'But that is not new': Poetic Legacies of the First World War

And I remember Not the war I fought in But the one called Great Which ended in a sepia November Four years before my birth. Vernon Scannell’s ‘The Great War’, first published in 1962, is perhaps the most explicit articulation of a legacy, felt at different times in different degrees, bequeathed to poets across the twentieth century: the inherited ‘memory’ of a war they did not experience. An historical, literary and cultural legacy, it is also in some ways an unaccountable one. In Poems of the First World War (1988), Martin Stephen points out that: The Second World War killed roughly five times as many people as did the first, brought untold destruction to civilian populations, and in its final throes unleashed a horror that could – and still can – wipe out life on earth. The facts, and logic, dictate that if any images dominate poetry they should be those of Hiroshima, Dachau, and Stalingrad. Certainly these images appear frequently in modern writing, but it is far easier to find the images of the Great War… Stephen’s historical ‘logic’, for anyone writing poetry post-1945, seems irrefutable. Nor is the legacy straightforwardly attributable to the literary reputations of its frontline combatants and their subsequent influence on an Anglophone poetic tradition. If one looks to the ‘bigger’ war historically, one might also look for the ‘bigger’ and more influential names of modern literature. As Paul Fussell puts it: ‘The roster of major innovative talents who were not involved with the war is long and impressive. It includes Yeats, Woolf, Pound, Eliot, Lawrence, and Joyce – that is, the masters of the modern movement. It was left to lesser talents… to recall in literary form a war they had actually experienced. Sassoon, Graves, and Blunden are clearly writers of the second rank’.