War Quotation found

In sheepish self-rebuke for my failure to assume, in absence of knowing, that Dr. Johnson was the author of the quotation which came to me during your seminar work on the poetry of Graves, Sassoon and Owen, I now quote the full passage in its context from Boswell's unassailably majestic Life of Samuel Johnson:

Johnson suddenly began to speak of subordination, then of fame, of wealth, and finally of war. Johnson observed provocatively, "Every man thinks meanly of himself for not having been a soldier, or not having been [a sailor with hard service] at sea." Boswell pointed out that "Lord Mansfield did not." But Johnson denied it by saying that if Lord Mansfield were present when Generals and Admirals were talking together, "he would shrink; he'd wish to creep under the table." Boswell denied this also.

Finally, in exasperation, Johnson replied to Boswell, "No, Sir; were Socrates and Charles the Twelfth of Sweden both present in any company, and Socrates to say, 'Follow me, and hear a lecture on philosophy;' and Charles, laying his hand on his sword, to say, 'Follow me, and dethrone the Czar;' a man would be ashamed to follow Socrates. Sir, the impression is universal; yet it is strange."

This attitude, which underlies the war poetry of Rupert Brooke, is manifest in Owen and Sassoon - albeit in individual ways - at the time of their entlistment, and which speaks to the performative model of British masculinity universal before the great war, is an important explanans for many of the tensions and paradoxes in their war poems - the ultimate clause in Sassoon's Lamentations for instance; and, indeed, Owen's Apologia Pro Poemate Meo.