1. Poplawski English Literature in context chapter 6 part 2

Modernism vs. Realism in the 20th Century (1901-1939)

The period of 1901-1939 is often described as modernistic, but the definitions of modernism and realism are frequently contested.
The modernist/realist distinction is still important in literary studies but should be approached with a critically open mind.
The literature of the 1930s is often considered separately, representing a reversion to traditional realist modes due to the politicized decade.
This was driven by a demand for a 'literature of commitment' that could engage directly with major social issues.
However, earlier decades also had socially committed literature (e.g., H.G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw).
Even in the 1930s, such work was not homogeneous or lacking in formal inventiveness.
Experimental modernist writing continued in the work of writers such as Dylan Thomas, David Jones, and James Joyce, whose Finnegans Wake (1939) is considered the apogee of modernism.
The predominant literary tendency of the 1930s sought common ground with the masses rather than individualistic epiphanies, but modernistic voices and visions still left their mark.

Continuities, Influences, and Innovations

Late-Victorian literature had already begun to question Victorianism.
Samuel Butler satirized Victorian values in his anti-Utopian novel Erewhon (1872), influenced by Darwinian thought.
Butler's attack on Victorian hypocrisies continued into the 20th century with Erewhon Revisited (1901) and The Way of All Flesh (published posthumously in 1903).
Several other notable writers, such as George Meredith, George Gissing, Oscar Wilde, Olive Schreiner, Thomas Hardy, George Moore, Sarah Grand, and George Egerton, consolidated and diversified this attack.
These writers provide an important immediate background to early 20th-century literature and a literal line of continuity.
Their importance is principally related to their criticism of society and their advanced views on religion, morality, sexuality, and gender, rather than major innovations of form or technique.
Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm (1883) is noted for its proto-modernistic form.
Gissing and Moore channeled elements of French naturalism into the English novel.
Key transitional figures for long-term literary innovation: Henry James (1843-1916), W.B. Yeats (1865-1939), and G.B. Shaw (1856-1950).
None of these writers was English by birth (James was American, Yeats and Shaw Irish).
Each played a major role in the development of English literature as it moved from the 19th into the 20th century.

Dramatic Changes and the Impact of G.B. Shaw

Changes in British theatre were slow-moving during this period.
The literary and artistic ferment of these decades did not impact serious drama as forcefully as it did on fiction and poetry.
Real innovation in drama didn't make its mark until later in the 20th century.
George Bernard Shaw precipitated major changes in dramatic writing and audience expectations.
Shaw came to London from Dublin in 1876 and worked as a journalist and critic.
In the 1880s, he became a socialist and a leading member of the Fabian Society.
He wrote several unsuccessful novels before turning to the theatre in the 1890s.
Shaw was strongly influenced by Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906), particularly by his realism, dramatization of ideas, and bold treatment of social issues.
At a time when serious theatre was dominated by conservative drawing-room drama and the 'well-made play,' Shaw felt that Ibsen's drama was needed to revitalize British theatre.
Shaw championed Ibsen's work in Britain in his study, The Quintessence of Ibsenism (1891), which served as a blueprint for his own play-writing career.
Starting with Widowers' Houses (1892), a critique of slum landlordism, he adapted Ibsen's dramatic model for British audiences to produce his own brand of socially engaged theatre.
His plays include Mrs Warren's Profession (written 1893, produced 1902), Arms and the Man (1894), Man and Superman (1903), and Major Barbara (1905).
Shaw's aim was to shock audiences out of their conventional views and encourage them to think rationally and critically about society's inequalities and injustices.
He used theatrical devices such as witty dialogue, clever stagecraft, plot surprises, and sudden reversals.
Shaw was known for his use of unorthodox characters and scenarios, paradox in speech and situation, and direct presentation of ideas in the speeches of his characters.
He shifted the focus of attention from well-made plots to the dynamic interrelations between character, speech, action, and ideas.
Shaw experimented with non-realistic elements to convey his message, anticipating techniques of later modern dramatists such as Brecht and Bond.
His use of witty argument and paradoxical humor also anticipated elements in Beckett and Pinter.
Shaw was one of the first writers for the theatre to exploit the potential of publishing his plays as texts to be read as serious literature, raising the profile of drama.

