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WAR POETRY,
OR THE POETRY
OF WAR? ISAAC
ROSENBERG,
DAVID JONES,
IVOR GURNEY
•••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••vivien noakes
Writing in 1937, David Jones states ofIn Parenthesis: ‘I did not intend this as a
‘‘War Book’’—it happens to be concerned with war.’^1 Although the world in which
he was writing gloomed under the shadow of another war, there was no longer
the urgency that had prompted Sassoon in his protest against the way in which
the First World War was being deliberately prolonged, or the compelling need to
inform and to warn that had guided Owen. But this disclaimer reflects more than
immediate concerns: it denotes a difference in kind.
As the Great War progressed, warpoetry as a genre underwent profound change.
Years of attrition in which men endured subhuman conditions, endless cold and
wet, and empty boredom fraught with constant danger, sudden, capricious death,
and slow, agonized dying, affected not only the bodies and minds but also the
(^1) David Jones, ‘Preface’, inIn Parenthesis(London: Faber, 1963; 1st pub. 1937), p. xii.