[In the following excerpt from the introduction to Anthology of Second World War French Poetry, Higgins provides a critical analysis of French war poetry.]

IV POETRY

A remarkable literary feature of the war was the sudden popularity of poetry. Many looked to it, both as readers and as writers, for a crystallization of their suffering and grief. The same was true, though less spectacularly, in Britain. But poetry also had practical advantages for résistants wanting maximum impact in clandestine publications. For instance, it need not take up much space—an important factor if you cannot get your hands on paper (which at that time was severely rationed). Another advantage is that rhythm and rhyme implant poetry more easily in the memory—an important factor when it was dangerous to carry compromising pieces of paper—and so many morale-boosting texts were spread by word of mouth. One of the most notable features of the Occupation, however, was the combination of legality with subversiveness in a kind of writing known as contrebande.

A lot of the poems in this anthology are of this type. Contrebande poetry has two themes: one on the surface—for example, love, nature, God—to which the authorities cannot take exception, and a hidden one, which will be seen by those who have eyes to see. Aragon, one of the most notable practitioners of contrebande, likened it to mediaeval troubadour poetry, in which the poet gets away with singing of his lover in the presence of her husband. Much of the most popular poetry of the war was of this kind. Some of these poets were in the Resistance, while others were not, but all were protesting against the Germans or Vichy. This poetry, since it was published legally, is clearly different from clandestine poetry: an illegal poem, anonymous or pseudonymous, has no need to pull its punches, but contrebande has to be more subtle.

Some of the focal points for the Resistance in the southern zone were literary magazines, notably Confluences, edited by René Tavernier in Lyon, Fontaine, edited by Max-Pol Fouchet in Algiers, and Poésie, edited by Pierre Seghers at Villeneuve-lès-Avignon. Seghers in particular is a good poet in his own right, and during the war produced poetry ranging from the vituperative, through contrebande to love poetry. He had set up as his own publisher in 1938, and then, before the defeat, he edited a soldiers' poetry magazine, Poètes casqués (usually abbreviated to P.C., which means poste de commandement in military jargon). After the Armistice, this became Poésie, set up with the twin intention of promoting poetry and maintaining French resistance. As well as the review, Seghers published books of poems by some of the best-known poets of the war, and since the war he has been one of the most prolific publishers of poetry.

Publishing contrebande was fraught with risk. All three of the reviews mentioned here were threatened with closure by Vichy. Poets like Aragon and Masson eventually had to live completely in hiding and could not publish legally in France. Seghers was sought by the Germans from May 1944. In the northern zone, it was still more difficult, and one of the most resounding contrebande volumes, the 450-page Domaine français, put together by the editor of the review Messages, Jean Lescure, had to appear in Switzerland in 1943.

V THE EFFECT OF THE WAR

This brief sketch of the background to the poems is purely factual, but it is vital to realise that the war, for a French person, was not a set of dates and statistics. It was virtual famine, daily fear, perpetual distrust and confusion: who was right, the government or the ‘terrorist’ Resistance minority? The experience of the Resistance, for those seriously committed to it (as opposed to the hangers-on who joined at the time of the Liberation), was an exalting faith in the creation of a new, nobler humanity—a faith which was certainly undermined for many by the feuds and opportunism which inevitably followed the Liberation. But that faith, cemented by the danger and fear, and the experience of torture, imprisonment and the self-sacrifice of thousands of people, was a response to the depths of degradation to which humanity was showing it could sink—duplicity, self-interest, cowardice, a maniacal pursuit of prejudice, and a sick, obsessive, ingenious cruelty as degrading to torturer as to tortured. As Sartre said after the war, speaking of people under torture: ‘Il ne s'agissait pas pour eux de croire en l'homme mais de le vouloir’ (Situations, II, p. 248). That is, they had to ‘will’ man, to prove by their behaviour that there was something worth believing in man: it was impossible any longer to fall back on comforting notions like ‘basic humanity’—and still less on ethnic or cultural superiority—because French and Germans alike had shown this undreamt-of capacity for degradation. The war, for the French, was to a great extent a civil war, and the dominant question was ‘Will I get involved in this, and on which side?’

We in the 1980s have to remember two things above all. The first is that for everyone at the time, including all the poets in this anthology, history had not yet been written. Reading about the war now, we know, however vivid the account we read, that in the end, after a thousand set-backs, the Allies will win. The basic history of the Second World War is so like a classic adventure story that there is a grave danger of its becoming just that, a set of legends—The Few, El Alamein, Frenchmen derailing trains at night—with victory inevitable in the last reel. In fact, even more to the non-collaborationist French than to the British, the future had never looked blacker, with German victory seemingly certain, at least up to late 1942.

The second thing it is essential to remember is that the Second World War was not, and is not, simply a glorified football match with one side winning and the other losing. However often our televisions show us John Wayne zapping the Japs or Kenneth More the Jerries, that ‘victory’ does not cancel out the millions of people put to death for ideological reasons, nor the realization that mankind has as big a faculty for bigotry and depraved cruelty as for heroism. As some of these poets have variously said, Hitler in a sense won the war, because we are all impregnated with the evil it released.