Henry James and the Art of Narration

Henry James was born in America but settled in England in 1876, becoming a British citizen in 1915.
His novels exhibit traits of the conventional 19th-century novel in their social realism and depiction of polite society.
James's self-conscious concern with style and form, experiments with narration, interest in psychology, and fascination with consciousness make his work acutely modern.
Fundamental questions of narration and consciousness lie at the heart of James's importance as an innovator.
In his later phase, with novels such as What Maisie Knew (1897), The Wings of a Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl (1904), James refined a technique of narration.
This technique used a third-person narrator but limited the narrative point of view almost totally to one focal character or 'centre of consciousness'.
Narrative information is filtered through the eyes and mind of the focal character without obvious intervention of the narrator.
This creates the illusion that the story is telling itself, with events unfolding as they are perceived by the central character.
The shaping influence of the narrator is still there but not immediately evident because the narrator remains detached and impersonal.
The reader is made to feel close to the perceiving centre of consciousness.
The technique avoids the evident artifice and intrusiveness of traditional third-person omniscient narration without becoming constrained by first-person narration.
By foregrounding the workings of consciousness, the technique merges almost imperceptibly into the subject matter of James's fiction.
The structuring consciousness of the principal character becomes the story.
The processes of consciousness, the structuring of perception, meaning, and identity became for James not only an informing principle of narration but the principal theme of his late narratives.
This would become a principal theme too for the novelists who followed him, with the rise of psychology and psychoanalysis.
In seeking a new psychological dimension of realism in the depiction of consciousness, Henry James pushed fictional realism to a limit.
Further development required moving into the sort of experimentation associated with later novelists such as Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce, and Virginia Woolf.
James paved the way for these modernists, and it was his psychologist brother, William James, who coined the phrase 'stream of consciousness' in his Principles of Psychology (1890).

W.B. Yeats and Irish Literary Revival

W.B. Yeats was strongly influenced by the resurgence of Irish nationalism in the campaign for Home Rule and in the Irish Literary Revival of the 1880s.
He became a leading member, involved with Irish cultural (and political) nationalism.
His collection of stories and anecdotes, The Celtic Twilight (1893), became a byword for the supposed romance and mysticism of Celtic culture.
Throughout his career, he drew extensively on the ancient folklore and mythology of Ireland, informing this also with interests in theosophy, spiritualism, and the esoteric.
For the first decade of the 20th century, Yeats was heavily involved with setting up and running the Irish National Theatre, establishing it in 1904 at the Abbey Theatre, Dublin.
Yeats promoted Irish subject matter and poetic over realistic drama, and he wrote and staged his plays, most notably Cathleen ni Houlihan (1902).
Following a brief period of disillusion over Irish independence, Yeats was drawn back to the cause by the Easter Rising of 1916.
He would later serve as a senator in the Irish Free State.
Yeats's development as a poet progressed in three broad phases:
- 1886-99: Late-Romanticism with Celticism, aestheticism, symbolism, and esoteric doctrine (e.g., The Wind among the Reeds, 1899).
- 1900-18: Transitional period of proto-modernistic austerity and impersonality of style (e.g., Responsibilities, 1914).
- 1919-39: Fully developed modernism with a complex, self-defining system of mythological thought built on visionary symbolism (e.g., The Tower, 1928).
Yeats began as a writer of the Victorian fin de siècle and ended as a key figure of modernist anti-decadence.
His early poems are infused with an elegiac quality and peopled with mythological and heroic figures from an 'old Ireland'.
He is arguably the first modernist of poetry, his feeling of alienation from his time strengthening his later apocalyptic poems.
The cultural crisis of the early 20th century turned the task of re-thinking the limits and drives of language into one of world-historic importance for many poets.
Yeats's early work is marked by a bygone aesthetic, and is metrically and syntactically conventional.
His later work, particularly that written from The Wild Swans at Coole (1919) until his death in 1939, would strongly assert his modernity.
In his pioneering use of 'the mythical method', in his experiments with impersonal voices or 'masks' for the poetic persona, and in his striving for an organically self-contained art of vision and symbolism, Yeats mapped out much of the terrain of modernist literature.
His development represents the complete cycle of the evolution of modernist poetry from its 19th-century antecedents.
We see in it a more general evolution of literary sensibility as related to historical context in the way Yeats carried forward and transformed into modern terms the late-Victorian critique of urban industrialism and materialism.

