Poetry and the First World War

Abstract

Another point of view on the Great War, beyond the role of Native Canadian soldiers, occurs in the poems in and about that time. So many British and English-speaking poets of the Great War represented warfare in so many ways. Coming to terms with the terror and rupture of this war was no simple matter. The trauma for the soldiers, the cataclysm for the countries, and the traces left by the poets, both by those who suffered the fighting firsthand and by those who observed from afar, impress on the very language the strain there is in reflecting and reflecting on this shock to Europe and to states beyond. During the conflict, the plethora of poetry about the war by poets and those urged into poetry who had not written verse before means that I can show but a few strands of this poetic response, and I will do so mainly with those who devoted themselves to poetry.¹ The poems discussed here are about the Great War, except the first two that are on the verge.