Literature inspired by World War I

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Literature inspired by World War I

The traumatic effect of World War I on the collective psyche of Europeans was reflected in the outpouring of literature that directly dealt with the war. Most of the works inspired by the war were infused with a sense of disillusionment, and some had a pointedly antiwar spirit.

The earliest works to capture the war experience came from the so-called war poets. Among the first of the British poets to write about his firsthand experience in the war was Rupert Brooke, whose sonnets, published posthumously in the volume ‘1914' (1915), are characterized by a romanticization of battle. The patriotism in Brooke's poetry was replaced by anger in the works of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Sassoon's experience as an officer turned him toward pacifism, and his poems, collected in ‘Counter-Attack' (1918) and other volumes, expressed rage toward supporters of the war. The most accomplished of the war poets was Wilfred Owen, whose poems of 1917–18 combined the anger of Sassoon with compassion for his fellow soldiers. Owen's single volume of poems, published posthumously by Sassoon in 1920, demonstrates a breadth of emotion and a technical virtuosity unmatched by the other war poets.

Novels inspired by World War I began appearing soon after the conflict ended. ‘Three Soldiers' (1921) by John Dos Passos, ‘The Enormous Room' (1922) by E.E. Cummings, and ‘A Farewell to Arms' (1929) by Ernest Hemingway are among the most notable, but Eric Maria Remarque's ‘All Quiet on the Western Front' (1929), a powerful depiction of day-to-day trench warfare, may be the work most closely associated with the war. A classic work of postwar nonfiction is Robert Graves's ‘Goodbye to All That' (1929), a prose memoir of his war experiences. The influence of the war is also evident in postwar modernist works that do not deal directly with the conflict.


Britannica Student Library. Encyclopædia Britannica 2007 Ultimate Reference Suite. Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2007.