UNIT 3. LITERATURE AND WAR: DISILLUSION AS NEVER TOLD IN THE OLD DAYS.

1. Presentation: The War that ends all ways.

When War was declared in 1914, few people hasty idea of the struggle that lay ahead. Some even
welcomed it. The 1st men to volunteer for the war were filled with the ideas of patriotism. They
imagined that they were going on a crusade “to teach the Hun a lesson”; to those civilians at
home, they were “brave boys” fighting for right against wrong.
Women took over men’s jobs. The Suffragettes were able to prove their equality in an active way.
War munitions were needed, women went to work in factories — discovering independence and
reasonable wages.
Anyone who was of German origin/name, became unpopular. German-owned shops were
attacked; a campaign of hate was launched against “The Hun”. Stories were told of German
atrocities against civilians in other countries - untrue stories to create bitterness towards the
enemy. This campaign against anything German affected Charles Hamilton Sorley, who died in
the font.
War and death were carried to civilians in Britain. This came as a shock to a people who had used
the sea as a shield. The terror of War became very real, with air attacks. As the conflict dragged
on, the early enthusiasm was lost.

The contrast between the life-and-death problems

of war time and the trivia of civilian life was a
recurring theme in Women’s narratives of the time.

Soldiers on leave didn’t find the support that they thought they deserved. Confronted with a
horror that they could not possibly experience for themselves, many choose ignores as a defense
mechanism — they didn’t really want to know.
For many across the Channel it was viewed as nothing more profound than casualty lists, relevant
to everyday life only if these tragedies became personal ones. What mattered the most to most
middle-class people in England were “the universal topic, maids and ration cards”.
WW1 wasn’t just the war to end wards, a holy crusade fought to make the world safe for
democracy; it was also the war of wars, a paradigm of technological warfare.
VICTORY CAME - 1918; The meaning of total war had been brought home to civilians as to
soldiers; who were exhausted by the fighting and bloodshed.

2. P o e t r y .
2.1. “The Poetry is in the Pity”: GEORGIAN POETS EXPERIENCING WAR.
Georgian = Generation of poets that were in the period of the reign of George V, 1910-1936.
The intention in choosing the name was to highlight the newness of the poetry being produced at
the time.
Introduction of “Georgian Poetry”, Edward Marsh proclaims a new poetic, comparable to
landmark poetic movements of the past, was born. This generation was caught up between
criticism from the previous generation for being too
innovative, on criticism from the following
generation for being unadventurous in theme and WRITERS:
style on the other. - D.H. Lawrence
Last anthology — 1922, were Modernist icons - Rupert Brooke
published - Robert Graves
- Edward Thomas
- Andrea Young
- W.H. Davies
- Vita Sackville-West
Literary Influences: Thomas Hardy, The Romantics (Wordsworth), The Victorians (Mathew Arnold,
Robert Louis Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling), A. E. Housman…
Interested in: Expressing everyday life experience and looking at the world with fresh eyes.
Against: The current tendency towards imperialistic and patriotic verse
Consists of a complacent and meditative lyrical vision of certain aspects of life and nature;
Attempt to come to terms with immediate experience, sensuous or imaginative, in a language
close to common speech.
Their poetry was paramount in the construction of an “Englishness”, white, rural and in many ways
romantic, that pervaded the perception of England for most of the 20th c. Ex. Vita Sackville-West’s
The Land, the Georgian view of the beauty of the English countryside and its relationship with the
lives of those inhabiting it is clearly reflected.
Time-span: 1912-1939; witness for the 1st WW and its aftermath.

“THE WAR POETS”.

The War was to destroy a social and cultural structure in a place
The Neo-Romantic in England since the Renaissance. Some of the men forming
poetry of the Georgians part of troops were poets; for them War represented a way
was one of the losses of to break free from what they saw as a materialist and
the War as it changed undignified milieu surrounding them.
for many, particularly for Felt an emotional and patriotic duty to defend their beloved
those who fought in it, England and join forces against an enemy whom was
their attitude towards considered brutal. The current feeling that the cause for war
poetry. was justified and legitimate stimulated an idealization, rooted
in the tradition of the hero, of those who ere willing to sacrifice
their lies for a just cause.