T.S. Eliot and the Mythical Method

In 1923, T.S. Eliot wrote an essay on James Joyce's Ulysses (1922), commenting on Joyce's use of Homer's Odyssey.
Eliot identified this 'mythical method' as a keynote of the period and a seminal statement about modernism.
Eliot picked out Yeats as the first writer to experiment with the method.
Using myth manipulates a continuous parallel between contemporaneity and antiquity.
It is a way of controlling, ordering, and giving shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history.
It is a method for which the horoscope is auspicious.
Psychology, ethnology, and The Golden Bough have concurred to make possible what was impossible a few years ago.
Instead of narrative method, we may now use the mythical method.
It is a step toward making the modern world possible for art.

Modes of Production and Consumption: The Literary Marketplace

Economic and social factors changed patterns of cultural production and consumption at the end of the 19th century.
Of relevance to literature were changes in publishing practices and increased levels of literacy, education, and disposable income.
As paper became cheaper, printing presses were developed, and distributive, retail, marketing, and advertising networks were consolidated and expanded.
Books and other printed materials became easier and cheaper to produce and sell in large quantities, at lower prices.
More people had sufficient disposable income to buy consumer goods.
Key educational reforms from 1870 onwards increased the ability and inclination to read and buy books, periodicals, magazines, and newspapers.
There was a new reading public, vastly increased and varied, representing a massive new demand for reading material.
A new set of economic conditions meant publishers could meet that demand.
Publishers broke with the big circulating libraries and distributed more books directly at a price people could afford.
The circulating libraries had a monopoly on the market for new fiction and could dictate terms to publishers and authors.
They established conventions as to the standard form and content of books circulated (e.g., the 'triple-decker' novel).
They acted as guardians of public morality and censored or banned works they disapproved of.
Publishers could now negotiate more freely with authors as to the type of books they might publish.
The supply side of the market was increasingly free to diversify in direct interaction with consumer demand.

The Fragmenting Culture and Challenges to Literary Conventions

Economic factors are in a complex relationship with cultural developments and the changes came about also as a response to intellectual and artistic pressures coming from writers themselves.
Mainstream Victorian society had a broad consensus on Christian morality and the existing social and political order.
Victorian writers and readers assumed a common culture and a shared language of values, attitudes, and cultural reference.
Circulating libraries sustained this consensus by promoting writers and works that reflected and reinforced the perceived standards of the dominant culture.
As those standards and that culture began to be questioned, writers challenged the literary conventions that had become associated with them.
The interrogative spirit and a new sense of the relativity and complexity of life led serious writers to express their frustration with the artificial constraints placed upon their art by the dominant system of publication and circulation.
George Moore published an attack on the circulating libraries, Literature as Nurse, or Circulating Morals, in 1885.
In the same year, he had a new novel, The Mummer's Wife, issued in one volume by Vizetelly, the English publisher of Emile Zola.
This challenged the convention of publishing new novels in three volumes and sounded the death-knell of the triple-decker novel.

