While Canadian literary histories rarely talk about its WWI war poets (using instead the war years as a convenient chronological marker), Canadian poets of all kinds and talents – major, minor, professional, amateur, prolific, and occasional – were determined to hold forth, in verse form, about the war and its enthusiasms. This chapter examines Canadian war poetry (from the front lines and the home front) for its varied commitments to a shifting constellation of ideas about aesthetic power, gendered patriotism, and embodied pain – all of which are framed or refracted by abiding concerns with colonial nationalism. As it happened or as it was remembered, in Canada the First World War was framed as ‘the progenitor of good’, according to historian Jonathan F. Vance – and the poets contributed to that effort, even as they revealed the attendant anxiety and struggle of doing so.

The accelerated pace of decolonization by the 1950s led many Britons to engage with questions of colonial nationalism. The Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF) was one of the largest postwar British civil society associations that addressed these questions. This chapter examines the MCF’s work as an international advocacy organization and a central node in transnational anti-colonial networks. It highlights similarities between the MCF and the initiatives pursued by some of the UN’s development agencies. It addresses the MCF's assistance to colonial nationalist movements in Africa, its role as an ally and supporter of African human rights activists, and its active role in identifying and combatting racism as a political and human rights problem at home in Britain.