RUPERT BROOKE

Had no time fully to experience the War since the died of blood poisoning on 1915 - Pre-war Poet
The irony seems to go further in the myth constructed around him and his death.
“The Soldier”: public imagination; he had the qualities of a national hero.
He was a young, cultivated, agreeable, courageous poet.
Similar to Philip Sydney seen by the Elizabethans — The icon of a country
He came to represent the sublimation of the sacrifice the nation had been pushed to make.
A sequence entitles “1914”, 5 numbered sonnets: The Treasure, I Peace, II Safety, III The Dead, IV
The Dead, V The Soldier.
“The Soldier”.
FORM: English sonnet introduced by Wyatt and Sydney — 14 lines of iambic pentameter divided
into an octave and a sestet.
A disruption of the form in that the octave his rhymed after the Shakesperean form (ababcdcd)
whereas the sestet follows the Italian rhyme (efgefg).
THEME: The poem also disrupts thematically the sonnet form in that there is no predicament/
resolution division
As a whole it shows the blissful state of the fallen soldier and the immortality of the English
heritage he carries as cultural baggage.
Being the last on the series— The culmination of the emotional tension built up by the previous
ones; it sums up the themes present in the previous sonnets: Spirit liberation from old ideas, the
permanence of the memories of the dead, and the hero’s immortal legacy. He relates these to the
idea of Englishness and a personal loyalty to English heritage.
The sonnet doesn’t insinuate an apology for England’s imperial policy yet, seems to be informed
by the imperialistic idea that England is wherever he sons are.
Not Brooke’s intention to write propaganda poetry but associated to it.
There is more to the aging of the poem than the mere suggestion that it was appropriated by the
establishment to stimulate in the population a feeling of necessary sacrifice.
Sums up: “Admirably a mood that was felt”
There is some personal emotion shared with public emotion and doesn’t attempt any very new,
intense, personal insights of a surprising quality — Unacceptably idealistic
Imagery: Submission of the fallen soldier dates it as rather naive. It seems as if nothing up until
then he had happened to Rupert Brooke, as a man or poet, to prepare him adequately to meet
the challenge of the War and all that implied.

CHARLES HAMILTON SORLEY

Was only 20 when he was killed in France.

He and Brooke, university educated in Cambridge and Oxford; had a background that allowed
them to travel. Also, parents involved with these universities so understand at an early stage of
their lives that they could became poets — Both, were among the first to enlist in the troops,
believing war to be a necessary evil.
Sorley knew Germany and the Germans; he was visiting Germany when the war broke out, so he
was arrested and deported.
The quality lacking in Brooke’s sonnets is that although his sonnet affected the emotions of the
public at large, he seems to have been unable, as a poet, to see the human soul with an insight
that would be eternal, a quality expected from poetry.
Sorley’s sonnet - “When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead” - already aware of the yet
unexpected fatalism the War would bring to the people; a more mature attitude to war.
He accepted war as a necessary evil, but saw no glory in war or dying for his country. He knew
that when the War ended, the former enemies would shake hands and the sacrifice of “millions of
the mouthless dead” would be for nothing.

