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English Poetry in WW1
The poetry of the years preceding the First World War was characterised by a sharp distinction between the avant-guarde groups and those poets that were still influenced by the Victorian Romantic tradition. The latter are usually described as the Georgian poets [E1], owing their name to an anthology, “Georgian Poetry”, published in the reign of George V [E1] [I1]. Among these writers Rubert Brooke and Walter De La Mare; but also Edward Thomas [E1] is associated with the Georgians because he shared their taste and themes. These poets employed the conventions of diction, looking for guidance to the Romantics and the Victorians. They felt sympathy for specifically English elements, such as the countryside as a place for escapist idylls, and remained indifferent or hostile to the revolution in sensibility and techinique inaugurated by W.B. Yeats [E1]
[I1], E. Pound [E1] [I1] and T.s Eliot [E1] [I1] [F1] .
The First World War was welcomed with enthusiasm. Thousands of young men volunteered for military service in the early months of the war; most of them regarded the conflict as an adventure undertaken for noble ends. It was not until the slaughter on the Somme in 1916 [E1] [I1] [F1] that this sense of pride and exhilaration was replaced by ever-growing doubt and disillusionment. The toll in human lives on the so-called “Western-Front”, the line of trenches running from North-West France to Switzerland, was terrible. For the soldiers, life in the trenches was hell because of the rain and mud, the decaying bodies the rats fed on, the repeated bombings and the use of poison gas werfare. The common soldiers were the first to apprehend the horror and suffering of the war in their full array, whereas the officers, thanks to their position of privilege and responsibility, saw the conflict in a more heroic light. Almost from the beginning the soldiers improvised verses which, precisely because they were rough, genuine, obscene songs of the trenches, did not reach the ears of the literate people living comfortably at home. However, there was a group of poets who actually experienced the fighting, and in most cases lost their lives in the conflict, who managed to represent modern warfare in a realistic and unconventional way, and to awaken the conscience of the readers to the horros of the war. These poets are known as “the War Poets” [E1] [E2] [E3]. They first described what trench life or death by gas was like, but also revealed the sense of exaltation and the spirit of adventure that marked the first years of the war. The first response was, in fact, a sort of romantic conviction, supported by propaganda and by a deep sense of patriotic duty, which drove a lot of young idealists to volunteer. Relevant to this point is Sir Herbert Read’s remark in “Annals of Innocence and Experience”:
“It must be remembered that in 1914 our conception of war was completely unreal. We had vague childish memories of the Boer War, and from these and from a general diffusion of Kiplingesque sentiments, we managed to infuse into war a decided element of adventurous romance. War still appealed to the imagination”.
As the war went on, however, this attitude changed. Confronted with the actual face of warfare, the poets turned to a more realistic sort of poetry, describing the horror of battles, unmasking the split between the soldiers at the front and the high command in their offices and denouncing the dangers of “reported war” to the civilians at home. They were not writing from “without” but from “within” the war, inspired by their own experiences and by the greater and lesser tragedies of thousands of unknown people involved in a nightmarish reality. Their value lies in the unconventional, anthiretorical way they dealt with the horrors of modern warfare, and in a certain measure of experimentalism which emerged in the choice of a violent, everyday language.
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