Where are the War Poets?

Abstract

The poets of the First World War performed a posthumous disservice to the poets of the Second World War. Rupert Brooke, Julian Grenfell, Herbert Asquith, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon and others less well known had created public expectations of what war poets should be. Immediately upon the outbreak of war in August 1914, Rupert Brooke had issued a ‘trumpet call’ — soon followed by the productions of other young writers — declaring that a new spirit of heroism could now replace the ‘sickness’ of the ‘pre-1914 world’.1 No such outburst of spirit was evident by the time of the Dunkirk evacuation in May 1940. Still, the British public steadfastly continued to associate poetry with war. An article entitled ‘To the Poets of 1940’, appended to a review of the year’s poetry in the TLS of 30 December 1939, called upon poets in wartime to rise to the occasion once again: ‘Here we are faced with an undeniable repetition of history, with nothing original, nothing unique about it. Clearly wars and revolutions are destroying the old social order of the world. But we need not despair of the birth of a new and finer order. It is for the poets to sound the trumpet call’.2