WILFRED OWEN

Being rejected a place at London University, lay assistant to a Reverend, before leaving for
Bordeaux, appointed as English teacher.
In France, met Laurent Tailhade, a French Decadent poet — ART FOR ARTS SAKE.
Introduced Owen to Verlaine, Flaubert…
“Maundy Thursday” — Title: The Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples as recorded in the New
Testament + Reference to William Blake’s “Holy Thursday”
Blake uses this religious image to question social and moral injustice, and Owen’s reference to
Holy Thursday and the Catholic ceremony on this particular day of Easter is questioning the very
ritual itself as he sees in it a superficial act of veneration of the gesture rather than of faith.
The sonnet is about the rite that is carried out by habit not conviction. Even those of the
congregation who shoe real Faith (women) end up in a monotonous and superficial worship for
they have to submit to the Church’s dogma.
The ending of the poem is extremely critical— scandalous ambiguity, not devoid of sexual
connotations.
Owen, seeing the growing scale of the War, returned to England in 1915 and signed up in the
Artist’s Rifles. He had read English Decadents, particularly Wilde and Swinburne.
1916 Caught up in an explosion and as a result in June he was diagnosed with shell-shock —
Evacuated to England, turning point in his life for it was here that he met Siegfried Sassoon, also
diagnosed with shell-shock after writing his famous declaration against the war.
Sassoon agreed to see Owen’s poems, and introduced him to Robert Graves, who mix up with
literary figures such ash Arnold Bennett, H.G. Wells.
1918 Rejoined his regiment, sent to France and died in France the 4th November.
His poems, influenced by the French literature Owen encountered at Bordeaux — Neo-
Romanticism.
Sassoon taught him he had learnt for himself from Thomas Hardy’s poetic originality —
Owen understood the need to abandon traditional poetic diction and syntax and to
use the direct speech introduces by Hardy.
Owen find his own dramatical poetical voice charged with the immediacy of Use of contrastive
trench warfare, and able to sum up all the influences and write a poetry shocking and powerful
not only for its theme but for its newness: A collage of tradition and images aimed at
innovation. creating a strong
“Greater Love” emotional impact.
Mixture of insights; a response to Swinburne’s “Before the Mirror”
Inspired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “Aurora Leigh” and Oscar Wilde’s
“Salomé”; and Shakespeare’s sonnet 130 “My Mistress eyes are Nothing like the Sun” is a
source of the open in the negative structure of the 1st line:
Red lips, glaring eyes, elegant posture, soft voice, and beating heart of the beloved -
Merge with the blood, the blinded eyes, the severed limbs and the silenced mouths of the
dead, and the bullet-ridden broken hearts of the men.
Effective contrast of images — The sequence of words in each line produces and affect that
creates a war atmosphere.
Through alliteration creates the whistle of bullets: Abruptly ceases to be heard by the person
who dies who would be producing a similar guttural sound when hit. This device works at
positioning the beloved in the battlefield; the beloved merge the alliterative hissing bullets since,
within the line, are equally present even if one of them isn’t actually mentioned. Any explicit
reference to war is absent except in the significance of the phonetic power of the words.
Juxtaposition of such different experiences as love and war fails.
“GREATER LOVE” Title = Ambivalence never fully resolved in the poem. Seems to imply in the
1st instance that there is no greater love than that felt by a soldier capable of giving his life to war
for the sake of a just peace; when a soldier is faced with horror and death, the love felt towards
the beloved is magnified since there is a clear possibility of losing it for ever.
Ambiguous game -Absurdity of the comparison that effect Absurdity of the war and the waste in
the losses it brings. The superimposition of these images = Workings of the human mind. When
pushed into extreme situations, freely wanders in random thoughts, irrelevant and often
inappropriate love. It is a wonder that in the middle of a warfare, the soldier can think of anything
other than war itself.
Immense sacrifice men are undertaking for their country - Absurdity of such a gift.
Reminder of how irrational and meaningless effort the war has become: a foolishness
actually voiced loud where the poet imagines an impossible meeting in a dream-like world
between a soldier and the enemy he has just killed.
The ludicrousness of the war is carried forward through the use of the direct speech of the
impossible dialogue between them.
Spite of it all what really worries him is that he will never be able to tell the truth about the war.
Essence: to tell the truth about the War.
Art for Art’s Sake of the beginnings is transformed into a total lack of interest in the art per se,
but into a need for this art to become a vehicle to express the truth about War.
Owen’s concern with the writing of his war poetry, contains the essence of what makes his poetry
modern although by no means Modernist.
CONCERN WITH POETRY: warning against an aestheticism which has too limited a view of
beauty, rather than against the poet’s being conscious that his job is to produce art.
“Dulce et Decorum Est”
Latin tag, Horace — = It is sweet and proper to die for one’s country”
By using Latin instead of English he is answering a poetic tradition that, from Horace onwards, has
made sublime the sacrifice of one’s life for one’s country.
The poem is undermining the views expressed in the poetry of Jossie Pope, to whom in the 1st
place dedicated the poem, later withdrawing it.