The Demise of the Triple-Decker Novel and New Freedoms for Writers

The demise of the triple-decker novel illustrates how economic and artistic factors combined to bring about change in the literary marketplace and in literary form.
The triple-decker encouraged padding and the use of stock devices.
With the possibility of single-volume publication, novelists gained greater freedom over the length and structure of their work.
This contributed to a developing trend towards shorter, more poetic or symbolic fiction.
Writers also gained greater freedom to experiment with style, to deal with unconventional topics, and to express unconventional views.
They were not entirely free, as publishers still had to consider the censors and public opinion.
Publishers were freer to take their own commercial risks and support a greater range of writing and a continuing diversification of the market.

The Changing Position of the Writer

Diversification helps explain the changes in literature from the Victorian period to the Edwardian and beyond.
It went hand in hand with new freedoms of literary form and expression.
It represented a fundamental change in the position of the writer and in the relationship between writers and readers.
The Victorian consensus gave major writers a sense of moral or intellectual authority at the heart of public opinion, as framed by institutions like the circulating libraries.
With the breakdown of that consensus and the institutions which supported it, and with the rise of a complex and segmented society, the lack of shared values and experience began to define literary relations.
Writers inevitably lost some of their authority as they lost their sense of a unified audience and of a common language they could confidently share with such an audience.
Twentieth-century writers were freer to develop their own personal artistic visions, but they were destined to become more isolated, detached from their readership, and to lose the public prestige and influence of their Victorian predecessors.
Rather than appealing to a single, known audience, they would have to take their chance on the open market, appealing to many different audiences, or possibly to none.

Drama and the Theatrical Market

Shaw exploited the expanding market for novel-sized books by publishing his play-scripts, supplemented by long prefaces and other material.
Drama, as a performance art, was subject to different market factors from those applying to fiction and poetry.
There was no nationally subsidized theatre, and most dramatic activity was concentrated in a small number of commercial theatres in London.
Plays had to be popular to be profitable, and there was little incentive for theatre managers to experiment with new techniques or controversial subject matter.
In the 1890s, there had been efforts to provide outlets for challenging forms of drama, such as J.T. Grein's Independent Theatre.
The Irish theatre movement in Dublin and the birth of a repertory movement in England brought some decentralization of theatrical activity and some loosening of the artistic constraints associated with conventional commercial theatre.
Despite a dramatic revival in the 1890s and 1900s, the theatre in England remained relatively conservative throughout our period, and developments in drama were modest compared to the radical changes afoot in the other genres.

Stylistic Developments: Modernism and Realism

Critics traditionally identify modernism and realism as the two main lines of stylistic development within this period.
There has often been an implied value judgment in this division.
Experimental modernist writing has been seen as the genuinely new, original, and authentic art of the century.
Realist art has been considered a continuation of outmoded 19th-century forms.
Modernist art has been considered obscure, elitist, and out of touch with everyday experience.
Realist art has been embraced for its direct relevance to people's lives and its striving to present an accurate and truthful representation of historical and political actuality.
Such value judgments have become increasingly problematic as the precise meanings of 'modernism' and 'realism' have been questioned.
As a broad categorization, it can be helpful to distinguish between these two 'modes of modern writing'.

