‘many sisters to many brothers’ to the war poets as worthy of particular consideration, perpetuating the notion of a
traffic between masculinity, poetics, and war: ‘their names remain firmly attached
to the First World War, and their figures are inseparable from the circumstances
that inspired the poetry by which—in most cases—they are best known’.^9
Johnston goes on to argue that the ‘mission’ of the poet was to ‘communicate his
senseoftherealityofwartothemillionsathomewhowouldnotorcouldnotappre-
ciate the magnitude of the experiences and sacrifices of the common soldier’.^10 This
idea of a ‘mission’ is key to understanding how women’s poetry of the First World
War has been excluded from more canonical literary histories of the war. If the
purpose of war was to win the battles fought in the trenches, then this excluded other
kinds of experiences, whether the experiences of the munitions worker or those of
the mourner. Gray, although somewhat resistant to the myths surrounding the war
poet, still argues that a ‘[p]erusal of war poetry reveals that the poems are very often
constructed out of an image-hoard of common, shared perceptions’.^11 The valoriz-
ation of the ‘authenticity’ of certain experiences over others has been echoed in the
numerous war poetry anthologies, which draw upon another strongly persuasive
myth, that of successive groups of male poets sharing a common aesthetics and
politics, something entrenched in Paul Fussell’s oft-citedThe Great War and Modern
Memory(1975). This pattern is repeated in later texts: there are no women poets, for
example, in John Silkin’sThe Penguin Book of First World War Poetry(1979), and he
explicitly makes a connection between the war poets and the Romantic poets.^12 This
approach necessitates an exclusionary tactic on the basis of various categories, but
largely that of gender. Although Dominic Hibberd could point out, in 1981, that ‘a
precise definition has never been agreed’ for the term ‘war poet’ and that changing
tastes reflect who is in vogue, his case-book of war poetry criticism published in that
year was still concerned with the group of male war poets (although some of the
critics included are women) which has dominated the literary history of the war.^13
Not until the 1980s was it begin to be widely recognized that women might have
actually had something to say about the First World War. The publication of Elaine
Showalter’sA Literature of their Own: British Women Novelists from Bront ̈e to Lessing
(^9) Johnston,English Poetry of the First World War, 20. The self-perpetuating dialectic of masculinity,
poetics, and war has, of course, valorized a reading of war poetry over non-war poetry, as Gray
identifies: ‘Foregrounding the factuality of war experience, while generating strong feelings in the
reader, may lead to ignorance or circumvention of formal considerations. The poems cease to be
poems, but just pegs on which to hang preconceptions about the nature of war, and the First World
War in particular’ (Gray, ‘Lyrics of the First World War’, 61).
(^10) Johnston,English Poetry of the First World War, 12.
(^11) Gray, ‘Lyrics of the First World War’, 54.
(^12) Jon Silkin, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry(Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 12, 21–7, 35–48. This is a particularly apposite comparison, as nowhere
else in Anglo-American literary history—aside from these two points—have two very small groups of
male writers come to represent a much wider political and aesthetic shift.
(^13) Dominic Hibberd, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),Poetry of the First World War: A Casebook
(London: Macmillan, 1981), 11.