Owen, who wrote the ballad, had an idealistic view of war and justice,
and the importance of its aims. “Dulce et Decorum Est” — Feeling of
disillusions as never told in the old days.

JESSIE POPE

Writer of children’s books and a poet.

Poems with strong patriotic overtones, published in the newspaper. Ex. “The Call”, “War Girls”.
This patriotic tone, used by many contemporary voices at home who were misled by the censored
news reaching them through the papers.
Women entered into the work force— Provoked a feeling of exulted liberation that in
turn produced poems such as “War Girls”:
Frustrating factor— Total lack of knowledge or understanding of what was actually happening on
the different fronts of the war.
Bitterly contrasted with the realization rotate the actual experience of the trenches brought about
the revelation that there were to be victorious nor defeated in this war.

OWEN.
Owen tries to right the situation; he shows commitment in his poetical voice to attempting to
change the reader’s attitude.
Commitment of Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” is not in itself something new — Propaganda
Poem, Anti-establishment poem, Protest poem.

Talking a truth that ought not to be told was received with coldness and, often, disgust.
Percy B. Shelley and Oscar Wilde responses to war driven by an indignation provoked by the
absurdity of the situation, the new commitment provided by Owen’s poem rests in a desire to
break up the social order within the context in which it was produced — Anew view on poetry in
the subject matter that it conveys.
Any topic at all can be the subject of poem, a view unimaginable for many of his contemporaries.
The style of the poem and the poetic devices used that makes possible its innovative newness.
Simile: 1st line, myriad of multiple images hidden in the ambiguity of the simile itself. It recalls the
image of soldiers heavily loaded and the ruined state of their uniforms which are the rages worn
by beggars.
The soldiers are bent double under the weight of their own emotions and tiredness: way to the
again ambiguous “distant rest” =a camp away from the front line” — Puts the reader on guard
about the perils to be found on the way, because resting is vet out of hand.
“WE”: Men are still capable action, even if it is only to curse, when in fact the image given is that
of men’s “cursed” by the depth of the mud weakening them, doomed by events — Brings the
poet into the text and includes the reader through the use of “We”.
Irony — It is not necessary to be actually in the front line, hearing the hissing of the bullets, to be
in danger in the war. On their way back from the front line they are attacked and one man is going
to die.
Powerful use of direct speech condenses in short sentences, made up of monosyllables +
suggests the strong pulse of the action.
Ecstasy — used paradoxically; shows the speed and panic of the men, as they know how
important its is to get their helmets on and yet their fingers fail them.
“Clumsy helmets” = transferred epithet: the helmets themselves are not “clumsy” but the soldiers
are clumsily trying to fit on the heavy helmets amid the chaos.
Third Stanza) Horror of witnessing a man dying without being able to help him. Next lines talk
about the terror and pain the man experiences as the gas enters his body.
Simile - “flound’ring like a man in fire” used to provide an image of the panic growing in the man
as he knows he is going to die. More poignant because no one can do anything to help.
Owen was an officer and thought his duty was to see for the well-being of his men. The
clumsiness of this man is transferred to Owen’s own clumsiness at not being able to help.
Poem purposely short — convey the desolation and lack of words of one man witnessing another
dying. Owen still has nightmares about the event. Even in his sleep, he cannot escape the torture
and suffering of the man, is a victim of the gas attack.
In Owen’s dreams the man pleads with the poet to help him, yet he cannot do anything.
Last words: “guttering, chocking, drowning” - evoke the sounds of the dying man as well as
making us aware of the length of the suffering before he dies; it is not clear at all whether the man
placed in the wagon is alive or dead.
Use of “You”— as he is talking to us
“Cancer”— pain of the man is hidden: the man is dying from inside out, the gas cannot be seen
as a wound could be. His death, the poem implies, is hidden from those, as Jessie Pope, who
cannot or will not acknowledge the horror, the pity and pointless nature of war.
The dignity of death is in the knowing and telling of the war, not in dying for one’s country. -
Disillusions as never told before.
2.2. “Let’s We Forget”: Women writing the War.
Some writers contend that the impact of the Great War on women’s emancipation has been vastly
overstated — Women expected to give up work once they were married, to revert to their
“natural” roles of wife, mother and housekeeper.
1903 WSPU - Women’s Social and Political Union, Emmeline and Christabel Pankhurst.
The response of women the outbreak of the War was Mixed:
- Small number, as Margaret Cole, adopted a staunch anti-war position and worked with the
conscientious objectors’ movement.
- Larger minority, threw their patriotic weight behind the Allied cause
The Pankhursts reined in the WSPU’s militant campaign, arguing that a military triumph of a “male
nation” would be “a disastrous blow to the women’s movement”.
- Majority of British women fell somewhere between these 2 extremes — viewing War as an
inevitability, for which they now had to make sacrifices.
The Pankhurst — War = New employment opportunities for women; paid labour market.
Advantages of Employment over domestic Service: higher wages, better conditions and
independence enhanced.
Although they wrote from different perspectives, a range of women who commented on the
conflict agreed in this point. Ex. Iris Barry “We Enjoyed the War”, Virginia Woolf “Three Guineas”.
Women’s paradoxical situation — Context of a pacifist essay; Although Women were often
treated as inferior, sot-gap replacements for enlisted men.
Many women didn’t find their labour experiences “liberating”, if only because it freed them from
woefully paid jobs in domestic service.
Millicent Fawcett: “The war revolutionized the industrial position of women - it found them serving
and left them free”.