Defining Modernism and Realism

Modernism is typified by poetic density and an extensive use of metaphor (or imaginative analogy).
Realism is typified by a striving for transparency of meaning and a preference for the use of metonymy (or imagery linked by direct logical connection).
Modernism turned its back on the traditional idea of art as imitation and substituted the idea of art as an autonomous activity.
A characteristic slogan was Walter Pater's assertion, 'All art constantly aspires to the condition of music'.
The fundamental principle of aesthetics before the modern era was that art imitates life.
By the end of the 19th century, it had been turned on its head.
'Life imitates art,' declared Oscar Wilde, meaning that we compose the reality we perceive by mental structures that are cultural, not natural in origin, and that it is art which is most likely to change and renew those structures when they become inadequate or unsatisfying.
Traditional realism does not aspire to the condition of music; rather it aspires to the condition of history.
It regards literature as the communication of a reality that exists prior to and independent of the act of communication.
In the work of archetypal modernists such as Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, Modernism produced a 'poetry that distinguishes itself from ordinary referential discourse by violently dislocated syntax and bewildering shifts of register'.
Modernism also creates works 'in which there are no narrative or logical climaxes but instead vibrant, suggestive, ambiguous images and symbols'.
This description applies equally to modernist novels of writers such as Conrad, Woolf, Lawrence, and Joyce.
Pursuing reality out of the daylight world of empirical common sense into the individual's consciousness, or subconscious, and ultimately to the collective unconscious.
Discarding the traditional narrative structures of chronological succession and logical cause-and-effect, as being false to the essentially chaotic and problematic nature of subjective experience.
Relying more and more on literary strategies and devices that belong to poetry, and specifically to Symbolist poetry, rather than to prose: allusion to literary models and mythical archetypes, repetition of images, symbols, and other motifs, 'rhythm' in the novel.

Modernist and Realist Writers

Important British modernists in poetry or fiction, or both, include Richard Aldington, W.H. Auden, Elizabeth Bowen, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), Ford Madox Ford, E.M. Forster, T.E. Hulme, David Jones, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Hugh MacDiarmid, Katherine Mansfield, Charlotte Mew, Jean Rhys, Dorothy Richardson, May Sinclair, Edith Sitwell, and Dylan Thomas.
On the predominantly realist front, the most important writers of fiction of the period are Arnold Bennett, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Rudyard Kipling, John Galsworthy, Graham Greene, W. Somerset Maugham, George Orwell, and H.G. Wells.
The satirical novels of Aldous Huxley and Evelyn Waugh, while technically closer to the realist tradition, also have affinities with modernism in their subversive view of modern society.
The fiction of Christopher Isherwood could be said to have begun in the modernist mode but then developed towards realism.
The growth of a mass market for fiction meant a growth in popular genres such as the family saga, light comedy, detective fiction, and the adventure thriller.
Some of the most widely read novelists of the time were John Buchan, Agatha Christie, Compton Mackenzie, Hugh Walpole, P.G. Wodehouse, and Dorothy L. Sayers.
In poetry, it is more difficult to categorize writers definitively as 'realist', and few writers of the age were not influenced by some of the aspects associated with modernism.
Poets like Kipling, Hardy, Robert Bridges, W.H. Davies, Walter de la Mare, and John Masefield stand out most strongly in contrast to the modernists.
These poets largely continued to use metrical verse forms rather than free verse.
The war-poets (e.g., Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Edmund Blunden) and the poets of the 1930s (e.g., C. Day-Lewis, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Auden) tend to be seen in categories of their own largely defined by the traumatic experiences of war and the politically charged climate of the 1930s.
Despite modernistic technical innovations in their poetry, both these groups clearly aspire to a direct representation of the felt history of their time.
They aspire to the condition of history rather than of music.

Drama: Realism, Naturalism, and Experimentation

Shaw is a transitional figure between the 19th and 20th centuries, ambiguously positioned on the modernist/realist divide.
His discursive didacticism places him firmly on the realist side, while his iconoclasm and technical innovations place him closer to the modernists.
Stylistically, it would be difficult to recognize Shaw in the characterization of modernism just given.
English drama in this period was largely distinct from poetry and fiction in continuing to be dominated by realist or naturalist modes.
Serious social plays of Henry Arthur Jones, Arthur Wing Pinero, John Galsworthy, and Harley Granville-Barker represent this.
Comic drama and sentimental and musical fantasy were well represented by the plays of J.M. Barrie, W. Somerset Maugham, and Noel Coward.
Apart from Shaw, the few serious departures from the dominant realism in the English theatre came in the 1930s.
J.B. Priestley experimented with time and expressionist modes in plays such as Time and the Conways (1937) and Johnson Over Jordan (1939).
T.S. Eliot carried over his poetic modernism into the theatre with his verse dramas Murder in the Cathedral (1935) and The Family Reunion (1939).
W.H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood experimented with verse dramas such as The Dog Beneath the Skin (1936).
A dramatic dialogue between modernism and realism took place in Ireland from the start of the century in developments at the Abbey Theatre in Dublin.
A cross-fertilization of modes is evident in the continuum from the symbolist verse dramas of Yeats and A.E. (George Russell), through to the more realistic romances of J.M. Synge-Riders to the Sea (1904) and The Playboy of the Western World (1907).
The continuum continues with the grittier social realism of Sean O'Casey in his trilogy The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926).
O'Casey then moved towards non-naturalistic techniques in his later plays, experimenting with expressionism in his 1928 play, The Silver Tassie.

