Capturing Home: British First World War Poetry

Cuthbertson, Guy (2021) Capturing Home: British First World War Poetry. In: British Literature in Transition, 1900-1920: A New Age? Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 122-136. ISBN 9781108648714

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Abstract

British First World War poetry speaks about a lot more than men in uniform, mud, blood, machine-guns, barbed wire, No Man’s Land and the glorious dead. The best poetry of the First World War often turns to home – home being Britain, or England, but also a house, a village, a county, and especially the countryside. British First World War poetry might indeed be more explicitly about home than about the fighting. Even within the soldiers’ poetry of the Western Front, there are dreams of home, and home is cherished as an alternative to war. The poetry of the First World War is frequently seen in terms of a gradual transition to an unillusioned and realistic depiction of the horrors of war; but in fact war poetry never truly leaves home. What the war poetry repeatedly does is bring war and home together for the purpose of contrasting them with each other.

Item Type:	Book Section
Keywords:	home England First World War Edward Thomas Ivor Gurney Wilfred Owen
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities
Depositing User:	Guy Cuthbertson
Date Deposited:	30 Sep 2022 09:42
Last Modified:	05 Dec 2024 16:22
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/3632

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