SECOND WORLD WAR FRENCH POETRY

The sudden vogue for poetry during the Occupation was welcomed by some critics as a renouveau poétique, with poets at long last addressing themselves passionately to ordinary people instead of to an intellectual élite; others deplored it as mere poésie de circonstance. The most talked-about poets at the time were nearly all, in different ways, associated with the Resistance. Consequently, if you mention Second World War poetry to most French people today, they immediately exclaim ‘Resistance poetry’. Whatever the truth of the matter, ‘Resistance poetry’ has become firmly consecrated in popular mythology of the war, as durable and as incompletely understood in France as Dunkirk and the Battle of Britain are in the United Kingdom. Popularly, however, it is durable only as a myth, and not in its own right: for most people, even those who do not confuse war poetry with Resistance poetry, the term seems to mean patriotic propaganda in verse, an understandable aberration, useful in keeping up morale during the Occupation, but as ephemeral as the circumstances to which it refers.

These reactions raise important questions for the enjoyment and study of literature, and one function of this anthology is to enable readers to ask them in a profitable way. First, however, before suggesting what they are, one has to define war poetry.

There are many possible definitions of war poetry. For the purpose of this volume, I have chosen as war poetry those poems which, written during or immediately after the war, make reference to it or express a reaction to it. Virtually all, then, is wartime poetry; but not all wartime poetry is necessarily war poetry. Naturally, almost all poetry written at a given moment expresses a reaction to it, even if the reaction is to ignore it. If—for the sake of argument—we call this latter reaction ‘indifferent’, then the poems here have been chosen because they seem to express a ‘concerned’ reaction, which may, of course, be explicit or implicit. A poem expressing an ‘indifferent’ reaction—and there were plenty of those—will be a wartime poem, but not a war poem.

To British readers, the phrase ‘war poetry’ tends to evoke the anti-war poetry written in 1916-18 by Owen, Sassoon and others. French Second World War poetry is something very different—and different again from English Second World War poetry. The First World War English poets protested against war because of the futile slaughter of a war fought for no very clear reason other than nebulous ideas of national pride. The Second World War was a different affair. While the war-effort was largely sustained on patriotism, the enemy was much more clearly not simply another nation, but something evil: German territorial ambition was the expression of an inhuman ideology, which eventually could only be destroyed by war. English Second World War poetry, then, may mourn lost friends, describe a desert battle, or capture the atmosphere in a POW camp, but it lacks the passion of Owen's poetry, because the moral battle is taken for granted: Nazism is so self-evidently evil that propaganda and bullets unite in protest against it—what is there left for the poet to protest against?

French Second World War poetry is more complicated than the English poetry of either war, or, indeed, than First World War French poetry. In 1914, the majority of French people actually welcomed the war, because it offered a chance of revenge for the Prussian victory of 1870. Further, the fighting was largely on French soil. Consequently, while the English poets protested against the senseless slaughter of millions, many French poets wrote sabre-rattling doggerel as crude as the chauvinism it expressed. Those poets who did eventually write against the war were prevented by censorship from publishing their work, while Apollinaire, the best-known French poet of the war, practised a kind of self-censorship in his published poetry, which was neither chauvinist nor anti-war.

In considering the differences between French and English Second World War poetry, it is essential to bear in mind the fact that, although the Blitz and the V-weapons brought the war on to British soil, they did not bring the Germans. France, on the other hand, was occupied, with two important consequences. First, the French had to come to terms with the everyday presence, in the streets and shops, and often in their houses, of soldiers who were the expression of Nazi ideology. Second, the press and radio, when not the official organs of the Germans or their French collaborators, were all subject to censorship, so that all legal information regarding politics and the course of the war was essentially pro-German. Another vital factor is the widespread sympathy to aspects of Nazism which had been apparent even before the war, and which fuelled collaboration with the Germans after the defeat of 1940. Chauvinism was impossible, because the enemy was not only this German soldier sitting at the next table, but also, perhaps, the French person sitting next to him. It therefore needed effort and courage to maintain a belief that Nazism was evil. For the British, on the other hand, it was in no sense a civil war. The evil which most British people saw themselves as fighting was, in a sense, simple and at a distance. They were fighting it in the straightforward way, with guns, and, except for the conscientious objectors, there was little option but to fight it. In France, the evil was more complicated, and omnipresent—even to speak against it was to risk death. It is not surprising that the poetry written in response to these conditions is different from the English poetry of either war.

