First World War Poetry

Core Idea

The First World War (1914-1918) produced a large body of English poetry written by soldiers, much of it from the Western Front. Early poems such as Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier" (1914) spoke of sacrifice and national honor. Later poems by Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen used graphic imagery, bitter irony and new sound effects to show the suffering of the trenches and to attack the language that sent young men to die. The change from one mode to the other is a standard unit of the British literature survey.

How It's Best Learned

Read Brooke's "The Soldier" and Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" side by side and list the images in each. Ask who the speaker addresses and what each poem wants the reader to feel. Then read Owen's "Strange Meeting" to hear his pararhyme, and Sassoon's "The General" to see satire compressed into a few lines.

Common Misconceptions

• All First World War poetry was anti-war. (Much of the poetry published during the war was patriotic, and many soldiers and civilians wrote verse that supported the war effort. The protest poems became the best known later.)
• The famous war poets were civilians imagining the front. (Owen, Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg served as soldiers. Owen and Rosenberg were killed in 1918.)
• Owen was widely read in his lifetime. (Only a handful of his poems were published before his death. Most appeared in 1920 in a collection edited by Sassoon.)

Explainer

When Britain entered the war in August 1914, many poets wrote as earlier generations had written about battle. Rupert Brooke's sonnet "The Soldier" begins, "If I should die, think only this of me: / That there's some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England." Death becomes a gift, the soldier's body becomes English soil, and the tone is calm and grateful. Brooke died of an infection in April 1915 on his way to Gallipoli, and his poems were widely read as an ideal of patriotic sacrifice.

The war that followed did not match that ideal. Trench warfare on the Western Front brought machine guns, artillery, mud and poison gas. Soldiers who wrote poetry began to find the old words false. Siegfried Sassoon, an officer decorated for bravery, made a public statement against the war in 1917 and was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh. His short satirical poems aim at generals and comfortable civilians. In "The General," a cheerful commander greets his men, and the last line says simply that "he did for them both by his plan of attack."

At Craiglockhart, Sassoon met a younger officer, Wilfred Owen, who was being treated for shell shock. Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" describes men marching "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks," then a gas attack in which one soldier fails to get his mask on in time. The speaker sees him "drowning" in dreams afterward. The poem ends by addressing a reader who urges glory on children, and it calls the Latin motto from Horace, that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country, "The old Lie."

Owen also changed the sound of English verse. In "Strange Meeting," he uses pararhyme: "escaped" and "scooped," "groined" and "groaned." The words almost rhyme but not quite, and the effect is unsettled. He was killed on 4 November 1918, a week before the Armistice. Most of his poems appeared in 1920.

Other voices matter too. Isaac Rosenberg, a private from a poor East London family, wrote "Break of Day in the Trenches" before he was killed in 1918. John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" (1915) inspired the use of the poppy as a symbol of remembrance. Reading these poets together shows how a war changed what English poetry thought it could say.