From void to void, with time to kill

Just as the slaughter in the trenches of Flanders and northern France gave birth to the tragic verses of Wilfred Owen, so the experience of bombing and being bombed between 1940 and 1945 generated its own major poetry in Britain and the USA. The scale of the catastrophe was vast: 55,000 of British Bomber Command aircrew, with an average age of 22, lost their lives, as did 60,000 British civilians roasted, suffocated, buried alive or blown to bits. German civilian deaths far exceeded this and have been estimated at around 580,000 (of these victims, more were women than men, and many were children), not to mention the millions of homes, churches and national monuments that were destroyed. As in the previous conflict, the devastation provided poets with new moral and physical landscapes: ‘In all this horror a brilliant, an insupportable, an inhuman beauty’ was how the writer Olaf Stapledon put it after the first world war.

One does not think of Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot as war poets, but Bomber County argues convincingly that it is in some of their very best work that they mourn the indiscriminate slaughter of the Blitz and the destruction of London. Other significant talents Professor Swift names are Cecil Day-Lewis (anticipating the bombing in pre- war verse and identifying the separate nature of airmen from that of the rest of mankind); Stephen Spender (as witness of the bombed German cities after the war), John Pudney (as a squadron intelligence officer mourning non-returning aircrews), Randall Jarrell (who went through all the stress of pilot-training, including fellow-pupils’ deaths that were an inevitable part of it); John Ciardi (as a rear gunner suffering from an hyper-active imagination on combat missions over the Pacific); and James Dickey (who flew as a radar observer, and whose poem ‘The Firebombing’ is an intensely powerful expression of guilt about killing civilians).