Walter - The New Penguin book of First World War poetry

Looking across the English Channel, he saw that literature had been trodden into the mud by the jack-boot of the Prussian and feared a similar catastrophe would occur in Britain, even if actual invasion was averted. With the publics attention firmly fixed on the war and its progress, those branches of literature which are most delicate, admirable and original were already being dangerously neglected, and this woeful state of affairs would surely continue until peace was once more restored. Whilst the damage might not be permanent, the immediate future looked bleak: the book, he concluded, which does not deal directly and crudely with the complexities of warfare and the various branches of strategy will, from Christmas onwards, not be published at all. In fact the opposite turned out to be true, as Gosse would later ruefully admit. Nowhere is this explosion of creativity more evident than in the hundreds of thousands of poems written and published during the First World War. Within weeks of the German invasion of Belgium, The Times was being inundated by as many as a hundred metrical essays in a single day,

The First World War was, in a very real sense, the first total war: total in that no-one who lived through it could remain untouched by it. But where did Clutton Brocks poets come from? Like most of his fellow-commentators, he failed to address the question of what the historical and cultural circumstances were which led to Britain having such a reserve of untapped poetical potential throughout the four years of the war. Only Edmund Gosse seems to have some inkling: he wrote approvingly of Britain sending out for our national defence in this war a soldiery far more widely and deeply educated than has ever been the case before.years before the war resulted in a boom in both the demand for and the production of printed material during the war years, in particular in the kind of newspapers and magazines which provided so important an outlet for the majority of war poets. In an age when media was almost wholly print-based cinema was relatively in its infancy then poetry was, for most of Edwardian society, a part of everyday life. Contemporary poets such as Sir Alfred Austin, Rudyard Kipling and Henry Newbolt were read not merely for entertainment, but also for the lessons they imparted; as C. K.

Stead has noted, the definition of a major poet in this period was a man who expressed a sound philosophy in verse. If any reader tired of the articulation of Britains sense of its national and imperial identity which these writers supplied and few seemed to have done so for long then A. E. Housmans particularly English lyricism was on hand to satisfy other, more romantic longings. A commitment to accessibility and an emphasis on rhythm and rhyme were crucial elements in these poets work, which meant that it was both immensely popular with ordinary readers and, more crucially, offered a ready-made poetic model for the even the least talented of versifiers when war broke out. For the more literary minded, the emergence of the Imagist and Georgian movements in the years immediately prior to the outbreak of war offered more contemporary and more stimulating models of poetic expression.

Of the two movements, Imagism was the more calculated, seeking as it did to tap into the wave of self-conscious and the influence of both, to a greater or lesser degree, can be traced in much of the poetry written by the better-educated during the war.

Genuinely admired by ordinary readers, they were also critically acclaimed: It is impossible to shred up this beauty for the purpose of criticism. These sonnets are personaland yet the very blood and youth of England seem to find expression in them. They speak not for one heart only, but for all to whom her call has come in the hour of need and found instantly ready. A significant boost to their popularity came on Easter Sunday 1915, when the Dean of St Pauls Cathedral chose The Soldier as the text for his sermon, arguing that the enthusiam of a pure and elevated patriotism has never found a nobler expression and that, in time, Brooke would take rank with our great poets. Brooke, on active Three weeks later, he was dead. Despite dying from septicaemia and not from an enemy bullet, the extravagance of the obituaries which greeted his death Winston Churchill described him as all that one could wish Englands noblest sons to be coupled with the considerable popularity of his sonnets ensured that he rapidly became mythologized as Britains first poetic martyr of the war.