Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War

476 Pages·2010·3.16 MB·English

by  Elizabeth Vandiver

CLASSICAL PRESENCES
General Editors
Lorna Hardwick James I. Porter
CLASSICAL PRESENCES
The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and
Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in
order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of
change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old
and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on
the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the
c lassical past.
Stand in the
Trench, Achilles
Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the
Great War
ELIZABETH VANDIVER
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp
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© Elizabeth Vandiver 2010
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First published 2010
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Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India
Printed in Great Britain
on acid-free paper by
CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire
ISBN 978–0–19–954274–1
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Manuscript of Patrick Shaw-Stewart’s ‘I saw a man this morning’. Reproduced by permission of
the Provost and Fellows of Eton College.
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To the memory of John William Streets
coal-miner, poet, artist, soldier
born 24 March 1886
died 1 July 1916
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Preface
Ninety-one years after the Armistice was signed, public interest in the
First World War remains strong and growing. There seems to be an
almost insatiable appetite for books on all aspects of the war: its
history, its social and cultural consequences, its art, and its literature,
especially its poetry. Books about the war poets appear almost every
month; the last fi ve years have seen new biographies of major poets,
new anthologies of war poetry, and new works of criticism.1
In the face of this torrent of publication, it may seem audacious to
assert that there is room for yet another book on First World War
poetry, let alone one that involves a hitherto unexplored aspect of that
poetry. Yet that is this book’s claim, and the basis for it involves another
strand of scholarly enquiry, classical reception studies. In the last few
years reception studies have become one of the most exciting and
fruitful branches of classics in the English-speaking scholarly world,
especially in the United Kingdom.2 This burgeoning fi eld has
produced research on classics in nineteenth-century novels, in fi lm, in
the British theatrical tradition, and many other areas; but no one has
1 Biographies, e.g. Max Egremont, Siegfried Sassoon: A Biography (London:
Picador, 2005); Jean Moorcroft Wilson, Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of A Great
War Poet. A New Life (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2008). Anthologies, e.g.
Vivien Noakes (ed.), Voices of Silence: The Alternative Book of First World War
Poetry (Stroud: Sutton, 2006); Dominic Hibberd and John Onions (eds.), The
Winter of the World: Poems of the First World War, pbk. edn. (London: Constable,
2008). Criticism, e.g. Vincent Sherry (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the
Literature of the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
Tim Kendall (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2007). New publications on the war’s history and its
social and cultural impact also continue to appear.
2 Recent publications, e.g. Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray (eds.), A
Companion to Classical Receptions (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007); Charles Martindale
and Richard F. Thomas (eds.), Classics and the Uses of Reception (Madden, MA:
Blackwell, 2006). Royal Holloway University has recently opened a Centre for the
Reception of Greece and Rome; description at <http://www.rhul.ac.uk/research/
CRGR/Index.html>.