SYLVIA PANKHURST

1911 “The History of the Women’s Suffrages Movement “

The outbreak of the 1st WW caused a serious conflict between Sylvia and the WSPU as she was a
pacifist and disagreed with the WSPU’s strong support for the War.
Joined with Charlotte Despard to form “Women’s Peace Army”, a newspaper, demanding a
negotiated peace, a campaign against the War and gave strong support to peaceful
organizations, as well as published Siegfried Sassoon’s anti-war statement.
Worked with Dr Barbara Tchaykovsky to open clinics for mothers and babies

The scale of women’s employment couldn’t longer be denied and the higher number of
unmarried or widowed women at the end of the war forces the established unions to consider the
status of women in the workplace.
REPRESENTATION OF THE PEOPLE ACT, 1918: Vote to all men over 21 and women over 30.
Gratitude for women’s war work cannot explain why only women over 30 got the vote while it was
younger women who had done the work.
Post-war blacklash against women’s employment and against the continued employment of
married women. Women themselves were divided with single and widowed women claiming a
prior right to employment over married women.
In some occupations single women insisted on excluding their married sisters.
 War End:
- As soon as the conflict ended the number of women working in munitions factories and
transport fell away rapidly
- Ex-servicemen reclaimed the jobs
- War didn’t inflate women’s wages
- Employers circumvented wartime equal pay regulations by employing several women to
replace one man or by dividing skilled tasks into several less skilled stages.
The idea of women returning to their “rightful” domestic place was a prominent theme

“While the inequality exists while injustice is done and opportunities denied
WINIFRED HOLTBY to the great majority of women, I shall have to be a feminist, and an Old
Feminist, with the motto Equality First. And O shan’t be happy till I get it”

