Abstract
The literature of the First World War, to begin with that one, illustrates a tragic paradox: The most destructive of human enterprises can nourish the most creative. Probably no single event in history allowed the transformation of so many intense personal experiences—often presented for outspokenly didactic reasons or as cries of impotent frustration or as necessary therapy—into works of art that transcended the limited circumstances of their birth. No responsible account of this century's imaginative literature could omit Robert Graves'sGood-bye to All That, Ford Madox Ford'sParade's End, William Faulkner'sSoldiers' PayandA Fable, Emest Hemingway's AFarewell to Arms, William March'sCompany K, Henri Barbusse'sUnder Fire, Jaroslav Hašek'sThe Good Soldier: Schweik, Arnold Zweig'sThe Case of Sergeant Grisha, or the lyric poetry of Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, and Charles Hamilton Sorley. To this list might be added such seminal works of modernism as T.S. Eliot'sThe Waste Land, Ezra Pound'sHugh Selwyn Mauberley, and Virginia Woolf'sJacob's Room.These are not “war poems” or “war novels,“ in any narrow sense, but they clearly would not exist had there been no war.
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