“There was no really good true war book during the entire four years of the war.

The only true writing that came through during the war was in poetry. One reason
for this is that poets are not arrested as quickly as prose writers” FINAL

– Ernest Hemingway, in “Men at War”

The Great War, which took place between 1914-1918, shook the very foundations of
the Western world, causing a societal upheaval that left immediate and lasting
impressions on every aspect of society and culture. Great Britain, as one of the
primary belligerents of the conflict, was no exception; and experienced a wave of
social and artistic change as a direct result of the war. One of the most heavily
impacted cultural arenas to be touched by the war was literature. Literature during
the Great War often reflects upon and bitingly criticizes the horrors of war, as well
as the changes society was undergoing and provides a drastic transition between
pre and post war work. Many social, political, and economic shifts occurred during
the war, and any of the writers of the time felt the need to speak out against the
flaws they saw in their society, sometimes even while fighting for their lives in the
trenches. The new style of war allowed soldiers an unprecedented amount of time
to ponder the battles which they fought; not only in the literal sense, but battles of
the mind and spirit which were of no shortage in the hellish conditions that they
endured. Literature became a common way for the British soldiers to approach the
reality of the war, whether to express dissent against it, or to simply understand it.

Women and men alike turned to writing as a means of emotional outlet. Back in
Britain, the social order was being rocked by the war taking place across the
channel, with women becoming key economic supporters in the absence of men
and men suffering the physical and psychological stress of war. Women were
forced to adopt a role that was traditionally considered masculine, taking on
industrial work in factories in order to provide for their children, as well as
assuming a leading role in the maintenance of the family. As a result many women
began to speak out, discussing their view on the war and the impact it was placing
on their families. Writers and poets of the Great War attempted to distinguish how
this war was different than anything the world had seen before, both the manner in
which it was fought and the changing attitude toward the purpose of the conflict,
and it was a task shared by all of society, both those on the battlefield and back at
home.
The Great War saw the advent of a new type of warfare known as Trench Warfare,
that would result in the stagnation of the conflict and drag it out as both the Allies
and Central powers fought from heavily fortified positions that neither side could
seem to overcome, leading to unprecedented slaughter with little, and often
nothing, being gained. The horrid conditions of the trenches and the seeming
futility of combat that followed their construction served as a macabre inspiration
for many “trench poets” throughout the war. Edgell Rickword, Wilfred Owen, Isaac
Rosenberg and Julian Grenfell.
● SIGNIFICANT TO LITERATURE BECAUSE TRENCH POETRY WAS
PRODUCED; SOLDIERS NEEDED TO PASS TIME DURING LONG
PERIODS IN TRENCHES

Battle of the Somme (July 1 – Nov. 18, 1916):

● SIGNIFICANT TO BRITISH LITERATURE:

○ LOSS OF MEN DURING FIRST ATTACK BROUGHT MORALE OF
SOLDIERS DOWN IMMENSELY
○ PROVIDED INSPIRATION TO UTILIZE POETRY AS OUTLET FOR
THEIR EMOTIONS

John Mcrae, a Canadian doctor and teacher who is best known for his memorial poem “In
Flanders Fields,” was born on November 30, 1872, in Guelph, Ontario

The poem highlights several contrasts: the crosses on the fields, symbolizing human
sacrifice, and the larks singing bravely in the sky; their singing versus the "guns
below"; the men that are now dead and lie buried in fields when a short while ago they
were alive and loved. It is somehow very difficult for the human soul to unite the
beauty of nature, singing birds, love and beautiful colours, and the squalor of
mechanical violence and destruction into one consistent picture. We tend to associate
spring, singing larks and golden sunshine with beauty. But reality can be different and
not all poets use poetic language to describe it. John MacCrae uses simple language,
very direct, very realistic. He calls on those at home to acknowledge that their fight has
not been in vain, they must hold the torch high. "Take up our quarrel with the foe".
The fight does not end here, it cannot be left at that.

Several of the poems touch on themes much more personal, dealing with the loss of
love and the men who will never realize their gifts, talents and potential. The following
poem is an example of the poems written as a response to 'In Flanders Fields'. It is
written by a woman called Edith Nesbit.
Alice Meynell (1847-1922) was a British writer, editor, critic, and suffragist, now
remembered mainly as a poet. One of her famous poems:

Summer in England

The contrast between the beauty of spring and the squalor of the war is a theme in
many poems, as we saw in the previous examples. Meynell uses more details and also
more poetic language when describing this particular summer: the light that fell on
London, the white houses lined out by the sun. She uses images of the sun, the sky and
the moon as having human qualities: of the sky as having "walked the world"; of the
moon in "stroking the bread within the sheaves" and "looking 'twixt the apples". But
suddenly, while all this loveliness is going on in England, "the armies died convulsed".
Our attention shifts to a completely different reality. The "chaste young silver sun that
softly went up", made even more beautiful because of the alliteration, is in horrible
contrast with the thousand shattered men. The contrast becomes even more horrible
when their remains are described as "one wet corruption" heaping the plain, and at the
same time deeply pitiful because the reader is reminded of the pain these men suffered:
"A league long throb of pain".

