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The Literature of War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2018

Mark Taylor
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Extract

The literature of the First World War, to begin with that one, illustrates a tragic paradox: The most destructive of human enterprises can nourish the most creative. Probably no single event in history allowed the transformation of so many intense personal experiences—often presented for outspokenly didactic reasons or as cries of impotent frustration or as necessary therapy—into works of art that transcended the limited circumstances of their birth. No responsible account of this century's imaginative literature could omit Robert Graves's Good-bye to All That, Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End, William Faulkner's Soldiers' Pay and A Fable, Emest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms, William March's Company K, Henri Barbusse's Under Fire, Jaroslav Hašek's The Good Soldier: Schweik, Arnold Zweig's The Case of Sergeant Grisha, or the lyric poetry of Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, and Charles Hamilton Sorley. To this list might be added such seminal works of modernism as T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's Hugh Selwyn Mauberley, and Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room. These are not “war poems” or “war novels,“ in any narrow sense, but they clearly would not exist had there been no war.

Type
Articles
Information
Worldview , Volume 17 , Issue 10 , October 1974 , pp. 14 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1974

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References

Notes

1. Allen, Walter, “A Literary Aftermath,” in Promise of Greatness: The War of 1914-1918, edited by Panichas, George A. (New York, 1988).Google Scholar

2. Robert Graves, “The Kaiser's War,” in Promise of Greatness.

3. Reprinted in Songs and Poems of the Great War, edited by Donald Tulloch (Worcester, Mass.: February, 1915). The early date at which this large volume appeared is worth noting.

4. A Certain World: A Commonplace Book (New York, 1971).

5. Introduction to Hašek's, Jaroslav The Good Soldier: Schweik (New York, 1963).Google Scholar

6. True, Michael, “War and Poetry,” Confrontation (Spring, 1974).Google Scholar

7. Correlli Barnett, ‘The Illogical Promise,” in Promise of Greatness.

8. Quoted by Press, John in A Map of Modem English Verse (London and New York, 1969).Google Scholar

9. Taylor, A.J.P., A History of the First World War (New York, 1966).Google Scholar

10. Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957).

11. Eleanor Ross Taylor in Poetry (September, 1972). This is by way of explaining why she did not contribute to the “Against the War” issue.

12. Hirsch, E.D. Jr., Validity in Interpretation (New Haven, 1967).Google Scholar