What this French poetry does share with English First World War poetry, however, is the element of urgent moral protest. To a great extent, it may be this that gives Owen greater power than Sidney Keyes, and Emmanuel more than Edmond Rostand. For good poetry always seems to be essentially resistance, a denial or negation of the way the world is. When Baudelaire says of poetry that ‘elle contredit sans cesse le fait, à peine de ne plus être’ (Curiosités esthétiques. L'Art romantique, p. 565), he is calling for use of the imagination to take us beyond what it known into what is possible. This negation of the given is not something life-denying: two of the poets in this anthology, Éluard and Ponge, are among the most joyously affirmative of French poets, but only because they deeply deny the world as it is usually seen and expressed, and create it afresh. A simple pre-war example of this is an untitled poem by Éluard which begins ‘La terre est bleue comme une orange’ (Œuvres complètes, vol. I, p. 232). The reader's reaction to this line is to see blue and orange in vivid contrast with each other, and to reject the simile as impossible. The following line is ‘Jamais une erreur les mots ne mentent pas’, which drags the reader back to reconsider his rejection. Suddenly, the phrase becomes ambiguous, instead of nonsensical. Perhaps it is a way of saying that the earth is not blue? Perhaps it is orange, in sunlight? But when does the earth go blue? At night. This implies the revolving earth, the earth as a planet—and perhaps the sun as an orange: two spherical heavenly bodies. In any case, if you want to see a blue orange, it is easy: leave it to go mouldy, and it turns a splendid blue. The reader realises that his original puzzlement did not derive only from the visual contrast, but from two linguistic factors as well. First, the word ‘comme’ has a whole range of logical possibilities, but most are omitted in any given phrase in everyday discourse. An apparent perceptual contradiction is seen as a set of linguistic problems, Éluard forcing the reader to consider the structures of analogy, the meanings of a simple conjunction, and the question of whether ‘une’ means ‘a particular’ orange or ‘any’ orange. Second, because ‘orange’ is commonly used as an adjective, this restricts the reader's reaction to the noun ‘orange’: he instantly feels that the object has got to be orange. But why not round? or blue? Note that all these possibilities arise as questions: this is how the negation of perceptual and linguistic clichés is achieved. And later in the poem, with the imagery of sunrise, the questions are confirmed as the right ones, and in that way answered: this is how the negation is affirmative, as refreshing as a splash in the blue sea or a drink of orange-juice.

This example shows how apolitical peacetime poetry protests against accepted ways of looking at things by denying the world in its relation to language. But what about war poetry? It might be thought that, while poetry is a denial of the status quo, a poem protesting against, say, an invader, is no different from a political tract. In fact, the same is as true, in essence, of the passionate moral protest of war poetry as of the Éluard poem. A poem, to a far greater extent than a tract, actually draws attention to the relation between language and what it denotes. Sometimes it does this explicitly, but usually implicitly. The commonest ways of doing it are through imagery, syntactic deformation or ambiguity, and manipulation of sound and rhythm. Linguistic clichés are denied along with perceptual clichés, and language and world are renewed in terms of one another. The political tract, taking for granted the relation between the words and what they denote, preaches almost exclusively to the converted. A comparison of a tract with a politically orientated war poem will make the difference clear.

Here is a Communist tract—not because Communist tracts are any more crass than those of other parties, but because many of the best poets in this volume were Communists at the time: the reader will find it very instructive to contrast their poetry with the tract. This one is from late 1939, and refers to Armand Pillot, MP for the eighteenth arrondissement of Paris, who had broken with the party after the Soviet invasion of Finland (the italics are mine):

C'est au moment où, seul, le Parti Communiste lutte courageusement contre les fauteurs de guerre et la réaction, que Pillot abandonne sa place dans le combat que mènent les travailleurs contre les 15٪, contre la vie chère, contre les conditions ignobles de travail que veulent leur imposer les gros capitalistes fauteurs de guerre.

(…)

Pour cacher sa peur de la répression, Pillot dit qu' ‘il n'a pas compris les événements de Finlande’. Il n'a pas compris que l'U.R.S.S., patrie des travailleurs du monde entier, sauvegardait la paix du monde en signant la série de pactes avec les pays baltes. Pillot n'a pas compris que l'U.R.S.S. obligeait le gouvernement fantôme de Tanner à céder le pas à l'armée et au gouvernement populaires de Kuusinen. Et qu'ainsi l'U.R.S.S. garantissait aussi ses frontières au moment où tous les pays capitalistes conspirent contre les grand Pays des Soviets avec à sa tête le génial Staline, continuateur de Lénine.

Quelle différence entre la conduite de ce rénégat et la courageuse attitude de Maurice Thorez qui, malgré la répression la plus impitoyable, reste à son poste de combat de soldat du Peuple.

(…)

Les travailleurs du XVIIIème, ardents combattants de la lutte anti-fasciste et de Juin 36, héritiers des Communards de 71, chasseront celui qui renie tout ce passé et qui ne saurait conduire leur action pour la défense de leur pain, pour les libertés démocratiques, contre la guerre impérialiste.¹

Most of the fears which underlie this tract were very well founded, but the text itself is yet another permutation of classic clichés (italicised here) and of traditional demagogic devices like cumulative repetition (‘contre’ three times, ‘n'a pas compris’ three times, ‘pour … pour. … contre’), overstatement (‘seul’, ‘monde entier’, ‘tous les pays capitalistes’), or rhetorical use of adjective before noun (‘le génial Staline’, ‘la courageuse attitude’). Also typical of the style is the invocation of glorious precursors (‘Communards de 71’), which is meant to confer on the present struggle the exemplary status of a precedent which has become legendary.

These clichés will have made no converts. They are a rallying-cry, a comforting and rousing reinforcement of the most cherished ideas of a party under great pressure. Now compare them with the last two stanzas of a poem from this anthology, Seghers' ‘Octobre 41’, which refers to the execution of the hostages at Châteaubriant and Bordeaux:

Ils ressusciteront vêtus de feu dans nos écoles
Arrachés aux bras de leurs enfants ils entendront
Avec la guerre, l'exil et la fausse parole
                                        D'autres enfants dire leurs noms
Alors ils renaîtront à la fin de ce calvaire
Malgré l'Octobre vert qui vit cent corps se plier
Aux côtés de la Jeanne au visage de fer
                                        Née de leur sang de fusillés.

