The best poet who came to light in the war, and fell in it, is the Anglo-Welsh
Edward Thomas(1878–1917).Thomas had lived by writing ‘countryside’ prose and
reviewing verse, until, encouraged by the American poet Robert Frost, he turned
poet late in 1914. Poems such as ‘Adlestrop’, ‘The Owl’ and ‘As the Team’s Head Brass’
approach the war indirectly through the life of rural England in peacetime, a
contrast with the shock tactics of the protest poems. They have the effect of the simi-
les in Homer which liken wartime to peacetime sights or activities. Natural observa-
tion accrues an under stated symbolic suggestion in a poem like ‘Lights Out’, which,
like another fine poem, ‘Old Man’, makes no reference to war but accepts death. Later
English poets have seen Hardy and Edward Thomas as continuing in a quiet and
unrhetorical way, an English way.
Wilfrid Owen wrote of the poetry of war, that ‘the poetry is in the pity’. W. B. Yeats
re jected this with the words ‘Passive suffering is not a theme for poetry’; his own
poems on the Easter Rising in Dublin in 1916 strike a more heroic note. Although
Owen’s pathos can cloy, his poems speak immediately, and are often set to be read at
school.The Owen–Sassoon story is often recycled, but the literary merit of these
poems can be exaggerated. Precious witness to a traumatic national experience, they
are not major modern poems, though their simple emotions are easier to respond to
than the adult poetry of the modernists.nFurther reading
Bergonzi, B.,Heroes’ Twilight: A Study of the Literature of the Great War,2nd edn (London:
Constable, 1980).
Fussell, P.,The Great War and Modern Memory(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975).340 12 · ENDS AND BEGINNINGS: 1901–19
‘Over the top’: British
troops climb out of a
trench towards the
barbed wire, in 1916.
Hulton Archive/Getty
Images.