Why did the mood of war poetry change?

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Natalie Goharriz

Why did the mood of war poetry change?

"'POETRY', Wordsworth reminds us, 'is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings', and there can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war: hope and fear; exhilaration and humiliation; hatred – not only for the enemy, but also for generals, politicians, and war-profiteers; love – for fellow soldiers, for women and children left behind, for country (often) and cause (occasionally)."

That was a quote from Jon Stallworthy, in his introduction to ‘The Oxford Book of War Poetry’. The First World War was one of mankind's greatest tragedies – and the poets were those most gifted to express the experience of those traumatic years. The experience of the front line war poets was more overwhelming, more prolonged and more intense than for any previous generation of soldiers. Each one of them coped with conflicting duties, psychological pressures, moral dilemmas, and bereavement, but the poets spoke of new things too.  

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Some poets wrote their poetry partly out of an anger with the press and the distorted, cosy pictures the press created of the soldiers' lot. A desire to respond to what the poets believed were the attitudes of civilians, was another stimulus to their poetry.  The war poets, as all poets, brought, to everything they wrote, their education, their life experience, their character.  They wrote in the context of momentous events and intense national feelings. But more importantly, poets wrote mainly in response to personal experiences.  The early war poems seem to be more patriotic in this way, as ...

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