for their impact, but why ‘marriage bed’? Is a marriage bed different to the bed a couple slept in every night since they were married? There were obviously children so it’s not like they had their wedding night here in the house, on this bed, and then it was destroyed.  

The final image of the discarded child’s toy might have been original, but it’s buried in the poet’s attempts to bully his reader into accepting his interpretation of the ruin. Imagine someone like Bunting or Pound taking their pencil to it and producing this:

A Ruined House

Trampled, dirtied clothes
amongst the dusty bricks
A bed, rusty and bent
And a broken toy..

Aldington is not a bad poet, but the great line never arrives.  The memorable image is always one draft away. The thought is fussing about the edges trying to work out which clothes to put on. Compare Aldington’s war poems to Gurney or any of the other big name war poets and as poems they pale in comparison. Compare the later Aldington in long works like , ‘A Fool I’ the Forest’, ‘A  Dream in the Luxembourg’ , ‘Life Quest’ and ‘The Crystal World’  to Eliot and there’s no contest.

We could pretend the world is full of egalitarian sentiments and pretend it’s not a contest, but poets vie for attention, and Aldington wrote his share of criticism. Art is a world where equal to, better than, less than are critical commonplaces and a fair question. 

Whatever is going on in ‘A fool I’ the Forest’ goes on for too long.  The fact that the poem is prefaced with a note explaining its own symbolism is another version of the first two lines of A Ruined House. Aldington uses untranslated snippets, in the style of Pound or Eliot, but like the former’s use of Chinese symbols they don’t do anything for a reader who can’t read them.

‘A Dream in the Luxembourg’ is a love story. Or a fantasy about a love affair. It’s easy to read, and enjoyable in its own way. So it can stand as an example of what’s wrong.

Firstly it’s difficult to see why he didn’t write it as a prose short story.

Now I am so much moved as I write this
That my hand shakes with excitement
And there is so much to say
I scarcely know where and how to begin
So hard is it to be truly reasonable
When you are a little crazy with romantic love.

Pound, who sometimes regretted his role in the popularization of ‘free verse’, wrote that the writer should not resort to poetry to avoid the difficulties of writing good prose. Is this good prose?

Now I am so much moved as I write this that my hand shakes with excitement and there is so much to say I scarcely know where and how to begin, so hard is it to be truly reasonable when you are a little crazy with romantic love.

Truly seems redundant, and ‘a little crazy with romantic love’ might be an ironic understatement given what follows, but ‘a little crazy’ is a sloppy description of the writer’s state of mind. (He’s about to tell the story of how he dropped everything he was doing in England and drove to France to meet the woman he loves after receiving an enigmatic telegram.)

There’s a steady rhythm to the extract, but it moves easily and it moves against the meaning of the lines. Sincerity is a complicated concept in writing: whether or not the writer is sincere is irrelevant, it’s whether he or she sounds sincere that matters. This doesn’t sound sincere. The poet is not talking directly to someone across the café table.  These are words arranged on the page for a purpose and the danger in trying to mimic a speaking voice is evident here: And there is so much to say/I scarcely know where and how to begin sounds like something someone might say, but on the page it raises the question couldn’t you do better? You did begin. You did find a starting point. And the conversational tone is immediately disrupted in the next verse section when Aldington drags in Catullus, Euripides and Pierre Vidal.

Next up, Tomas Carew and one of the strangest erotic poems in English.