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‘MANY SISTERS
TO MANY
BROTHERS’:
THE WOMEN
POETS
OF THE FIRST
WORLD WAR
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The critical as well as the popular literary history of the First World War is unique,
in that the experience of war has been rendered through a small group of male poets.
The influence and reproduction throughout the twentieth century of the war poetry
by Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Isaac Rosenberg can only
be partly ascribed to the particular confluence of the myths of the Edwardian idyll,
of the young sacrificed male, and the terrors of technological trench warfare.^1
Joanna Scutts neatly summarizes this, arguing that to ‘perceive in the history of
(^1) While an examination of the ways in which these myths are inextricably linked with class structures
is beyond the remit of this essay, we do need to remind ourselves that the characterization of the First
World War as horrific would have been true only for a certain proportion of the soldier body: ‘These
writers generally came from pre-war environments which were leisured, comfortable and secure.