Maxine Hong Kingston proposes that “it is possible for people to come out of war and learn peace” (vi), and it is from this hopeful assertion that Janis Stout takes the title of her new study. Her thesis is that the two world wars provoked artists of all kinds to produce material that communicated their dismay at the occurrence and recurrence of global war. As Stout comments, despite this surge of “grieving” antiwar art, military conflict remains a dominant aspect of what is still termed (with increasing inaccuracy) the postwar world, which has signally failed to “learn peace.”
The study has a logical structure—responses to war as it was being fought, followed by retrospective reactions—and includes discussion of the jingoistic poets of the Great War period, the soldier-poets and women poets who lamented the conflict, and the war artists who captured its horror visually, as well as the poetry, music, and art of postwar memorialization. It also chronicles the ways in which poetry and popular song responded to the recommencement of global conflict and closes with a chapter devoted to Benjamin Britten's War Requiem. Copyright issues mean that many published analyses of poetry suffer from a lack of examples of the poetry itself; by contrast, Stout offers many extended quotations from the poetry of the period, presenting a varied and interesting selection of texts.
Attempting a single-volume analysis of the enormous number of cultural responses made to so vast a subject as two world wars carries certain risks, and this study is not without its limitations. One significant issue is uneven coverage: while British and American poetry is well represented and is, admittedly, the study's main concern, the discussion of other art forms suffers from paucity of material: painting is represented principally by Paul Nash, sculpture by Käth Kollwitz, music by Britten and Charles Ives, and popular song by a few examples from the 1940s. Surprisingly, cinema and the novel barely feature at all. The complete absence of key war poets such as David Jones, Keith Douglas, or Alun Lewis is also striking. Although it is inevitable that any survey will have its necessary omissions, the lack of any commentary on these writers (especially given the space devoted to songwriters such as Irving Berlin and Paul Simon) is disappointing.
There is, too, an unexplained imbalance in the coverage of poetry: certain poets, understandably, receive substantial discussion (Sassoon, Owen), and considerable space is devoted to more unusual choices (e. e. cummings, Louis Simpson, and Wallace Stevens). While discussion of the former is surely inescapable in any study of this sort, and exploration of the latter may widen usefully our understanding of what “war poetry” might be, some uncertainty remains as to why a poet like H.D., for example, should be dealt with in a brief discussion composed mostly of quotation, accompanied by an apology for “necessary” brevity (173). Although Stout defends the validity of work by women poets, inequities such as this, which seem to particularly affect the discussion of female writers, somewhat undermine her otherwise convincing claim that the inescapable character of modern war meant that all artists (male or female, soldier or civilian) are entitled have their work received as credible and important.
Vivid as the poetry is, the extensive quotations are not always accompanied by critical commentary; Stout often notes—sometimes with caustic disparagement—other critics’ responses to the work but is also content at times to let the quotations from the poetry speak for themselves. So, for example, Stout notes that Philip Larkin composes war poetry in 1960 (“MCMXIV”) but does not consider why he writes about the First rather than the Second World War; she makes an interesting point about the credibility afforded the war poetry of e. e. cummings, who did not fight but drove an ambulance in the war zone, compared with the dismissal of poetry by women who undertook exactly the same job, but she does not offer an explanation; she claims that Auden's “September 1, 1939” “foreshadow[s] the World Trade Center” (226) but does not clarify what is meant by this: the events of 9/11, presumably, but in what sense?
On another level, the study is undermined by some recurrent faults, including Stout's propensity to use “English” as a synonym for “British”: for example, “the heroism of England's soldiers” (25); the film archives of “England, France, India, Japan” (192); and “British war losses” created a “culture of grieving” in “England” (xii). The study also tends to repeat facts unnecessarily: the “stand to” practice in trench warfare is explained three times, as is Sassoon's decision to return to the front to support his regiment despite his denunciation of the war itself. Important details are sometimes missing: repeated references to a photograph of a “child on fire with napalm” (224) fail to credit Nick Ut's 1972 image of the young Kim Phuc, burned but not on fire, in Vietnam. Errors in spelling and quotation (a MacNeice poem is quoted as “good for flying” and “great for flying” in the same paragraph [113]; only the former is correct) and instances in which the prose inexplicably breaks down into a list or series of single-sentence paragraphs undermine overall coherence and reliability.
Stout's study offers a useful synthesis of research in the field of war poetry and includes an extensive bibliography that will facilitate further investigation in the many specialized areas it touches on. The general reader will find Coming Out of War a clear and engaging introduction to the subject, but ultimately the study struggles under the weight of its own remit. It is perhaps most useful as a kind of critical anthology of poetic responses to war, since it cannot hope to be the definitive volume on the huge subject that its title encompasses.