Like the tract, these lines are a rallying-cry, a consoling affirmation of the age-old idea that dead martyrs will rise again, in the minds of the living. Like the tract, they invoke a legendary example, that of Joan of Arc, the French patriot par excellence. And they, too, use rhetorical repetition, with the three future tenses. Yet each of these devices is used quite differently in the poem, which differs fundamentally from the tract.

One of the simplest features of the poem is that most of the long lines have thirteen syllables, whereas traditional verse has twelve (see below, p. 34). The reader does not, of course, sit counting syllables as the poem is read, but to the French ear, familiar with traditional verse, the effect is inescapably one of a slightly clumsy imbalance, as if the speaker's emotion is so great that it cannot quite be fitted into an orthodox mould. The imbalance contrasts with the regular rhyme scheme, further drawing attention to this struggle to give words to the emotion. The reader is therefore made aware of the very processes of expression, which becomes part of what is expressed—a crucial difference between poem and tract. This theme is underlined by the reference to ‘la fausse parole’: the abuse of language by Vichy and the Germans contrasts with the use of language in the poem to create a new legend, the martyrs becoming a counter-myth to the myths fostered by Fascism. This process is explicit in the poem, whereas in the tract the parallel with the 1871 Commune is taken for granted. The very use made of rhymes, while straightforward, is a reminder that sound and meaning in language are interdependent. Having ‘écoles’ rhyme with ‘parole’ reinforces the theme that truth is language and legend, and so does the phonetic linking of the predictions of rebirth with the speaking of the martyrs' names, in ‘ressusciteront … entendront … noms … renaîtront’. These rhymes are emphasized rhythmically, because there is a pause after each one, and rhythm likewise plays a role in the revitalizing of the cliché ‘calvaire’ through its position in the rhyming chain ‘guerre … calvaire … vert … fer’. It is, however, ‘l'Octobre vert’ that does most of the work here. Earlier in the poem there is a reference to ‘Octobre, quand la vendange est faite dans le sang’: the unsurprising reference to autumn as a time of death, and the implied blood-red vine leaves and wine, contrast strongly with the surprising spring-like green October. In fact, the green is an allusion to the colour of the German army uniform. The dominant sound of ‘guerre’, ‘calvaire’ and ‘vert’ then culminates in ‘fer’, Jeanne's grim, iron countenance throwing into relief the intangible spirituality of this paradoxical birth. Because the last line is short and rhymes with ‘plier’, it points up the contrast between spiritual birth and the bodily finality of ‘qui vit cent corps se plier’ (instead of, say, ‘cent hommes mourir’), while the internal rhyme of ‘Née’ and ‘fusillés’ heightens the contrast still further. The new Jeanne—that is, a revitalized and purified France—is born as the minds of schoolchildren.

More could be said about these eight lines, but this should be enough to show the difference between the poem and the tract: whereas the tract simply takes existing linguistic usages for granted, in an attempt to reinforce the political doctrine, the poem actually presents the episode of the executed hostages in part as a challenge to expression, and is a response to that challenge. Although this example makes more or less explicit reference to it, this aspect of poetry is more usually implicit, in the relatively obtrusive nature of the language. It does indeed seem to be a feature of good poetry that, whatever else it communicates, it also conveys the struggle against inarticulateness—a gasp of ecstasy or a groan of misery may be very heartfelt, but they are even less inadequate as communication than as expression.

Poetry, then, contrasts with the political tract in so far as the tract, however subversive, exploits existing linguistic usage. Virtually all non-poetic political discourse is linguistically conservative. Poetry is more completely subversive, but its political effects may be very indirect or long term. However, although political poetry does run the risk of confirming received ideas, it does not have to do so. Indeed, for many of the poets in this anthology, the basic political struggle was itself a struggle to defend language. Philosophically, this is because language is the essential means by which man grasps the world and himself. During the Occupation, this became clear in the simplest ways, in the pressure put on single words. This is what Seghers calls ‘la fausse parole’ in ‘Octobre 41’. For example, in the official view, liberté meant freedom to join in the Fascist crusade against Bolshevism; and to derail a German ammunition train was to commit a terrorist crime against freedom. The words France and patrie meant one thing to Vichy, and another to those who refused to collaborate. This is the burden of Aragon's anonymous preface to L'Honneur des poètes II. Europe, which he begins by linking Resistance poetry with that of the apolitical Symbolist Mallarmé:

De tout temps, ce fut la mission des poètes, comme l'un d'entre eux un jour l'a définie, que de Donner un sens plus pur aux mots de la tribu.

Il est bien que les poètes français aient su le faire, n'aient pas démissionné aux heures les plus sombres quand précisément le langage était détourné de son cours, les mots étaient dénaturés, pervertis par ces usurpateurs qui s'étaient emparés du vocable France lui-même …²

Jacques Gaucheron, in La Poésie, la Résistance, makes another simple, but vital point: at a time when the Germans seemed to have deprived the French people of practically everything, the French language itself was one of the most precious assets they had left: ‘Parler français en présence d'Allemands qui ne comprennent rien est un plaisir. … Il suffit d'aller jusqu'au langage poétique, au point où ce qu'il y a de plus riche dans la langue n'est pas susceptible d'apprentissage, pour que l'expression poétique soit ressentie comme une parcelle de patrie’ (p. 122). So while poetry may always be a form of resistance to the status quo, this became much more obvious through the circumstances of the Occupation than it often is in peacetime.