The Impact of War

Given the number of major conflicts that took place within the space of these forty years (including the Boer War, the Anglo-Irish War, the Irish Civil War, and the Spanish Civil War) and the fact that they encompassed the First World War and the build-up to the Second World War, it would be difficult to overestimate the impact of war and all the ramifications of war.
The First World War in particular represented a shattering end to the 19th century's optimistic faith in human progress.
There was a permeating consciousness of the war as a defining reality for modern civilization.
As D.H. Lawrence suggested in 1924, everywhere, it seemed, 'the dead hand of the war lay like a corpse decomposing'.
Although Lawrence was a non-combatant, his works are symptomatic of that permeating consciousness, especially as it grappled with the moral and spiritual implications of the underlying tendencies which had led to and supported the war and its mass mechanised destruction.
In a famous chapter of his novel Kangaroo (1923), entitled 'The Nightmare', Lawrence reflected on what he saw as a fundamental debasement of humanity brought about by the war and by the bellicose attitudes it engendered.

Moral and Spiritual Implications of War (Lawrence's Perspective)

Lawrence reflected on a fundamental debasement of humanity brought about by the war and bellicose attitudes in a chapter of his novel Kangaroo entitled The Nightmare.
He stated it was in 1915 the old world ended. In the winter of 1915-16 the spirit of the old London collapsed.
He described the city perishing from being a heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears, and horrors.
He describes the integrity of London collapsed, and the genuine debasement began, the unspeakable baseness of the press and the public voice, the reign of that bloated ignominy, John Bull.
Lawrence's use of the word 'vortex' is possibly ironic in its echo of the avant-garde art movement, vorticism, which celebrated the creative energy of modernity, often through expressionistic depictions of machinery and industry.
This 'vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears, and horrors' outlines much of the psychological terrain explored by Lawrence and other modernist writers in their artistic representations of how human relationships had internalized the conditions of war-torn modernity.

Modernism's Focus on Internal Factors

The focus on internal factors - on the ways in which the underlying forms of life had influenced and been influenced by the war - also reflects a central tenet of modernism.
Form embodies meaning and can often reveal underlying truths about life more effectively than explicit statements or descriptions can.
Modernist art dealt with the war as much by the implications of its fragmented forms and its embedded symbolism as by the explicit logic of its surface meanings.
T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land (1922) is the pre-eminent example of this, but Lawrence's work, too, is again symptomatic.
His modernist novel, Women in Love (1920), was composed largely contemporaneously with the First World War.
It registers the pressures of war in its fractured episodic structure, its sudden outbursts of violence, and its highly wrought language of emotional and sexual conflict.
It contains not a single explicit reference to the war, consciously excluded such reference as his aim was not to record the external circumstances of war, but rather to analyze its 'internal' consequences for the individual and society, and to embody these in the internal dynamics of the text.
Lawrence wish the time to remain unfixed, so that the bitterness of the war may be taken for granted in the characters.
Women in Love is a war novel, even though its society is apparently at peace and its date left deliberately vague. Uncovered in the depths of all the characters is violence, threatening to destroy the self and others.
This is because the novel was written at a time when over Europe people had thrown themselves into the First World War.
The novel's art, in language and form, must be such as can render and explore violence, disintegration, deadly excess.

