Whilst Chesterton's war poetry does not describe trench warfare or the conditions endured by soldiers, it nonetheless made a significant impact. Excerpts from Chesterton's poetry including the aforementioned have been digitised by the British Library, providing an interesting point of comparison with the works of the poets who saw active military service.
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British Library, Jessie Pope Before the war Jessie Pope had been a successful writer of comedy verse, and a prolific contributor to newspapers and magazines.
Bangor University, Hedd Wyn manuscripts Although the men were more physically affected by the Great War, women were also emotionally affected. Between their high level of stress from assuming the role of men in the workplace and home life and their sadness from being separated from their husbands, women found writing as a means of expressing their feelings and drastic situations.
Women who became nurses used their exposure to and observations of wounded soldiers and hospital life as the main subjects of their writing. She married quartermaster-sergeant Roland Leig hton, whose writing also played a major role in British literature during the war.
They wrote letters and poems to each other while he was away before his untimely death in the war. Eva Dobell drew from her experiences as a volunteer nurse for inspiration when writing. She wrote to boost the morale of the wounded soldiers and was known to write about specific patients.
A fan of sonnets, Eva was deeply affected by the war, which is easily visible in her poetry. I dreamt last night Christ came to earth again To bless His own. My soul from place to place On her dream-quest sped, seeking for His face Through temple and town and lovely land, in vain.
One of the prominent trends of poetry and other kinds of literature during the first world war was a persistent propensity for irony. It is like a big picnic without the objectlessness of a picnic. I have never been so well or so happy. In their works, poets like Grenfell continued to mock such propaganda that glorified the war or service in it, having experienced the horrors of the trenches firsthand and relating the reality of the war through their writing.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned out backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us!
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Buchan had been writing about the war from its beginning. Detailed accounts of battles appeared in the adventure stories Greenmantle , and Mr Standfast , sequels to the phenomenally successful thriller The Thirty-Nine Steps Many American authors and publishers were also equally engaged in promoting the war effort.
Although the war may have seemed distant to the citizens of the United States, its impact was nevertheless felt. Furthermore, with its immense wealth and resources, the USA was the target of much Allied propaganda. As mentioned above, European writers with large American readerships were encouraged to help the Allied cause with their literary outputs. Moreover, American writers popular in Europe were reciprocating in the name of the war effort. Although the United States did not enter the war until April , there was still support for the Allied cause before this date, particularly amongst some of the elites of the east coast who felt a European war might resolve some of the social problems they were experiencing at home.
In , Edith Wharton , writer of such literary works as The House of Mirth and Ethan Frome , wrote The Marne , a novella about Americans caught up in the invasion of France in A year later she wrote A Son at the Front , although it was not published until Wharton had visited France at the beginning of the war, and in published a collection of her journalism, Fighting France.
From the beginning she had, like many in the European combatant nations, viewed the war as a clash of civilisation, and urged her fellow Americans to recognise the threat of Germany.
Patriotic support for the war did not necessarily conform to a pro-British or French perspective. Such sentiments were not limited to American onlookers.
In Britain, some socialists such as H. Wells enthusiastically espoused pro-war propaganda in the belief that out of the carnage of war would spring a new utopian society. Left-wing authors in other nations saw the war in similar ways.
American writing about the war, then, reflected a range of reactions to the conflict. Before the declaration of war in , pro-war fiction was produced but did not necessarily reflect public sentiment.
Even when the United States entered the fray, public support was not guaranteed, particularly in the face of reports from the fighting fronts. Their nation may have been directly involved, but for most Americans, as John T. Of all the major combatant nations, France was perhaps the most affected by the Great War. With blood being shed on French soil, cultural mobilisation was widespread across French society.
Moreover, because of the proximity of the fighting there was less need for an official gathering of literary luminaries to spread propaganda , as had been seen at Wellington House. These people were not responding to a top-down directive from a centralised propaganda agency, although they often received establishment approval. The interpretation of these works could often contradict the intentions of the author.
Duhamel, who had signed up as an army surgeon at the beginning of the war, resented the view of his work as supporting the war effort; he had intended Civilisation and Vie des martyres Lives of the Martyrs: to condemn the experience of the conflict.
Given the immediacy of the war in France, many established French writers, including Henri Barbusse , Guillaume Apollinaire , and the aforementioned Duhamel, joined the French army upon the outbreak of war. These were not young men spurred on by youthful naivety; Barbusse was forty-one when he enlisted, while Apollinaire was thirty-four. In he, like his friend the Swiss-born poet Blaise Cendrars , attained French citizenship.
Yet many readers and critics at the time saw the novel as a work of naturalism, an almost factual report of what was happening in the trenches.
Moreover, it espoused the notion that the war, however horrible, was necessary to defeat German militarism and pave the way for a new, egalitarian society. Within two years of publication it had sold , copies. His rejection of the war came after Many civilians were also engaged in producing war literature. Indeed, it could be said that the novel was the art-form through which the French experience of the war was distilled most successfully.
It was eventually published in With many authors called upon to fight, and some publishers refusing involvement with works unconnected to the war, the majority of literature was patriotic and aimed at a popular audience.
In Germany , as in many other combatant nations, the cultural mobilisation of society saw much literature produced about the war, but little of literary merit. Nevertheless, between and the conflict was a subject for popular fiction, and, as in Britain and France, newspapers were filled with poetry written by amateurs with more enthusiasm than talent.
From its onset in , many German intellectuals declared their support for the war. Broadly speaking, they strongly espoused notions of German superiority and entitlement. As in France, some writers, such as fifty-one-year-old Richard Dehmel , had immediately signed up to serve at the front, while others supported the war effort from behind the lines. One of the leading German literary figures, Thomas Mann , wholeheartedly supported the war, in opposition to his brother Heinrich Mann Walter Flex enlisted in Earlier in the war, the opinions of those who did not support the national battle for Kultur were either rendered silent by the censor [30] or remained part of an ineffectual, ignored elite.
Fritz von Unruh , for example, wrote anti-militarist material throughout the war. Der Opfergang Way of Sacrifice: was written at Verdun in , but published after the war. His tragedy Ein Geschlecht A Family was published in Unruh left Germany in This decline in enthusiasm on the home front would form the basis for much of the interwar literature of Germany. It should also be remembered that German influence spread into the Austro-Hungarian Empire , and was reflected in their literary output.
Given the breadth and structure of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, reactions to the war there were less homogenous. Of all the main combatants, Austria-Hungary had perhaps the most ineffectual propaganda agency. Nevertheless, there were several important literary responses, although some of the leading Austrian literary figures of the period such as Robert Musil and Stefan Zweig , are perhaps more associated with German intellectual circles.
As in other nations, important pre literary figures enlisted in the armed forces on the outbreak of war. Musil had edited several literary magazines between and , and published in the acclaimed Die neue Rundschau. He served as an officer during the war, and was decorated for his service on the Italian Front. Utilising a range of sources of the period, from newspaper articles to overheard conversations, it depicted the war as the product of propaganda, attacking the parasitic press, as well as generals and governments.
How widely known the play was across Europe is questionable. Its final version was not published until In Russia literacy was not as widespread as in other nations. Nevertheless there was still a sizeable readership, and at the beginning of the war at least, there was general support from the literary community for the conflict.
At one end of the cultural spectrum there was widespread enthusiasm; popular fiction played a role, but such works often had little interesting to say about the war.
Many popular novels simply grafted pre-war plots about spies or romantic encounters onto a wartime setting. The satirical journal Novyi Satirikon , traditionally anti-tsarist since its establishment in , supported the war from its outbreak.
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