Imagination and memory are but one thing : imagination and memory in James Fenton’s war poetry

Abstract EN

War poetry” is a term comprising two human contradictory activities; experiencing a war and writing a poem.

Whereas one suggests destruction, chaos and death, the other indicates creation, order and life.

This paper focuses on the war poetry of the British poet, James Fenton (1945- ), whose poetry, though small in bulk, translates a remarkable range of experience.

Fenton evokes the memories of war without revealing them.

He likens the psychoanalytic idea of the difficulty of defeated nations accommodating the memories of a lost war to Thomas Hobbes’ observation from Leviathan (1651) that “Imagination and reality are but one thing." He believes that the imaginative process of selectively recreating the past becomes the survivors’ tactic for living with the burden of history as well as his aesthetic of writing political poetry.

In “A German Requiem/’ “Dead Soldiers,” “Children in Exile” and “In a Notebook” Fenton employs his linguistic ability to explore the nightmarish scenarios of war.

For him, memory always distorts; there is no such thing as pure recall.

One’s imagination plays an influential role on the pasts, either individual or collective.

Fenton’s poems strive to bridge the gap between politics and art, suggesting that there can be a universal expression of the former in the latter.