P. S. Mrs Maugery lent me a book last week. It’s called The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935. They let a man named Yeats make the choosings. They shouldn’t have. Who is he—and what does he know about verse?
I hunted all through that book for poems by Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. There weren’t any—not one, And do you know why not? Because this Mr Yeats said—he said, ‘I deliberately chose NOT to include any poems from World War 1. I have a distaste for them. Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.’
Passive Suffering? Passive Suffering! I could have hit him. What ailed the man? Lieutenant Owen, he wrote a line, ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.’ What’s passive about that, I’d like to know? That’s exactly how they do die. I saw it with my own eyes, and I say to hell with Mr Yeats.
(Mary Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrows "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society")
I hunted all through that book for poems by Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. There weren’t any—not one, And do you know why not? Because this Mr Yeats said—he said, ‘I deliberately chose NOT to include any poems from World War 1. I have a distaste for them. Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry.’
Passive Suffering? Passive Suffering! I could have hit him. What ailed the man? Lieutenant Owen, he wrote a line, ‘What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns.’ What’s passive about that, I’d like to know? That’s exactly how they do die. I saw it with my own eyes, and I say to hell with Mr Yeats.
(Mary Ann Shaffer, Annie Barrows "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society")
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