Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War

by Elizabeth Vandiver

Elizabeth Vandiver examines the ways in which British poets of the First World War used classical literature, culture, and history as a source of images, ideas, and even phrases for their own poetry. Vandiver argues that classics was a crucial source for writers from a wide variety of backgrounds, from working-class poets to those educated in public schools, and for a wide variety of political positions and viewpoints. Poets used references to classics both to support and to oppose the war from its beginning all the way to the Armistice and after. By exploring the importance of classics in the poetry of the First World War, Vandiver offers a new perspective on that poetry and on the history of classics in British culture.

Genres: Poetry, World War I, War

480 pages, Hardcover

First published February 18, 2010

About the author

Elizabeth Vandiver is Associate Professor of Classics and Clement Biddle Penrose Professor of Latin at Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington. She was formerly Director of the Honors Humanities program at the University of Maryland at College Park, where she also taught in the Department of Classics. She completed her undergraduate work at Shimer College and went on to earn her M.A. and Ph.D. from The University of Texas at Austin.

Prior to taking her position at Maryland, she held visiting professorships at Northwestern University, the University of Georgia, the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome, Loyola University of New Orleans, and Utah State University.

Professor Vandiver is the author of Heroes in Herodotus: The Interaction of Myth and History. She has also written numerous articles and has delivered many papers at national and international conferences.

In 1998, The American Philological Association recognized her achievements as a lecturer with its Excellence in Teaching Award, the most prestigious teaching prize given to American classicists. Her other awards include the Northwestern University Department of Classics Excellence in Teaching Award and two University of Georgia Outstanding Honors Professor Awards.

Reviews

[a ☕︎ · Rating 4 out of 5]

i found this book bc of the title, which comes from the final stanza of the only poem patrick shaw-stewart ever wrote: i will go back this morning from imbros over the sea; stand in the trench, achilles, flame-capped, and shout for me, a reference to book 18 of the iliad, when athena gilds achilles in fire (all their spirits quaked—even sleek-maned horses, sensing death in the wind, slewed their chariots round and charioteers were struck dumb when they saw that fire, relentless, terrible, burst from proud-hearted achilles’ head, blazing as fiery-eyed athena fueled the flames. three times achilles gave his great war cry over the trench, three times the trojans whirled in panic). vandiver covers this poem and far more: an array of little-known wwi verse, quick biographies of key war poets, even latin jokes in magazines any common soldier would page through. her comparison of how poets used horace’s dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is especially excellent, for though most are familiar with wilson owen’s rejection of it, other writers used this line as solace, justification, ideal, &c. a few poems i liked: sorley’s millions of the mouthless dead (think of achilles’ words to lycaon when he pleads for his life), owen’s strange meeting (note the use of friend, and the chariot wheels washed by sweet wells), and graves’ escape (horribly funny—good dog!).

[Tom · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was my great pleasure some years ago to discover Paul Fussell's marvelous The Great War and Modern Memory, which remains one of the best blendings of literary criticism and history I have yet read. And even though subsequent research has made clear that Fussell (among others) did not cast his net wide enough, and consequently gave too much emphasis to the bitterness and disillusion of war poets like Sassoon and Owen, there is still much to learn from his pages.

Elizabeth Vandiver's Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War explores how British poets, male and female, soldier and private citizen, with widely varying knowledge of Latin and Greek, used what they knew to process their experiences in and attitudes towards The Great War. As she does so, she makes perfectly clear how very wide the range of opinion was among them:

A way to frame the aggression of the Kaiser; a source of appropriate elegies for the eternally youthful dead; a measure of an autodidact's learning; a strengthening and heartening foundation for the concept of liberty; a dead weight of meaningless platitudes that must be cast aside; a template against which one's own experience of the war could be read: classics was all of these and more for writers trying to express the varying realities of their own war.

Vandiver's knowledge of Greek and Roman poetry allows her to handle masterfully all the many transformations the poets of The Great War worked on their material. And if the conclusion seemed to me to speak too much of Rupert Brooke, there is a lesson in that too for the reader, especially this one. For the hero cult that attended Brooke's memory and poetry in and after the war is essential for understanding the way the poet and those who tended his shrine drew on the classics of Greek and Roman poetry. A full understanding requires that we examine even those parts of the picture that we don't understand or care for. Brooke, as enshrined, may seem to me a good fit for a song by Carly Simon, but I cannot ignore the evidence because of that.

What emerges is a fascinating and significant portrait of a culture using the tools it had to search for the meaning of so many of the concepts they had grown up with, all of this at the dawn of a calamitous century.

[Mac · Rating 5 out of 5]

Academically, it's brilliant. Everyone wants to talk about it, and Vandiver's decision to not rank the poetry in terms of 'good' or 'bad' makes for a really effective methodology. The section on Rosenberg was particularly brilliant and particularly heartbreaking.

Personally, I bawled the whole way through. Fully reccomend reading with box of tissues. Yes, even if you are in the library. PARTICULARLY in the library. It's the sort of book you have to read twice, imo, if you want to be able to work from it. Once for tears and once more for analysis, and then again just because you want to.

First world war poetry is brilliant, and the stuff you read at school and university is normally particularly brilliant. But there is more to it, and Vandiver pursues this wholeheartedly. This poem Vandiver includes a section of - testamentary dispositions, by Garrod:

No, a scrap of shell
Took Ted, a bullet in the head
Roger- O, that sweet soul sleeps well...
Ah! There's Hutton, though.
No! Hutton was, Troy was, and we
A fuimus of Alien woe,
Outlive our own obituary.

FUIMUS TROES, FUIT ILIUM, indeed.

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

Words cannot describe just how much I love this book. It's truly one of the most fascinating things I've ever read - I enjoyed it so much, and the things Vandiver talked about were incredibly interesting. I'm so glad I happened upon this book! Luckily it was written in a very easy to understand way, so I could actually comprehend what I was reading. Highly recommended to anyone with even a mild interest in First World War poetry. This really shines on a light on it.

[Richard Seltzer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This eye-opening analysis of British WWI poetry reveals the classical lens through which both the educated and the uneducated perceived the war and the meaning/purpose of life and death.

The broader implication, though not the subject of the book, is that humankind perceives the world through lenses. Those lenses change over time and across space affecting our reception of reality. We may be incapable of coherent perception without the aid of one lens or another.

Was the classical lens that was prevalent in Britain during WWI good or bad? Was the world better off in the Middle Ages, when soldiers were mercenaries, fighting for pay and spoils, or in WWI when combatants believed in honor, glory and the patriotic duty of self-sacrifice? Did the mixed classical and Christian belief system not just give shape to the poetry and epitaphs and consoling reminiscences of the day? Did it also make the participants willing to endure years of misery in the trenches, facing almost certain maiming or death? I am curious -- were the Germans similarly motivated? And did that mindset make such a horrendous war possible and prolong the misery?

[JMM · Rating 5 out of 5]

How to make sense of a terrible war? British soldiers who fought in WWI, some well-educated, others of the working class, often turned to classical allusions in their poetry and in letters to describe their experiences. Elizabeth Vandiver explores the way these soldiers found meaning in ancient Greek and Roman texts and describes the conditions under which the poems were written. I learned so much from this volume – and was profoundly moved by it.