Drawing upon their respective expertise in early twentieth-century literature and music, Matthew Ingleby and Ceri Owen explore the centrality of literature within Vaughan Williams’s work and career, demonstrating that his literariness was not simply an outgrowth of his personal artistic proclivities, but rather was mediated by several institutions that were key to the production of a new sense of English national identity during the first half of the twentieth century. By contextualizing Vaughan Williams’s literary tastes and choices for musical settings – including his interest in historically remote, non-contemporary, and Anglophone writers and texts – it is argued that such choices should be read less as evidence of the reactionary, conservative nationalism with which he has often been associated, and more as an indication of his participation in forward-looking currents within twentieth-century literary culture. Ingleby and Owen conclude by proposing that, while the nation may have been the frame through which Vaughan Williams often articulated a complex relation to modernity, his powerful interest in internationalist figures such as Walt Whitman and William Blake suggest that his cultural nationalism formed part of a broader humanitarian aspiration, one that was implicitly indebted to his literary imagination.

Throughout the Second World War, Vaughan Williams was not just the ‘grand old man’ of English music but in many ways its leading figure, often serving to represent what was worth protecting and preserving in English cultural life. He and his music were featured extensively on radio and film, and his major work of the period, the Fifth Symphony, was warmly received. The serenity of that work may seem to suggest a certain remove from wartime realities; indeed, his music generally in this period seems out of keeping with the turbulence of the war years. And yet, his vision of music as a source of spiritual sustenance and serenity seemed to find traction in wartime, in a newly powerful way. In the course of the war, he established himself as a cultural figure of national importance in a way that few musicians had before, both building on and reinforcing the growing importance of music itself in wartime life, and serving as a major representative of English and, in turn, British culture to the wider world.