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) The man he killed

English novelist and poet who set much of his work in Wessex, his name for the
counties of southwestern England.

The theme of the poem is universal for all wars: the dilemma of people feeling
sympathy on a personal basis for their political enemies. The language is simple, the
soldier in the poem is a simple man: he has not realized the possibility of finding
himself faced with this predictable problem. As he is telling the story of his encounter
with this supposed "enemy" to an imaginary friend, he becomes aware of a curious
discrepancy between his own feelings and reality: if only he had met this man that is
doomed to be his enemy somewhere else, in different times, they would probably have
become friends. But just because there is a war going on, this very same person has to
be killed. It is obvious that the men in the poem are no true-blue soldiers or heroic
warriors; they happened to join the army because they were out of a job and could think
of nothing better to do. Now they are subjected to their insentient fate: one of them is
going to shoot the other.

Ezra Pound The return

American poet and critic, a supremely discerning and energetic entrepreneur of the arts
who did more than any other single figure to advance a “modern” movement in English
and American literature. (1885-1972)

The poem is taken from his work 'Personae'. As to form it is completely different from
previous poetry; it has no rhyme scheme, pentameter or fixed metronome. The
language is different, too. It does not give any realistic details about the horrors of the
battlefield such as Owen's, nor invoke romantic images of nature such as Sassoon's. Its
strength does not lie in playing upon idealistic patriotism as does Brooke. As to
contents it is full of images that appeal to our senses and emotions simultaneously.

They do not even reflect their own personal bravery of having stared into the face of
death, of having held their own: they return "with fear, as half awakened" and do not
even have the will left to support each other: "one by one". They are so pitiable that we
cannot begin to remember that once these men felt sure of their victory: "Wing'd with
Awe"; the snow has to remind us by turning back and addressing us: do not be
mistaken, these are the same men that considered themselves "inviolable".

James Joyce Dubliners

Irish novelist noted for his experimental use of language and exploration of new
literary methods in such large works of fiction as Ulysses (1882-1941)

“There was no hope for him this time: it was the third stroke. Night after night I had
passed the house (it was vacation time) and studied the lighted square of window: and
night after night I had found it lighted in the same way, faintly and evenly. If he was
dead, I thought, I would see the reflection of candles on the darkened blind for I knew
that two candles must be set at the head of a corpse. He had often said to me: “I am not
long for this world,” and I had thought his words idle. Now I knew they were true”.

Irony

One of the prominent trends of poetry and other kinds of literature during the first
world war was a persistent propensity for irony. At the onset, the war was greeted with
a sort of ironic enthusiasm, with soldier-poets such as Julian Grenfell professing that
“I adore war. It is like a big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic. I have never
been so well or so happy.” (12) The nature of the war, costly as it was in so many
different ways stood in stark contrast to the flood of propaganda that was being pushed
by the government in an attempt to drum up more support for the war, often to attract
new volunteers in the face of overwhelming casualties being suffered on a regular
basis. In their works, poets like Grenfell continued to mock such propaganda that
glorified the war or service in it, having experienced the horrors of the trenches
firsthand and relating the reality of the war through their writing.
Soldier’s Point of View

Much of the poetry produced by the “trench poets” presented the war from the point of
view of the average soldier, depicting in graphic detail the sights and experiences that
were their lives day in and day out that the people back at home never saw, from
descriptions of combat, to the sordid living conditions, to the nightmarish instances of
chemical warfare and the general feelings of hopelessness that the soldiers often faced.
Beginning of Modernism

“The excitement, however, came to a terrible climax in 1914 with the start of the First
World War, which wiped out a generation of young men in Europe, catapulted Russia
into a catastrophic revolution, and sowed the seeds for even worse conflagrations in
the decades to follow. By the war’s end in 1918, the centuries-old European domination
of the world had ended and the “American Century” had begun. For artists and many
others in Europe, it was a time of profound disillusion with the values on which a whole
civilization had been founded. But it was also a time when the avante-garde
experiments that had preceded the war would, like the technological wonders of the
airplane and the atom, inexorably establish a new dispensation, which we call
modernism.” – A Brief Guide to Modernism, poets.org

Religious Views

Much of the writing being produced in Britain during the war was religiously charged,
or at least carried religious themes or evoked religious imagery, such as in Eva Dobell’s
“Advent 1916” where she describes the timely return of Christ in her dreams as he
visits the battlefields and compares the fallen soldiers to him, saying that they are
“crucified” for the sake of others. Sometimes, it was used to drum up support for the
war, positing that God was on the side of the British and that they would be protected
as a result such as in Harold Begbie’s “Fall In” where he urges young men to join the
war effort, proclaiming that “England’s call is God’s”. Others, particularly a few years
into the conflict, expressed a deep internal conflict between their religious beliefs and
the realities that they faced that called said beliefs into question.