The relation between poetry and the circumstances in which it is written is the really important question raised by this poetry. The argument raged during and after the war, and has never died down. Many critics condemn war poetry as ‘poetry of circumstance’, and therefore ephemeral: comprehensible only to one part of one generation, it is not ‘eternal’, not real poetry. It is striking that this opinion was sometimes expressed even in some of the journals most actively opposed to collaboration.³ ‘Poetry of circumstance’ used to mean simply poetry written to mark public events, like the Queen Mother's birthday, but, as used by these critics, the phrase means poetry which refers to social or political situations or events. ‘Eternal’ poetry is about things like love or death or nature, which are supposed to be always and everywhere the same and to elicit feelings which are accessible to introspection.

The most spectacular recent variant of this emphasis on introspection had been Surrealism, the dominant poetic movement of the inter-war period. It is notable that one of the most violent attacks on the so-called Resistance poets, Le Déshonneur des poètes, was the work of that most Surrealist of Surrealists, Benjamin Péret. Surrealism was strongly influenced by Freud's theory of the unconscious. Its goal was total revolution, through each individual's liberation from social, moral, political and aesthetic constraints. This was to be achieved by releasing from the unconscious all suppressed desire. The most extreme ‘literary’ means of doing this was automatic writing, in which words and phrases were written down as they welled up into the mind, without being subjected to any criticism or sifting. In the best Surrealism, the practice was different from the theory, and the aim was after all social subversion. Even so, the private imagery and the fierce rejection of constraint, including party political loyalty, do very often make this poetry look as if it was written in an ivory tower, by and for members of a middle-class intellectual élite uncaring of ‘circumstances’.

The poets in this anthology, then, to a considerable extent represent a ‘lost’ generation, squeezed out of the reckoning by a combination of the élitist self-trumpeting of Surrealism and a woolly-minded, but equally élitist, suspicion that war poetry is poetry of circumstance, and that poetry of circumstance may be too limited in scope, or too easy, or too obscure, to be worth studying. Certainly, most war poetry is bad poetry. But open any literary magazine or any collection of poetry, and you find that most poetry is bad poetry anyway. Indeed, given the circumstances of deprivation, uncertainty and fear, it is perhaps amazing that so much Second World War French poetry should be so good. Clearly, the notion of ‘circumstance’ in this debate contains some confusion, which it is essential to disperse if the poetry is to be seen in anything like a just perspective.

As an example of a poem of circumstance in the traditional sense, here is Sir John Betjeman's poem for the Queen Mother on her eightieth birthday:

We are your people
Millions of us greet you
On this your birthday
Mother of our Queen.
Waves of good will go
Racing out to meet you
You who in peace and war
Our faithful friend have been.
You who have known the sadness of bereavement
The joyfulness of family jokes
And times when trust is tried,
Great was the day for our United Kingdoms
And God bless the Duke of York
Who chose you as his bride.(4)

If this is a poem at all, it must be as bad as any in English—not however, because it is a poem of circumstance, but because it looks like something written to order, in deference to the social and linguistic status quo, with no emotional or intellectual involvement on the part of the writer: world and language are not questioned in terms of one another.

As poems of circumstances in the current sense, one could take any of the poems in this anthology which refer to the war. Now if you know nothing about the Queen Mother or the war, your understanding of these poems will be limited. But if you know nothing about birch trees, or have never been in love, a poem about a birch tree or a lover will mean little to you. Birch trees and lovers are circumstances, like German soldiers or public celebrations. Circumstances are things around one, and a poem about a birch tree or a lover is a poem of circumstance, since it is a response to an external stimulus. Further, a poem about a birch tree written in 1930 is as much an expression of the circumstances of peace as a poem written about an execution in 1942 is an expression of the circumstances of war; and both—like a poem about a birch tree written in 1942—are as much expressions of the poet as they are of the circumstances. This is perhaps the reason why the question of poetry of circumstance has been so much discussed in the middle of the twentieth century: it is generally recognized that the mind only functions in response to things outside it, that feelings are not accessible to introspection, even the most intimate self-awareness only being possible in terms of things other than the self—that is, circumstances.

In this respect, it is noteworthy that some of the most politically committed poets in the anthology—for example, Aragon, Éluard or Masson—present the Occupation and intimate experience like sexual love in terms of one another. Indeed, it has to be said that the best Surrealist poetry of Breton (who does not figure in the anthology), Aragon, Desnos and Éluard implies this dialectic of circumstances and self. Éluard, in particular, was never a very orthodox Surrealist, because his poetry, however startling or fragmentary the imagery may sometimes be, more often seems to explore the relation between sensation and imagination than to plunge into the unconscious. Breton, the leader of the movement, no doubt had his own reasons for writing virtually no war poetry and leaving France in 1941; but it is not altogether surprising that the others should have turned to a less private poetry, more accessible to ordinary people. Certainly, most of the poets of the ‘lost’ generation pursue self-knowledge not through introspection but through investigating sensation—that is, the circumstances in which they experience emotion, whether this be love, or anger at oppression, or sorrow at the death of a comrade, or exultation on being released from captivity. One of the characteristics of the renouveau poétique of the war was that the poets wanted their work to be à hauteur d'homme, a term laughed at then and since by those who think that it simply means poetry which can be read widely, and that such poetry must be inferior. But poetry which is easy to approach does not have to be inferior. In any case, look at the poems in this anthology: some are immediately accessible, while others present an intellectual challenge; but they are all poésie à hauteur d'homme, because they express an emotional experience of the interdependence of self, language and circumstances, and do not ignore or deny this interdependence.

