dawn bellamy
dimension to his use of the Great War’s mythology. The vastly different nature of
theconflict meant that the soldier-poets of 1939–45 would not be saying exactly the
same things as their predecessors; yet their sense of themselves as part of a larger liter-
ary tradition enables them to transpose the mythology of the previous conflict so that
thepastremainsresonantinthepresent.‘Almostallthatamodernpoetonactiveser-
vice is inspired to write, would be tautological.’ But within Douglas’s ‘Almostall’ (my
emphasis) is the space for the poets of the Second World War to write of their own
experiences, influenced, rather than silenced, by those others who had come before.