From Ashes to Soil to Mud

Abstract

This chapter returns more fully to war poetry and especially the context in which First World War poets wrote their poetry, i.e. in a suffocating mudscape. The chapter explains the unique quality of the mud in Flanders’ fields and the different, often comforting roles it assumed in much of the war-related literature. It ends with an exposition on Laurence Binyon, author of possibly the most famous First World War poem “For the Fallen,” famed for its stanza starting with “They shall grow not old.”