‘On the perimeter and fringe of war’: Norman Nicholson, Rural Modernity and Wartime

The author Norman Nicholson is an exemplary writer of rural modernity, acutely conscious of the need for rural areas to remain ‘living and organic communities’, as he puts it in his topographic book Greater Lakeland (1969). Here, I argue that his position in his lifetime home of Millom, an industrial town on the periphery of the tourist Lake District, gives his writing a unique, revisionary perspective on both modern/ist and war poetry: he is a non-combatant rural poet who focuses not on contested ground overseas, but on the rural and wartime industry on the north-western English coast. Born in 1914, his life was profoundly shaped by war, and while not often considered in these terms, he was inspired by modernist poetry, particularly that of his editor at Faber & Faber, T.S. Eliot. Reading Nicholson’s early writings ‘on the perimeter and fringe of war’ (‘Waiting for Spring, 1943’) during the Second World War, engaging with his editing, periodical contributions, and early poetry up to and including his debut collection Five Rivers (1944), enables us to see the multiple ways that the traces of war in his poetry have previously gone unrecognised, displaced, by the widely-theorised struggle of both combatants and civilians to articulate the experience of war, into dates, locations, events and depictions of the body. I conclude by examining Nicholson’s response to war after the Second World War, and commenting on the implications for more general theories of wartime.