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World War One was supposed to be the war to end all wars, an event so horrific it should and would never be repeated. However, the outbreak of World War Two twenty-one years later showed that man failed to learn from the mistakes which the World War One poets had so eloquently expressed. In the atmosphere after World War Two, literature seemed almost futile, unable to educate and change human morality.
In the fifty years since the end of World War Two, writers have been struggling for new ways to express the horror of events of mass and planned killing, such as the atomic bomb and the Holocaust. Such threats are present in the world today, and inspire and inform contemporary literature.
The World War One poets were reporting to the public at home the horror of events, offering an alternative and realistic viewpoint to the sanitised and censored accounts of the press. In contrast, modern writers are aware of the fact that their job is not primarily to communicate the horror of war, because the television news already gets us closer to the action than before. Rather, modern literature hopes to understand why people fight and to expose our unjustified, voyeuristic responses of pride or horror to fighting.
For example, Geoffrey Hill wrote the poem Two formal elegies: for the Jews in Europe. It was his response to the constantly replayed television images of the Holocaust although, eerily, it might also apply to the modern videos of the September 11 attacks on America:
Is it good to remind them, on a brief screen,
Of what they have witnessed and not seen?
(Deaths of the city that persistently dies…?)From Two formal elegies: for the Jews in Europe by Geoffrey Hill
In the example above, Hill asks what the purpose of seeing the Holocaust on television is, if we are not going actively to respond to the images and ensure such an event won't happen again. War is such a dominant theme of human history that is has become a prime metaphor, perhaps almost a cliche.
It is a hackneyed response to, or thoughtless use of, combat that many modern poets and authors warn us to avoid. With this attitude, war literature seems to have turned full circle, from celebration to condemnation, from unthinking praise to a questioning of our attitudes to conflict.
Having found out about the range of opinions and styles of writing on war, you may like to explore some of the authors, books and websites from the West Midlands on the Further information page.
Navigate this theme:- Introduction | Chivalric viewpoints | World War One | Post-war period | Further information
Page created 10 August 2004 and last updated
21 August 2004
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