95. Radical Feeling in the Poetry of WWI

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

But in the decades following the war, a very different kind of poem would come to be “seen as the truth,” as Max Egremont puts it in his new anthology Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew. These poems showed the war as “a series of failed attacks from water-filled trenches across lunar landscapes threaded with barbed wire, in an atmosphere of dread, under the command of stupid, moustachioed, out-of-touch generals.” This picture emerged in part from the work of a number of poets who, like McCrae, fought in the war but who, unlike McCrae, did not care to produce propaganda. (Rupert Brooke, who died of an infected mosquito bite towards the beginning of the war, did write overtly patriotic verse; he is the exception.) Some of the names (Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg) will be familiar to general readers; others (Ivor Gurney, Robert Nichols, Edward Thomas, Julian Grenfell, Charles Sorley, Edmund Blunden) less so. Of the eleven poets included, six—Sorley, Owen, Rosenberg, Brooke, Thomas, and Grenfell—died in the war, while Sassoon, Blunden, and Graves all went on to write valuable war memoirs. (…)

The war poets were radical not in form but in feeling. These men—mostly officer-class products of the English elite—register in their basically traditional verse a bitter disillusionment with the official narratives of their own culture that is, in places, nearly revolutionary. One measure of that disillusionment is the distance between Rupert Brooke’s patriotic “Peace”—“Now, God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, / And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping”—and Edward Thomas’s disgust at home front jingoism in “This is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong”: “Beside my hate of one fat patriot / My hatred of the Kaiser is love true.” / Len Gutkin, Boston Review