World War II produced several novelists of note, including James Jones, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller and Kurt Vonnegut. World War I, however, was the poets' war. It produced one of the greatest war novels of all time, All Quiet on the Western Front, yet poetry still ruled the literary world, even though it was all but dead just a few years later when the second big war erupted.
He focuses on six poets who fought in the war and wrote verse about their experiences: Rupert Brook, Alan Seeger, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Only Graves and Sassoon survived the war.
Their poetry changed as the war went on and on. To Brook and Seeger, the only American in the group, the war was a great adventure. "What bloody fun!" Brook wrote in a letter. In one of his best-known poems, he said: "If I should die, think only this of me:/That there's some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England."
Seeger, related to folk singer Pete Seeger, was even more romantic about combat. "I have a rendezvous with death ...," he wrote. And "that rare privilege of dying well."
The others viewed the war more realistically. No less patriotic that the other two, they nevertheless saw the war as pointless and a terrible waste of human life.
They were also shockingly blunt about what soldiers did in war. Writing about killing an enemy soldier with a bayonet, Sassoon wrote: "Sweet Sister, grant your soldier this;/That in good fury he may feel/The body where he sets his heel/Quail from your downward darting kiss." In another poem he wrote the phrase, "The place was rotten with dead."
Authorities strictly censored letters, books and anything else written about what was actually going on in the trenches. Yet for whatever reason — perhaps because the censors had little patience for poetry — the poems of these men somehow got through.
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