Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I The Great War in British literary culture
- 1 British war memoirs
- 2 The British novel and the war
- 3 The Great War, history, and the English lyric
- 4 British women’s writing of the Great War
- 5 The Great War and literary modernism in England
- Part II The world war: Pan-European views, transatlantic prospects
- Part III Postwar engagements
- Guide to Further Reading
- Index
- Series List
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
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Part I The Great War in British literary culture
- 1 British war memoirs
- 2 The British novel and the war
- 3 The Great War, history, and the English lyric
- 4 British women’s writing of the Great War
- 5 The Great War and literary modernism in England
- Part II The world war: Pan-European views, transatlantic prospects
- Part III Postwar engagements
- Guide to Further Reading
- Index
- Series List
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.”
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- Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2005
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