‘many sisters to many brothers’ British culture in the early twentieth century a narrative arc of prewar innocence to
postwarexperience is both convenient and convincing’.^2 The ways in which the arc
has been circumscribed, articulated, and poetized has largely been the result of this
small group of male poets and their proponents. As Martin Gray points out, the
‘war may be (and usually is) approached through the work of a few poets chosen
by critics as poetically skilful, or self-selected by their ambitious sense of themselves
as ‘‘poets’’ ’.^3 While the reasons for the resonance of these myths surrounding the
literary output of the war have been the subject of much work, what has received
less attention is the way in which the myths surrounding these literary figures have
resulted in the exclusion of other accounts of the war, accounts which spoke to other
kinds of experiences and traumas. Drawing attention to the exclusion of a specific
group—on the basis of gender, race, class, sexuality, and/or nationality—from
an accepted canonical literary history is a fairly standard criticalmodus operandi;
however, while it is not a remarkably innovative argument to make, it is one which,
nevertheless, needs to be repeatedly foregrounded. It is particularly relevant when
considering the poetry of the First World War, which was, from the opening shots
of the war until the 1980s, considered a masculine group enterprise.
For some, like John H. Johnston, this ‘natural’ grouping is a result of thekindof
war: ‘These poets form a natural group by virtue of the fact that they were the first
to deal with the kind of war peculiar to modern civilization; they were the first to
attempt some assessment of the physical and spiritual effects of that kind of war.’^4
The understanding of this poetry as a response to the material conditions of war is
onewhichhasmarkedmuchofthecriticism.For others,theexclusionofother voices
ispartlytodowiththepersonalmyth-makingofthepoets:‘Their groupidentityis,to
an extent, part of the myth that they themselves create. Both during and after the war
the poets are drawn together into loose fellowships, united by their common desire
to come to terms with the traumatic experience of the trenches.’^5 While Gray here
emphasizes the commonality of experience, he also rightly identifies how those war
poets who survived were complicit in the act of myth making. Gray, however, also
draws attention to the cultural afterlife of the myth and the importance of the war
War exposed them to hardship, squalor, insecurity, loss of control overtheir circumstances and the
proximity of death and injury. They were understandably horrified. But one might reasonably ask how
much of this would have beenasshocking to slum dweller and coal miners in 1914’ (Adrian Gregory,
‘Goodbye to All That? The First World War and the Making of the Twentieth Century’,Bridges: An
Interdisciplinary Journal of Theology, Philosophy, History and Science, 12/1–2 (Spring–Summer 2005),
124).
(^2) Joanna Scutts, ‘A Breaking Point? The Positionof the First World War in Literary History’,Bridges:
An Interdisciplinary Journal of Theology, Philosophy, History and Science, 12/1–2 (Spring–Summer
2005), 79.
(^3) Martin Gray, ‘Lyrics of the First World War: SomeComments’, in Gary Day and Brian Docherty
(eds.),British Poetry: 1900–1950: Aspects of Tradition(London: St Martin’s Press, 1995), 57.
(^4) John H. Johnston,English Poetry of the First World War: A Study in the Evolution of Lyric and
Narrative Form 5 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1964), p. ix.
Gray, ‘Lyrics of the First World War’, 51.