Anxiety for their fellow men at War, pressures of employment combined with the need to perform
house work in straitened circumstances, and the inadequacy of social services — Withdrawal of
women back into their homes after the War; Full-time domesticity wasn’t wholly voluntary:
Many women blamed themselves for he loss of the ground they had gained between
1914-1918. Repressed by what was still, after all, a male dominated community and
reproached by their own consciousness, a number retreated into self-doubt or guilt-
stricken domesticity.
One response to the trauma of the 1st WW to have an enormous impact on women’s lives, was
the re-making of the present and future in the image of the past

Sandra Gilbert + Susan Gubar — Paradox War: apocalypse of masculinist, apotheosis of

femaleness, a triumph of women who feed on wounds and are fertilized by blood.

REBECCA WEST

Novel: “The Return of the Soldier” depiction of the psychic damage caused by War.
A soldier returns from the front to the three women who love him. His wife, Kitty, with her cold,
moonlight beauty, and his devoted cousin, Jenny, wait in their exquisite home; Margaret
Allington, his 1st and long forgotten love, nearby a suburb. The soldier is shell-shocked and can
only remember Margaret he loved 15 years before when he was a young man and she an
innkeeper’s daughter. His cousin he remembers only as a childhood playmate; his wife he
remembers not at all. The women have a choice: leave him where he wishes to be, or to cure
him. It is Margaret who reveals a love to make a final sacrifice: the amnesiac hero is restores to
health by Margaret who gathers his “soul” into “her soul” and keeping it warm so that his body
can rest quiet for a little time, she brings him to life and his actual wife.

CICELY HAMILTON

“William-An Englishman”, presents a grim image of War.

The eponymous hero, William and his wife, Griselda, are passionate but unquestioning supporters
of women’s suffrage and pacifism. Griselda dies as a consequence of being raped by a German
soldier — William becomes pro-war.

Cicely Hamilton denounces what she perceives as an unreliable opinion based merely on the
personal experience of war as portrayed in her novel, where she attacks the character’s
narrowness and lack of independent judgement. At times her contempt for her characters is a
barrier to eh reader— Particularly when her’s one involvement with the suffrage campaign.
William’s behavior is credible as that a man who, singled out of the herd, followed it once tragedy
made him face the reality of War. 

“Theodore Savage” — Civilization has been destroyed by total scientific warfare; mankind
becomes concerned only with survival, and all moral restraints disappear.
As communities form people try to understand their lives.
Powerful and apocalyptic book — A dread of destruction; Cyclical view of history in which
mankind endlessly refines the tools of its own destruction and emerges from the ruins to repeat
the process, mythologizing the past in the process.

MAY SINCLAIR

A foretaste of the insularity the was to be a part of the 1914-1918 War — “The Tree of Heaven”
Dorothea is told by her lover as he departs for Mons in 1914
War = Fight for Freedom
When the boy is killed one of her chief regrets is all the time that they wasted.
Her brother Nicky finds thats it is “absolute happiness” to go over the top.
For her, Feminism fades into significance in comparison with the greater cause, view with which,
in various forms, women have become very familiar throughout the century.

Militant feminism declined in the 1920s.

Olive Banks argues in “Faces of Feminism”: replaced by “welfare feminism”, concerned with
economic and social issued.
Ex. Novels of Vera Brittain and Winifred Holtby

WINIFRED HOLTBY

Daughter of David Holtby, a prosperous farmer, and Alice Holtby, the first Alderwoman.
1918 She join the Women’s Auxiliary Army Corps; she decided it because:
- The desire to suffer and to die — especially when suffering is associated with glory
- Fear of immunity from danger when our friends are suffering
His boyfriend, Harry Pearson, was fighting and shot in the shoulder in 1916
1931 Began to suffer with high blood preassure, recurrent headaches and lassitude — Kidney’s
sclerosis; given 2 year to live.
She put all her energy on writing “South Riding”, and died in 1935
VERA BRITTAIN

