War and its Aftermath: W. H. Auden

Abstract

The splendour of Britain’s imperial progress in the 19th century and the success, by and large, of her armed forces blinded most of her poets to the technological revolution that had been going on in the weapons and methods of warfare and rendered them unfit to make the kind of black and ominous prognostications of impending Armageddon that had been issuing from the pens of their Continental (particularly German) confrères since the 1890s. The Prusso– Austrian War of 1866, with its demonstration of the ruthless efficiency of the new needle-gun, had made European poets outside the British Isles much more susceptible to the tremors of a world war. While Continental poets were prophesying this dire event, British poets, with few exceptions, went on trilling notes of pastoral roundelay until the outbreak of hostilities in 1914.