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Throughout history, poets have expressed contradictory ideas about their roles in wartime and postwar reflections. To acknowledge Shelley's notion that poets are the“unacknowledged legislators of the world,”Harriet Monroe once wrote:“What is the fundamental, the essential and psychological cause of war?…The feeling that war is beautiful still lingers in men's hearts, a feeling founded on world-old savageries—love of power, of torture, of murder,love of big stakes in a big game.”She continued:“This feeling must be destroyed, as it was created, through the imagination. It is work for a poet.” [1]
The critical anthology acknowledges Harriet Monroe's judgment of war as an insatiable“love of power, of torture, of murder, love of big stakes in a big game”, leading to such a logical argument that war and especially that glorification of war can be regarded as“cultural pathology”and war poetry performs a fundamental mission of a“cultural critique”or“cultural therapy”. If literature is a textually transmitted virus, then war as a cultural virus must be historically, politically, culturally or socially toxic. To this extent, war indicates a system of such a historical, political and cultural pathology.
As a scientific study of the nature of a disease and its causes, processes, development,and consequences, the scientific terminology“pathology”often deals with the structural and functional changes in abnormal physical and biological conditions, thus also called“pathobiology”. It is here used as a metaphor for cultural studies in terms of the pathology of our shared ideas, values and behaviors that have constituted a communal or collective culture. In addition, pathology also conceives a broader meaning in the sciences of the study of disorders, not specifically in such a discipline as psychology, which is termed as“psychopathology,”or simply“pathology,”indicating disorders within its domain (mental,emotional and behavioral) to be forms of“illness”or“disease.”When it is appropriated in the field of the study of collective disorders in the domain of culture, it can thus be termed as“cultural pathology”and“patho-culturology.”Therefore, the terminology“cultural pathology”here basically refers to“communal”or“social”psychoses or neuroses as represented in war and war writing.
As the system of shared beliefs, values, customs, behaviors, and artifacts transmitted from generation to generation through acquisition or learning, the complex whole of culture has been incessantly contaminated by the dominant ideology that serves the very interests of a particular class at a particular time in history, and with its dominant discourse of power, its“true”but“false”consciousness, or its“imaginary relation to the real conditions of existence”,it has become merely an instrument of social reproduction or social control. It is such a“lived”or“perceived”culture thus contaminated and transformed by the dominant ideology that is pathological in nature but that humans have acquired and used it to cope with the world. Thus,“cultural pathology”is proposed as a constructive approach to the study of culture in general and as an interdisciplinary study of literature and war in particular. Such a cultural pathology of war covers four categories of pathological cultures: 1) those“cultures”that disable the natural subject's physical body; 2) those that cripple the natural subject's mode of thinking or psychological wellbeing; 3) those that drag the social development into long terms of inertia and stagnancy; 4) and finally, those that plunge the whole community into a state of insanity and devastation.
Regarding genealogy, a history-toxic culture of war, concerning the reproduction of power,depends on the historical genealogy as a legitimating force. Culture is that“abode”that power is frequently exercised apart from any changes of the regimes, or power has always corrupted culture through historical genealogy. In this light, the genealogy of British and American war poetry has transmitted a diseased conception of war and at the same time a constant therapy of those“beautiful feelings”about war, especially in the modern and contemporary antiwar movements, in those poetic traditions that have questioned the legitimacy of the state,criticized the glorification of nationalism as“an imagined community”and worshipped the dominant power at all manipulating levels.
Canonization, or canon formation, is an important category for the present critical anthology. Representational exclusion has served as a basic organizing principle for all war poetry anthologies. The current principle follows the three aspects: Historically, it tries to be comprehensive, selecting as many as possible war poems from British and American history and their involvements with wars, the objective of which is to provide the Chinese reader with a comprehensive scope of war writings in English, and for the modern and contemporary war writings, it intends to select and include those marginal, left-wing, and“revolutionary”poets who have been often ignored or neglected by the Western ideologies in canon formation such as Rupert John Cornford (1915—1936), Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893—1978), and so on;Thematically, it lean heavily on those“anti-war”poetic writings, especially foregrounding our Chinese ideologies of Marxian concept of class confrontation and civilian harmony.
Periodization, or period division, has always been an ideological construction of knowledge. The anthological research leans heavily on its periodization as war-related demarcations. Poets are chronologically arranged according to the chronology of wars with Anglo-American involvements. Focusing on the poets' verse composition, a very short introduction will be positioned when the poet's war writing appears for the first time. When the poet's another piece of war writing appears, only the excerpted poem or poems are presented.
In addition to the inclusion of some Irish poets, the anthology also includes a number of Australian, Canadian, South African poets before the Second World War. The reasons are that they all belong to the Commonwealth of Nations, or formerly British Commonwealth of Nations (1931—1949). The Commonwealth is now a free association of sovereign states comprising the United Kingdom and a number of its former dependencies who acknowledge the British monarch as symbolic head of their association, and from 1965 on the Commonwealth Secretariat were established in London to organize and coordinate Commonwealth activities.
[1] Harriet Monroe wrote these words for an editorial called“The Poetry of War,”which appeared in the September 1914 issue of the magazine—the first of many special war numbers Poetry would produce over the decades.