The War Poets (WW1)

The war poets are those whose works were strongly influenced by World War I, known in Britain as the Great War.  In turn, their writings influenced how Britons thought and felt about war and even how the country planned for future war.  The war poets include Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Ivor Gurney, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg, May Wedderburn Cannan, Robert Graves, David Jones, and others.  Thomas Hardy and A. E. Housman were contemporaries.  However, they are not classified among the war poets, though each devoted one or more poems to war. Hardy, for example, wrote Channel Firing and In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations.’(Greenblatt, 1877 and 1884)  One of Housman’s contributions was Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries. (Greenblatt, 1953)  The writings, even the lives, of the war poets were dominated by the unspeakable horrors of war.

Peter Hart, a British military historian, who compiled a history of the signature battle of that war, the battle of the Somme, wrote somewhat dismissively of the war poets when he penned—

The sheer horror of the Somme [a battle that lasted from July 1 to mid-November, 1916] has for a long time been part of British twentieth century mythology.  The overall context of the Great War has long been forgotten and the teaching of the subject reduced to an adjunct of English literature that can be brutally summarized in just five words: ‘the pity of it all.’  Politicians are portrayed as Machiavellian, but simultaneously weak, generals are stupid, soldiers are brave helpless victims and war poets—war poets are the later-day saints made flesh. (Hart, 528)

If Hart’s observation is accurate, one would expect to find correlation to it in the war poets’ poems themselves.  And, indeed, one does.  Wilfred Owen, for example, takes aim at those, principally politicians, who mouthed platitudes about it being such a “wonderful and great honor to fight and die for your country” in his memorable poem Dulce et Decorum Est. (Owen)

Rupert Brooke idolizes the soldier in The Soldier, (Greenblatt, 1955) but events soon showed his depiction “a ridiculous anachronism in the face of the realities of trench warfare,” according to the editors of the Norton Anthology of English Literature. (Greenblatt, 1955)  Siegfried Sassoon picks up the theme again, however, in They, countering the bishop’s patriotic platitudes of defeating the Anti-Christ and planting an honorable race with the stark realities of the wounded and maimed returning from the front. (Greenblatt, 1960)  Yes, they’re changed men alright, he says in effect, one’s lost both legs, another is blind, still another is shot through the lungs.  Brave, helpless victims all.

“Stupid” generals come in for it in Sassoon’s The General.  The troops likened the old man’s staff to “incompetent swine.”  The general himself they called a “cheery old card” who got them “done in,” by his (stupid) “plan of attack.” (Greenblatt, 1961-62)

We also find that, unlike the historian, Mr. Hart, all of the war poets served in some capacity in the war.  Robert Brooke was a commissioned officer.  His poem, The Soldier is perhaps his best known work, describing the place on some “corner of a foreign field,” where a British soldier had fallen in battle as “forever England.” (Greenblatt, 1955)  Edward Thomas, author of Tears, served on the Western Front in the awful year of 1917, as did Ivor Gurney, who was gassed, wounded, and returned to England. (Lives)  Sassoon fought at Mametz Wood and in the Somme Offensive, as did his friend Owen. (Greenblatt, 1960)  Isaac Rosenberg was killed in action. (Greenblatt, 1966)  His poem, Break of Day in the Trenches tells of everyday life during the war, specifically the aspect of sharing the trenches with so many rats.  May Wedderburn Canaan was a Red Cross Volunteer—her poem, Rouen, captures the essence of what her wartime activities must have been like. She also worked in intelligence in the war office in Paris. (Greenblatt, 1981). Robert Graves was wounded.  David Jones served nearly the entire war.  His epic, In Parenthesis, part poetry and part prose, is a kind of study of war.

They wrote not in high judgment of the war, but of the sheer pitiable experience of having to fight in it.  Their poems bleed the common themes of war, death, maiming, the senselessness of war, war’s atrocities, life in wartime, the suffering caused by war, and, of course, ‘the pity of it all.’ In his poem, Tears, Edward Thomas captures the sadness brought by war, of the tears that fall until there are no more tears, the solemn silence, the silence that still lingers even when the marching flourishes are played.  These, he wrote, “told me truths I had not dreamed.” (Greenblatt, 1957).  Sassoon’s The Rear Guard captures the wretchedness of incessant trench warfare, its chaos, and the all too common experience of stumbling over dead comrades in arms.  Death, too, is the theme of Rosenberg’s Dead Man’s Dump, which provides a glimpse of the macabre battlefield task of gathering dead bodies and carting them to the place where they are to be burned and buried where “Earth has waited for them.” (Rosenberg)

Wilfred Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth captures the interminable, inexorable march toward death “as cattle,” made by so many of England’s innocent young men.  His Apologia Pro Poemate Meo flings image after image of war-caused suffering, short of death: “mud cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled;” the “soft silk of eyes that look and long;” “the bandage of the arm that drips;” “hoarse oaths;” “the silentness of duty;” “shell storms;” and “whose world is but the trembling of a flare.” (Greenblatt, 1972)

England’s sufferings under the heavy hand of the Great War were deep and lasting, affecting the national psyche well into the second world war and beyond.  In a single day’s fighting in the Somme—in just that one day alone, Britain suffered 57, 470 casualties, 19,240 of which were dead. (Hart, 211)  “The whole British Empire lost 908,371 dead in the entire course of the War.” (Hart, 528)  The magnitude of such losses affected Britain’s war planning where, almost thirty years later, the date of the Normandy landings in World War II was pushed back several times in order for there to be more American—as opposed to British—men available for the invasion of France.  The war poets, whether or not they were “latter-day saints made flesh,” captured the spirit of their times.  Tennysonlike, they were often the voice of their nation.  But for many of those who lost their sons in the Great War, the writings of these poets must have been a kind of link between them and the last sufferings of their loved ones, so many of whom never made it home again.  It is for this, no less than the other, that their work has had such a lasting impact upon Britain and its literature.

Works Cited

Greenblatt, Stephen and M.H. Abrams.  Eds.   The Norton Anthology to English Literature.  8^th Ed., Vol. 2.  New York: W. W. Norton, 2006.

Hart, Peter. The Somme: The Darkest Hour on the Western Front. New York: Pegasus Books, 2008.

Lives of War Poets. The War Poetry Website, http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/biogs99.htm#IVOR
%20GURNEY, accessed March 3, 2012.

Owen, Wilfred. Dulce et Decorum Est. The War Poetry Website, http://www.warpoetry.co.uk
/owen1.html, accessed February 21, 2012.

Rosenberg, Isaac. Dead Man’s Dump. The First World War Digital Archive, http://www.oucs.ox
.ac.uk/ww1lit/collections/item/3268, accessed March 4, 2012