According to the Oxford English Dictionary, prosthesis is the ‘replacement of defective or absent parts of the body by artificial substitutes’. That definition provides an apt description of the function of post-war poems I discuss in this book: objects meant to replace an essential component of human life that has been ‘impaired’ to varying degrees during war. And just as the prosthesis, in the physical sense, is meant to allow a person to regain some, but not all, of the functions lost by injury, so the poetic prosthesis represents an attempt at an artificial, or wrought, linguistic prop. This literary, linguistic tool, as I have discussed in previous chapters, allows soldiers to write or speak after war, despite the fact that their vocabulary has been booby-trapped by wartime experience. War veterans, through the use of the prosthesis, create a mangled, artificial, uncomfortable mode of describing the violence they have experienced, the death they have seen, and at the same time demonstrate what violence has done to their ability to communicate, a duality that serves as a significant feature of what we call ‘poetic language’. Poetic speech, in terms of these veterans’ poems and in general, then, is a kind of stylised failure, an object that both achieves its purpose and fails, akin to that wonderful line from Wallace Stevens: ‘The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.’ As such, the poem or prosthesis bears the marks of success – in relating something about one’s painful past, in gaining a sense of artistic agency – as well as the failure of a persistent phantom pain, flashbacks, hyper-vigilance and the continued and frustrating inability to describe that past ‘correctly’ or to remember ‘well’. At one at the same time, then, the prosthesis enables the stepping out of death into renewed movement and communication while serving as a constant reminder, an index, of the loss that triggered its creation. This is the source of that oscillation or ‘irony’ that was the subject of Chapter 4, one also evident in the ‘results’ provided by the prosthesis: improved functioning alongside the constant presence of pain.

In their attempt to describe indescribable wartime scenes, soldiers will be moved to use benign words such as Randall Jarrell’s ‘hose’.