Met Winifred Holtby at Somerville College; graduated together and in 1921 moved to London,
hoped to establish themselves as writers. Brittain first two novels, “The Dark Tide” and “Not
Without Honor” sold badly and were ignored by the critics.
Holtby had more success with “Anderby Wold”, “The Crowded Street”, “The Land of Green
Ginger”
She was a journalist and a pacifist.
Wrote about their relationship in her book, “Testament of Friendship”
“Testament of Youth” —One the most important autobiographies of the 1st WW, her account of
how she survived it, how she lost the man she loved, how sh nursed the wounded and how she
emerged into an altered world; PASSIONATE RECORD OF A LOST GENERATION.

SYLVIA TOWNSEND WARNER

Poetry and Prose.

Explore, with Storm Jameson, women’s roles in society and the tensions between social
expectations and women’s desires — Even women who were not specially recording anxieties
about female survival seem sometimes to have been infected by the post-war misogyny that was
so “strickingly the correct fashion” — Gilbert and Gubar.
Diversity of her writing and her experiments with different forms of expression are her concern
with the relationship between art and politics + the question of whether Modernist or Realist
writing is the more appropriate vehicle for political literature. 


1st WW: Ambivalent attitude in many women writers towards a War they deplored for its
destructiveness but the need for which they felt inhibited from criticizing since they weren’t
considered active participants in the conflict.

CHARLOTTE MEW

Her poetic responses to the Great War have been included in an anthology of World War I
women’s poetry — “Scars upon my Heart” 1981 — Title = Vera Brittain’s poem about her beloved
brother
“The Cenotaph”
Speaks of loneliness, the heartache and the sorrow women felt in 1918.
Spirit dedicated to the renewal of like painfully won for the Allies on the fields of France.
Suggests that women’s deep, anguished grief must take solace in the Christian virtues of
forgiveness and reconciliation, and that they must find courage to live on without their loved
ones.

SCARS UP MY HEART.
Reveals the extent to which women became
involved with the “pity of war”, a fact that prior
to the publication of this anthology had been
largely ignored
Jan Montefiore - “Feminism and Poetry” 1987 — Pointed out the entrapment of women’s “war
poets” in history, paralleled by their use of traditional Victorian and Geogian poetic forms, and a
“Masculinist” symbolic language and imagery of war.
A number of women poets of this period escaped such literary and ideological traps.

ROSE MACAULAY “Picnic”

Joan Montgomery Byles’s Analysis:

1915 Rose wrote painfully and exactly about the imagined barrier that cut off from the front line
experience of war.
Expresses the frustration, anguish and guilt of staying at home.
Women are still part of the ethos that seeks to protect them from the obscenity of war; although
this exclusion from witnessing the actual battle scenes cannot shield them, especially the poets
among them, from the anxiety of imaging and dreaming of these scenes.
Powerful images of trench warfare, mud, rats, blood.
It was not doubt easier for the men bravely to suffer pain than for their women folk to endure
helplessly the thought of their suffering.
The images of pastoral England, of gentleness, fertility and growth change into rage and pain, as
Macaulay thinks of the anguish of the men lying in their own blood in the mud of Flanders.
Feminine image: RAIN = When it rains in England it suggests more blood-soaked mud in the
fields of Flanders.
There is a need not to “look”/“listen” at the catastrophe going on so geographically close to the
women of England that they can feel the earth shaking under them from the same explosions that
rock the men in their trenches.
“Battered” = another identification with the soldiers at the front: implacable destructiveness of
the guns + battering that women’s hearts and minds were experiencing.
The perception that the walls, real/imaginary, that have heretofore protected women from the
hideous knowledge of war, can no longer hold up — Women no longer want to wait cringing
behind safe walls whilst their men folk deign ditches.

“WAR POET” pinned on a

woman poet seems an elusive
label. A misleading one for it is
charges with the prevailing
a t t i t u d e t o w a rd s w o m e n
during the War time.
Women poets are still denied
the diversity of their
experiences of War.