It is not, then, so much a question of whether the poet pays attention to circumstances or not, as of what circumstances are to the forefront of his emotional and intellectual attention at a given moment. In peacetime, the outside world changes relatively slowly, so the circumstances in terms of which a poet expresses his love may be little different from one generation to another. In the sunlit foliage of a tree, he may see his lover's hair, and a hundred years later we have little difficulty drawing analogies with our own experience of trees, sunshine and girls' hair. But the German Occupation changed the outside world drastically, so that even the most private feelings were likely to involve public affairs. With no food in the shops, with your best friends imprisoned or shot, with enemy soldiers and informers everywhere, you are as likely to be struck by the notices of executions pinned to the tree trunks as by the sunlight in the leaves. Poems like Desnos' ‘Dans l'allée …’ or Emmanuel's ‘Cinq heures attachés …’ are essentially neither more nor less poems of circumstance than Ronsard's ‘Mignonne, allons voir si la rose …’ or Baudelaire's ‘Avec ses vêtements …’. True, if you do not know that there were twelve in a firing-squad, or that condemned résistants had been left tied to a stake before being shot, the Desnos and Emmanuel poems will be puzzling, just as Seghers' phrase ‘Octobre vert’ is puzzling if you do not know the colour of the German army uniform. But Ronsard's poem is odd if you do not know that sixteenth-century roses were as delicate and short-lived as dog-roses; Baudelaire's poem makes better sense if you know that dresses in the 1850s were ankle-length; and no matter how much you know about the Occupation, Ponge's ‘Le platane’ will mean little to you if you do not know what a plane tree is like.

An important corollary of this is that the reader's circumstances are as important to the meaning of a poem as the poet's. The reader of the 1980s, who has seen photographs taken from space showing the earth as a blue planet, is more likely than the reader of the 1930s to see Éluard's blue earth as an orange-shaped globe! But while it is true that the short-lived circumstances of the war make aspects of the war poetry obscure to us today, that does not in itself make it ephemeral, and is not a reason for not reading it. Ronsard and Baudelaire can be read with pleasure by those who know little about the linguistic and social conventions of the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, but an annotated edition permits a different reading. Similarly, nearly all the poems in this anthology are accessible to a reader knowing nothing of the war, but the Introduction and Notes, changing the circumstances in which he reads the texts, will affect their meaning for him. Some of the best examples are the sonnets of Jean Cassou. These are fine poems in their own right, but their meaning may change when the reader learns that they were composed in prison; and when he then learns that Cassou made practically no intentional references to his imprisonment in these sonnets, their meaning may change again.

As may be clear by now, the criticism that this war poetry is poetry of circumstance usually hides a quite different criticism. Because so many poems of circumstance in the traditional sense are as bad as Betjeman's, it seems to be assumed that any poetry referring to social or political circumstances must also be written to order, and therefore ‘committed’, and therefore bad. By ‘committed’ poetry is meant poetry promoting a social or political cause, like the monarchy, or revolution, or liberation from Fascism. The mistake is to make an illogical series of assumptions: some war poetry is Resistance poetry, and some Resistance poetry is committed in this sense, so all Resistance poetry must be committed; so all war poetry must be committed. But the term ‘Resistance poetry’ is a vague one. Does it mean poetry about the Resistance, or poetry exhorting the reader to join the Resistance, or just poetry written by members of the Resistance? And while all poetry may be resistance, with a small ‘r’, half an hour's browsing in this anthology is enough to show that not all war poetry is Resistance poetry, with a capital ‘R’, in any of these three senses.

One has nevertheless to come to terms with the fact that there is no good poetry from the war years which was written by those with Fascist or vichyste sympathies. While poetry was being published in unprecedented quantities, the collaborationist weeklies and monthlies hardly ever printed poems, although they do abound in sarcastic references to the ‘poètes-poètes’ who have proliferated since 1940. One example of a poet who did find favour is Maurice Fombeure, of whose À dos d'oiseau M. Richard wrote, in La Révolution nationale for 19.12.42: ‘Il y a plus de motifs d' espoirs français dans un livre comme celui-ci, plus de raisons d'optimisme que dans tous les discours des rhéteurs … Je retrouve, intactes, toutes les cordes de la voix de notre race dans celles de la lyre de Fombeure.’ It is understandable that Fombeure's simple vignettes of a rustic life and homespun Christianity should have appealed to a Vichyste critic, when the parrotcry was that poetry should once more be ‘nationale et traditionnelle’; and it is true that Fombeure, in his preface to Bérimont's Lyre à feu, argued that poets should go on writing as if there were no war, on the grounds that poetry is a private affair and has nothing to do with politics. But the sympathies of both Fombeure and Bérimont were unambiguously with the Resistance. Similarly, one looks in vain for collaborationist poetry in the wartime La Nouvelle Revue française, the prestigious literary monthly, whose editor, from 1941, was the Fascist Pierre Drieu la Rochelle. A variety of poets published under Drieu at first, but so far from the review being fed by collaborationist poetry, it folded up in 1943 for lack of contributions of any kind.

