Just to reinforce your very valid point, Rickard.
Cheers,
Peter


      It is an advantage to mankind in general to live in a beautiful
      world;that no one can doubt. But for the poet is it so important?
      We mean all sorts of things, I know, by Beauty. But the essential
      advantage for a poet is not, to have a beautiful world with which
      to deal: it is to be able to see beneath both beauty and ugliness;
      to see the boredom, and the horror, and the glory. (126)
      -------------------------------------------------------------------
      Eliot,T.S. "Matthew Arnold." THE USE OF POETRY AND THE USE OF
          CRITICISM. London: Faber, 1933.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Rickard A. Parker" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2012 7:30 PM
Subject: Re: trench


> On Tue, 20 Nov 2012 10:49:00 -0800, P <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>>Thanks Rickard. I tried. :)
>>It's quite remarkable isn't it!
>>One doesn't get the Victoria Cross for just any old act of courage.
>>They're as scarce as hens' teeth.
>>P. M.
>
> A few lines from "Antwerp" by Ford Madox Hueffer:
>
> And what in the world did they bear it for?
> I don’t know.
> And what in the world did they dare it for?
> Perhaps that is not for the likes of me to understand.
>
> The poem in full is at: http://www.bartleby.com/265/165.html
>
>
> And, getting back on topic, in a paper entitled 'T.S. Eliot’s Letter to
> “The
> Nation”' there are the following paragraphs:
>
> [Eliot] certainly didn’t feel that most war poetry took the war
> seriously. At a time when patriotic effusions were just about everywhere,
> he
> pointedly remarked that “Antwerp” by Ford Madox Hueffer was “the only good
> poem I have met with on the subject of the war”. “Antwerp” is a poem about
> the paradox of courage and endurance emerging among men who appear banal.
> It
> does not evade “the sordid and disagreeable” and shows how the business
> “must be put through”.
>
> Eliot was looking at the English war not just through the eyes of an
> American who could see the oddity of much that the English took for
> granted,
> but with a sensibility educated by reading Laforgue and Baudelaire. The
> banal, the sordid and the horrific were subjects with which poetry must in
> some way deal. Eliot’s critical prose of the war years is full of praise
> for
> writers who face the horrific, and ridicule for those who avoid it, or try
> to explain it away.
>
>
> If we haven't seen this webpage before we certainly have seen the letter
> that Eliot submitted to "The Nation" magazine. It was a letter from the
> front by a young Army officer that was most likey from his brother-in-law.
> I
> draw your attention to
> http://greatwarfiction.wordpress.com/tseliots-letter-to-the-nation/
>
> Regards,
> Rick Parker
>