The Trench Poets (The War

Poets)
As the WWI breaks out, a great number of young people die
in the trenches. Most felt their duty to do so, they acted on
an impulse, thinking it was an honourable thing to go and
fight, even die for ones country. War was glorified as a noble
thing; it was the question of honour. That was the usual way
in which poetry was written. In poetry, war was usually
depicted as an honourable, glorious affair. Thousands of
young men left their homes with this conviction. However,
those very few who survived the war, returned changed,
wiser, more cynical, they experienced the horrors of the war
first hand. Many turned to writing, became artists, trying to
escape from the trauma of war. The name war poetry might
be misleading somewhat, because it is actually the anti-war
poetry, the poetry presented attack against the whole
ideology of nobleness of war. They are not modernists, in
terms of form or language they use. They are modern. It is a
kind of modern poetry. Naturalistic and painfully realistic,
with shocking images and language, intending to show what
the war really like, the war poetry showed the mud, the
trenches, death, and sometimes even compassion for
soldiers. The overall massage through such poetry is that the
war is brutal, vicious, meaningless, stupid and barbarous;
there was nothing honourable, glorious, or decorous about
the war. The daily experience of soldiers on the front was of
mental disorders, nervous breakdown, caused by constant
fear and pressure. The Trench Poets question the very notion
of war, heroism, patriotism, etc., they attacked the values of
the pre war society in general. The war poetry is a negation
of Georgian poetry. Georgian poets were considered as
modern as one can be. They were very patriotic; their poetry
was very artificial, bombastic, their favourite themes were
the beauty of the English countryside and their poetry lacked
any poetic or philosophical depth. They regularly presented
war as a noble affair, as an opportunity for the young
Englishmen to ennoble their lives and turn from ordinary
citizens to heroes. To them the war was seen as something

giving a chance to young people to become ennobled by the

experience of the war. However, the war poets adopted quite
opposite views of the war and of the Georgian society. Most
prominent among them were Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred
Owen and Isaac Rosenberg.
As a conclusion on war poetry, we have to say it differs from
the poetry which preceded it, namely the Georgian poetry.
So a clear break is made from the Georgian poetry. They
communicate strong anti war messages. For war poets the
war in unnatural, meaningless, foolish, brutal, enterprise in
which there can be no winners, it is not a noble, heroic
enterprise.
The First World War or Great War was the first military
conflict in history that evoked the widest possible spectrum
of literary responses, ranging from enthusiastic patriotic
affirmation to disillusioned reductio ad absurdum. The poets
Rupert Brooke, Robert Nichols, Julian Grenfell, and Charles
Sorley hailed the War as a renewal and purification, in timehallowed terms and forms. The traditional commonplace
metaphors gained new life from the feeling that the sickly
sluggishness and suicidal subversionism of the Decadent
Movement and the Fin de Sicle had to be overcome: a sick
organism must be radically purged, foul weather must be
cleared by a purifying thunderstorm or "stahlgewitter",
wintry stagnation must be broken up to yield to regenerative
vitality. The poets Rupert Brooke and Rudyard Kipling praised
the sacrificial benefits of the War. At the extreme subversive
end of that wide spectrum of literary responses to the Great
War stood those War poets who would more properly be
called trench poets: Edward Thomas (born 1878), Frederic
Manning (born 1882), Siegfried Sassoon (born 1886), Ivor
Gurney and Isaac Rosenberg (both born 1890), Richard
Aldington and Osbert Sitwell (both born 1892), Wilfred Owen
and Herbert Read (both born 1893), Robert von Ranke
Graves (born 1895), and Edmund Blunden (born 1896).
Beside these major trench poets and conscious artists,
scores of other names of trench soldiers could be added,
whose shock erupted into verse, and whose poems are
either still in manuscript or were printed in cheap rare

editions. Some of them have been recently (and more or less

deservedly) salvaged from oblivion.10 These soldier poets
were the first to experience the radical innovations, the
breakdown of the old forms and norms of warfare as
mirroring the final breakdown of all the crumbling forms and
norms, that 'Crisis of European Civilization'11 which
shattered all the brittle traditional beliefs. They experienced
the War as a meaningless gap in time and history, raising
their very personal and subjective experience to the rank of
a general philosophy.12 They belonged to what Gertrude
Stein and Ernest Hemingway called "the lost generation".13
Their pitiful or angry exposure of the absurdity of the Great
War, as revealing the absurdity of life and death in general,
proved a signal contribution to the breakthrough of literary
'Modernism'.14
Trench poetry proper could only be written under the shock
of the immediate experience of that radically new kind of
warfare: either in the trenches themselves (as in the case of
Isaac Rosenberg, who had only one brief leave in his twenty
months at the Front)15, or in hospital (as in the case of
Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, who were wounded in
the trenches and sent home for recovery, where they met),
or immediately after the War (as in the case of Edmund
Blunden, who survived sane), or in mental homes (as in the
case of Ivor Gurney, who survived insane and relived his
experience until his death in 1937).16 The freshness of this
shock did not allow the trench poets to gain distance to their
experience of total chaos, to relate it to new metaphysical or
anthropological concepts, to discern new purposes in selfsacrifice and war, to re-establish a theodicy.17 Such distance
could only be either in time, after the immediate experience,
or in space, removed from the immediate experience. Thus,
Robert Graves later overcame the absurd view of life and
death expressed in his trench poetry, Over the Brazier
(1916) and Fairies and Fusiliers (1917), and elimitated these
poems from later collections of his poetry. Thus, after a lapse
of almost twenty years, the Welsh poet David Jones could
rediscover a secret universal meaning in his very personal

suffering in the trenches. His long epic of mixed poetry and

prose, In Parenthesis (1937), written on the model of T. S.
Eliot's Waste Land (1922) with its conglomeration of
archetypes of ritual and mystery, succeeded in unbracketing
the individual trench experience and relating it to previous
noble wars and their epics of heroic self-sacrifice (such as La
Chanson de Roland and Y Gododdin).18 Thus, the poetess
May Wedderburn Cannan, who was a volunteer nurse behind
the lines, and the poetess Jessie Pope and the popular
novelist Mrs Humphry Ward, who never came near the front
line, could write affirmative poems and tales restating
Christian sacrifice and Britain's just cause.