Without thorough study, it would be rash to suggest why collaboration should have produced virtually no poetry, and resistance or ‘indifference’ so much. Certainly, poets like Aragon and Masson were hostile to ‘indifferent’ poetry (in the sense defined above, p. 11), on the grounds that anything that did not promote the Resistance cause was in effect inimical to it, but one is hard put to it to find anything like explicit collaborationist poetry. The only collaborator of any note who wrote poetry seems to have been Robert Brasillach, the Fascist editor, for most of the war, of the anti-Semitic weekly Je suis partout. Brasillach's poetry perhaps gives a clue as to why there should have been so little collaborationist poetry. He published a collection in 1944, entitled Poèmes, which consists of poems written both before and during the war. It therefore encompasses the experience of phoney war, defeat, imprisonment in a POW camp, repatriation to resume the crusade against Jewry, and triumphant collaboration. Yet the extraordinary thing is this: while the Fascist ideology made a cult of strength, virility and suppression of the weak, and while French collaborationists were committed to the energetic creation of an Ordre nouveau in Europe, Brasillach's poetry, pre-war and wartime alike, is uniformly elegant, unoriginal, elegiac and completely toothless, consistently giving off an atmosphere of nostalgia and resignation.

Brasillach was arrested after the Liberation, and kept in Fresnes gaol until his trial and execution for treason. The poetry he wrote in Fresnes is collected in Poèmes de Fresnes: these have the same tone as the others, with an occasional bleat that if the other side had won, things would have been different. Now, it is true that if the Germans had won the war, history would have been written differently: the ‘crusade for civilisation against Bolshevism’ would have been successful, and the ‘Judeo-Communist terrorists’ of the Resistance would have been brought to ‘justice’. Nevertheless, the fact remains that the losers—even those imprisoned in Fresnes or in fear for their lives—would have left an inspiring corpus of resilient, life-affirming, even ebullient poetry (see the anthology), while all the winners could have offered would have been Brasillach's flabby threnodies. Given the shortage of space here, it would have been perverse to include a selection of Brasillach's work, when so many better poets have had to be left out; but the contrast between his poetry and that chosen here, together with its freak status as the only instance of remotely collaborationist poetry, is extremely interesting, and perhaps gives support to the idea that good poetry is by definition protest and resistance, and cannot thrive on resignation or acceptance of the status quo.

In this respect, the case of Aragon—who was in the Resistance—is also important evidence. Ever since 1940, Aragon has waged a campaign for a ‘national’ poetry, returning to traditional popular forms so that it would be accessible to everybody. However, while this poetry is in this sense retrograde, he has an allied concern which theoretically prevents it being conservative, as the ‘national and traditional’ poetry dear to Vichy was presumably supposed to be. As he wrote in the preface to Les Yeux d'Elsa, a contrebande volume published in 1942, ‘il n'y a poésie qu'autant qu'il y a méditation sur le langage, et à chaque pas réinvention de ce langage’. Aragon's poetry is very uneven in quality; the selection in this anthology probably suggests that the more it subverts linguistic usage, the more successful it is: like all good poets, and unlike Brasillach, Aragon at his best denies or resists the world in its relation to language.

Whatever meaning one gives to the term ‘Resistance poetry’, and however illogical the assumption that it is ‘committed’ poetry or its confusion with war poetry, there is a further question: why should poetry not be politically committed, anyway? The answer to this question frequently contains another confusion, between hostility to propaganda poetry and hostility to the cause for which a given poem is thought to be propaganda.

There are senses in which all literature can be said to be propaganda, and some propaganda has features which can also be found in poetry. But let us—for the sake of argument—use the generally accepted view of propaganda, and say that it attempts systematically to implant a political or social doctrine in people's minds. The tract quoted above is an example of propaganda. In so far as poetry is negation of the world in its relation to language, it is incompatible with propaganda, which depends on and reinforces political and linguistic clichés. However, as we have seen, different circumstances are likely to elicit different sorts of subject-matter in poetry. It would be surprising if, in the conditions of the Occupation, poetry hostile to Nazism had not moved some way along the spectrum of expression towards propaganda. For although the political situation was in some ways as complicated as it had been before the war, the really basic option was a simple one—whether to resist or not. Vichy repeatedly, and fruitlessly, called for political unity in the National Revolution—but it was the Resistance, a heterogeneous collection of beliefs, which for four years achieved the impossible, with Catholic and Communist, and many in between, united in a single struggle.

Political truth, then, was simple for the Resistance, which is why the Communist Aragon and the Catholic Emmanuel could both write poetry described as Resistance poetry. What lay behind much criticism of this ‘commitment’ was the fear that it was in fact a commitment to a Communist takeover after the war. Inevitably, many who had shared in the struggle against the Nazis and admired, say, Aragon's war poetry, were, after the Liberation—when circumstances changed and the struggle was a different one—unable to accept the principles typified in these lines from his ‘Chanson du sixième hiver’.

