Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-gb8f7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-29T17:43:39.952Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

3 - The Great War, history, and the English lyric

from Part I - The Great War in British literary culture

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 May 2006

Vincent Sherry
Affiliation:
Tulane University, Louisiana
Get access

Summary

Arms and the muse

In the BBC TV series Blackadder Goes Forth the flying-ace Lord Flasheart says: “I'm sick of this damn war - the blood, the noise, the endless poetry.” This echoes satire during the Great War itself, as when the Wipers Times ”regrett[ed] to announce that an insidious disease is affecting the Division, and the result is a hurricane of poetry.” Since a “strange scabies scribendi” also afflicted “civilian verse-makers,” and newspapers printed poems, poetry virtually became a mass medium in Britain - a phenomenon unmatched in other combatant countries. Catherine Reilly's bibliography lists 2,225 published poets and (1914-22) about 50 anthologies with titles like Soldier Songs, The Muse in Arms, From the Front: Trench Poetry. While most of this outpouring has been remaindered by history, it set the scene for poetry conditioned by the war, poetry that internalized the war, poetry that remains a model for public poetry. Great War poetry is read, imitated, and quoted in shifting contexts. Before the Iraq War, the anthology 101 Poems Against War appeared. Its cover quotes Wilfred Owen ( “All a poet can do today is warn ”), as does an afterword by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion: “Towards the end of the First World War, amidst the squalor and tragedy of the Western Front, something fundamental changed . . . The patriotic imperative 'Dulce et Decorum Est' became 'that [sic] old lie,' and . . . our sense of 'a war poet' was transformed.”

Type
Chapter
Information
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Save book to Kindle

To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.

Available formats
×

Save book to Dropbox

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.

Available formats
×

Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

Available formats
×