https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/70139/the-poetry-of-world-war-i

I appreciate this post.

When I taught senior English I always included a unit on the War Poets. Harrowing, beautiful stuff.

This quote from the site is interesting:

Quote:

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You may notice that more poems in 1914 and 1915 extoll the old virtues of honor, duty, heroism, and glory, while many later poems after 1915 approach these lofty abstractions with far greater skepticism and moral subtlety, through realism and bitter irony. Though horrific depictions of battle in poetry date back to Homer's Iliad, the later poems of WWI mark a substantial shift in how we view war and sacrifice.

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About 1990 I read The Great War and Modern Memory, a great book by Paul Fussell, a WWII combat veteran who used the GI Bill to become an English professor.

His thesis, proven quite conclusively as far as I am concerned, is that the more realistic, anti-war poetry written during WWI was first ignored by survivors and families who wanted to wring some meaning from their suffering and loss, and then forgotten. The darker works remained buried until resurrected by activist university students in America opposed to the Vietnam War.

For instance, my mother (born 1919) vividly recalled reciting "In Flanders Fields" for Decoration Day commemorations in Somerville, TX, but had never read "Dulce et Decorum est" until I shared it with her in 1970.

Thank you again for this post.

I love Kiplings poetry with the noticeable change after his son is killed in WW1

I lived in Belgium for several years, I picked up a book of ww1 poetry and used to sit at random places around Ypres and read it. Wilfred Owen is my favorite.

This slim volume is an excellent sampling of WWI poetry and beautifully illustrated, too. Highly recommend.

WWI

ja86 said:

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I lived in Belgium for several years, I picked up a book of ww1 poetry and used to sit at random places around Ypres and read it. Wilfred Owen is my favorite.

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Owen is a fantastic read. It's sad to think of what might have been.