The Poetry of War

There was a mass of literature in the period which dealt directly with the First World War, written by combatants expressing their feelings and recording their experiences.
The earliest poetic responses of many of the war-poets - Brooke, Julian Grenfell, Sassoon, Owen, Rosenberg - were written in a heroic mode of patriotism and idealistic enthusiasm.
War seen as an opportunity for the country's youth to demonstrate its valour and that the cause was a righteous cause.
Even Sassoon, soon to become one of the war's most bitter critics, wrote, in mid-1915:
- 'The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes'
- 'Till beauty shines in all that we can see.'
- 'War is our scourge, yet war has made us wise,'
- 'And, fighting for our freedom, we are free.'
- 'We are the happy legion, for we know'
- 'Time's but a golden wind that shakes the grass.'
- 'What need we more, my comrades and my brothers?'
For most, this heroic mode did not survive the first large battles of the war.
Previously unimaginable numbers of lives were lost for no immediately obvious gains.
The heroic mode of war poetry was later transmuted into an elegiac memorializing of lost comrades and of the courage shown by ordinary fighting men.
For many of the soldier-poets such as Sassoon, the dominant tone inevitably became one of disillusioned protest and bitter satire:
- 'Good-morning, good-morning!' the General said
- 'When we met him last week on our way to the line.'
- 'Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead;'
- 'And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.'
- 'He's a cheery old card,' grunted Harry to Jack
- 'As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.'
- 'But he did for them both with his plan of attack.'
For almost all the poets, though, there clearly developed a need to bear witness, as simply and sincerely as possible, to the devastating loss of life, and to the terrible pity or tragedy of war.
This sort of poem, usually lyrical or dramatic in form, has come down to us as the most memorable and moving testament of that time:
- 'Move him into the sun -'
- 'Gently its touch awoke him once,'
- 'At home, whispering of fields half-sown.'
- 'Always it woke him, even in France,'
- 'Until this morning and this snow.'
- 'If anything might rouse him now'
- 'The kind old sun will know.'
The poetry of the war has been widely anthologized since the period of the war itself and is still widely studied in British schools, colleges, and universities.
It has been influential in shaping popular cultural perceptions of the war and is likely to be fairly familiar to most readers.

War Novels

Novels about the war are less well known, despite the fact that a large number were published both during the war and throughout the post-war period, with a peak in 1928-30 during the war-books controversy.
Around 172 war novels were published in Britain between 1914 and 1918, and, according to Martin Ceadel, Although most romanticized the war, not all did so.
Henri Barbusse's Under Fire (1917), a translation of the novel published in Paris the previous year as Le Feu, was in many respects the prototype of the realistic trench novel.
From 1917 there was a markedly more critical spirit in war-time literature.
H.G. Wells's Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916), though set mainly on the home front, might be added here as an unusually early example of a (partially) critical war novel.
In the first part of the 1920s, as people tried to put the trauma of war behind them, the output of war books diminished somewhat.
As post-war disenchantment grew through the 1920s in the face of economic and international problems, and of the apparent failure of successive governments to build a land (and homes) 'fit for heroes', so people began more and more to doubt what they had been told about the war and to ask questions about why, and for what, so many people had lost their lives.
This mood was given expression in C.E. Montague's critical polemic of 1922, Disenchantment, and it can also be seen reflected in Virginia Woolf's disturbing presentation of the shell-shocked Septimus Smith in her 1925 novel, Mrs Dalloway.
The number of war novels thus started to creep up again in the mid-twenties.
Eight such novels appeared in 1927 and ten in 1928, the tenth anniversary of the Armistice.
Edmund Blunden's Undertones of War, appeared in November 1928.
1928 saw the first production of R.C. Sheriff's play Journey's End (with Laurence Olivier in the lead).
In January 1929 Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front was published in book form in Germany an English edition followed in March 1929.
Remarque's English edition sold 300,000 copies in