Nadine Cohen: Peer Commentary for Liz Claessens

English 354/Finley: 7 October 1999

The fundamental question Robert Graves asks in "Recalling War"is, twenty years past,

"What, then, was the war?". Any reader wishing to comment on "Recalling War" struggles

with Graves as he attempts to answer this question through his poem. Elizabeth Claessens'

commentary on Grave's definition--"an infection of the common sky"--is excellent, and

Graves use of the word "infection" certainly is provocative. I disagree, however, with the

assertion that Graves is criticizing "false memory" of the war; I think what he is essentially

criticizing is, in many ways, a lack of memory altogether. When Graves writes that, "The

one-legged man forgets his leg of wood/ The one-armed man his jointed wooden arm,"he

is not criticizing "false memory." Rather, he is frustrated with the lack of memory, or, more

fully, the inability to remember trauma truthfully. Claessens' assers that it is a "sense of

distance from the war that Graves finds so frustrating." This reading is convincing; it fails to go a step

further, however, and identify the root of "the sense of distance,," which seems to be rooted

in the inadequacy of memory. Lastly, I do not agree with Claessesns when she writes: "Graves is clearly saying that the world's innocence had to end, but he does not think the end has justified the means."

Although this theme is true through many of the war poets, in my reading of "Recalling

War," I did not find it to be the prevailing theme. It seemed to me that Graves was far more

concerned with the inability of memory (and language, as I discussed in my own

brief essay), than he was with the universal effect of the war. Graves' is not critiquing

the fall of the world's innocence; instead, he is critiquing the world's inability to remember

and express the cause of such a fall.