Rien n'est tout à fait à sa place
Le cœur est encore en prison
Les enfants ont des mains de glace
Le toit n'est pas sur la maison
Rien n'est tout à fait à sa place
Le peuple ne commande pas.(5)

Aragon was not surprisingly constantly vilified in the collaborationist press because of his politics; others, like Emmanuel, who were not Communists, were still given that label. But if, for many people, war poetry was ‘Communist poetry’, the most widespread criticism of it, certainly since the war, and even at the time, has been that it is chauvinist doggerel, a modern version of the revanchist patriotic songs of Paul Déroulède (1846-1914).

The best way of judging this criticism is to look at an example of Déroulède's work. Here is an excerpt from one of his most famous poems, ‘Le Clairon’:

L'air est pur, la route est large,
Le Clairon sonne la charge,
Les Zouaves vont chantant
Et là-haut sur la colline,
Dans la forêt qui domine,
Le Prussien les attend.
(…)
À la première décharge,
Le Clairon sonnant la charge,
Tombe frappé sans recours;
Mais, par un effort suprême,
Menant le combat quand même
Le Clairon sonne toujours.
(…)
Puis, dans la forêt pressée,
Voyant la charge lancée,
Et les Zouaves bondir,
Alors le Clairon s'arrête
Sa dernière tâche est faite,
Il achève de mourir.(6)

Comparing this with the poems in the anthology will make it easy to see how absurd the charge of chauvinism is. Certainly, France figures by name in many of the poems: French heroes, the French Revolution, the French countryside, French culture, the French language, all are rallying-points for national pride. The concept of national pride is of course a hazy one, and can only mean anything in terms of the individual's experience of his relation to society. In the exceptional circumstances of invasion and occupation, many people's moral and political ideals, which are social ideals, not surprisingly crystallized round the brutal changes forced on their society by the invader. And, as we have seen, the phenomenon of collaboration meant that the meaning of the very word France was not as self-evident as it had been to people like Déroulède. The common cause in this war poetry was in fact not France, but Man. A Communist—to take one extreme—will think that man's best chance of moral regeneration lies in creating a socialist society. No wonder that French Communists, seeing the human degradation visited on the French by Fascism, concentrated their fight for a new humanity on France. A Catholic—to take the other extreme—may think that man's best chance of moral regeneration lies in a return to Christianity: French Catholics, too, however, concentrated their struggle on what they saw as a devilish ideology imposed on France by foreign military force. But, whether it was conceived politically or religiously, the moral regeneration was the end, and the patriotism the means. To use Sartre's term (see above, p. 9), all the poets in this volume, including those who invoke la patrie, are concerned to ‘will’ man, in full awareness that he cannot any longer be believed in or relied on, but has to be created, constantly, through his own efforts.

This view of man lays stress on circumstances: at any given moment a person is what he is in terms of the circumstances around him. It is no doubt in so far as it expresses this truth about human beings that the war poetry is ‘eternal’, even though the circumstances in which it was written have disappeared. Indeed, very often the universality has only become fully clear because the circumstances have changed. (This is something that has to be said in defence of those who, at the time, condemned this poetry as ephemeral: circumstances in the 1980s make it easier to see its ‘eternal’ quality than they did in the 1940s.) The various poems about Gabriel Péri are a good example (see Aragon's ‘Ballade de celui qui chanta dans les supplices’ and Notes). Péri was a Communist MP before the war. If you let this fact close your mind to the poems, because you are not a Communist, you throw the baby out with the bathwater. What makes each of these very different poems interesting is the theme of how the memory of a dead person plays an inspiring part in the present. This was as true when they were written as it is now: they are poems about the phenomenon of circumstance as much as they are ‘poems of circumstance’. Because circumstances have changed since the Occupation, their impact will not be the same as it was then (although it may be as great), but that is an essential part of their themes. The same is true of Guillevic's ‘Vercors’ or Tardieu's ‘Oradour’, and it is as true of Auden's ‘August 1968’ or MacDiarmid's ‘The skeleton of the future’ as it is of Ronsard's ‘Mignonne, allons voir …’ or Agrippa d'Aubigné's ‘Jugement’, which was written in the early seventeenth century, and reprinted by Seghers in 1941 because of its contemporary relevance. We have not taken part in these conflicts or loved Marie, but we have been in love, remembered the dead, and hated tyranny in Chile and Kampuchea and Afghanistan and South Africa. The essence of the poems is not to tell us about the circumstances in which they were written, but, through expressing one person's passionate experience of it, to remind us about our relation to circumstance. As Éluard says in ‘Faire vivre’: ‘Ceci est de tous les temps.’

Notes

1. The tract is reproduced in Guérin, A. La Résistance, Paris, Livre Club Diderot, 5 vols. (1973-76), vol. I, p. 326.

2. Quoted in Seghers, P. La Résistance et ses poètes, pp. 326-7.

3. See e.g. Henri Hell's ‘Examen des revues’ in Fontaine, 24 (1942), pp. 486-8.

4. Printed in The Times, 4.8.80, p. 2.

5. In Les Lettres françaises, 17.2.45, p. 3. Reprinted in Le Musée Grévin. Les Poissons noirs et quelques poèmes inédits.

6. Quoted from Dillaz, S. La Chanson française de contestation. Paris, Seghers, 1973, pp. 124-5.