Blackwell Reference Online

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My subject is War, and the Pity of War.The Poetry is in the pity.(Wilfred Owen)It wasn't only evil men who did these things. Courage smashes a cathedral, endurance lets a city starve, pity kills…(Graham Greene, The Ministry of Fear)If one war most influenced British literature in the last century, that war was certainly Wilfred Owen's, the Great War, 1914–18. From Rupert Brooke's sonnets of 1914 to Pat Barker's Regeneration trilogy of the 1990s, the First World War has inspired British writers like no other. Indeed, Paul Fussell argues that this war defines subsequent British culture more generally, engendering a uniquely “modern understanding [that is] essentially ironic” (2000: 35). As part of this privileged place in the nation's cultural memory, the Great War has, through the writing of Owen and others, become the war of twentieth-century British literature, that which defines for popular memory what war is and what war writing should be. In Samuel Hynes's words, this war's “image of total annihilation is our tragic myth of modern war” (1998: 53), one that shapes how we approach both later conflicts and the literature about them. Indeed, the Great War's grip on literary representations of war is such that the Second World War poet Vernon Scannell confesses, in his “The Great War,” that he remembers “Not the war I fought in / But the one called Great / Which ended in a sepia ... log in or subscribe to read full text