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[Read about the authors' views on war in the context of World War One.]
Some critics argue that fine novels and literary works should never contain an explicit morality; the story should speak for itself, rather than the author making direct comments and interjections. However, war seems to provoke such emotions and debate as to force writers to make their feelings about war known outside of the story.
For instance, Robert Buchanan, in his preface to The Shadow of the Sword states that the book:-
...is a polemic against War, against the institution which, above all others, is the disgrace and scourge of modern civilization....I trust...that it is something more--an attack on War in the abstract, as the deadliest and most loathsome representation of the retrograde movement of modern political thought.
The shadow of the sword by Robert Buchan
In the front of her book, She goes to war, and under the heading "Argument", Edith Pargeter quotes from The Prince by Machiavelli:-
I say again, we should never submit to an evil merely to prevent a war; in fact, we do not thereby avoid it, but only defer it to our great injury.
She goes to war by Edith Pargeter
Henry Treece, in a letter, quoted by Margery Fisher in her introduction to The Invaders, published in 1972 after Treece's death, says:-
I want to foreshadow the tragedy of fighting-men and not always show the big glory and the trumpets...I see war as something horrid and usually inglorious. When I use violence and victory and glory, they are often means to my end of illustrating that it doesn't really work out.
Wilfred Owen believed that the emphasis of poetry should shift given the subject matter it was portraying in the First World War:-
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity.
From by Wilfred Owen
However, in the later eighteenth century too, war changed the way writers thought about writing. In the age known as the Romantic Period, writers began to strive for intellectual and literary freedom from the old forms and ideas of the past. The French Revolution of 1789 seemed to signal the possibility of a new political and intellectual age which might spread across the Channel. William Hazlitt expressed this optimism when he wrote about the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge:-
he had nerved his heart and filled his eyes with tears, as he hailed the rising orb of liberty, since quenched in darkness and in blood, and had kindled his affections at the blaze of the French Revolution, and sang for joy, when the towers of the Bastille and the proud places of the insolent and the oppressor fell
The Spirit of the Age by William Hazlitt
However, the popular revolution descended into bloodshed. Here was an opportunity dashed, a fact which few of the writers of the Romantic period could help voicing directly in their works:-
It was a misfortune to any man of talent to be born in the latter end of the last century. Genius stopped the way of Legitimacy, and therefore it was to be abated, crushed, or set aside as a nuisance. The spirit of the monarchy was at variance with the spirit of the age. The flame of liberty, the light of intellect, was to be extinguished with the sword--or with slander, whose edge is sharper than the sword. The war between power and reason was carried on by the first of these abroad, by the last at home.
The Spirit of the Age by William Hazlitt
[Read about the authors' views on war in the context of World War One.]
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Page created 10 August 2004 and last updated
21 August 2004
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