Arms and the muse

In the BBC TV series Blackadder Goes Forth the flying-ace Lord Flasheart says: “I'm sick of this damn war - the blood, the noise, the endless poetry.” This echoes satire during the Great War itself, as when the Wipers Times ”regrett[ed] to announce that an insidious disease is affecting the Division, and the result is a hurricane of poetry.” Since a “strange scabies scribendi” also afflicted “civilian verse-makers,” and newspapers printed poems, poetry virtually became a mass medium in Britain - a phenomenon unmatched in other combatant countries. Catherine Reilly's bibliography lists 2,225 published poets and (1914-22) about 50 anthologies with titles like Soldier Songs, The Muse in Arms, From the Front: Trench Poetry. While most of this outpouring has been remaindered by history, it set the scene for poetry conditioned by the war, poetry that internalized the war, poetry that remains a model for public poetry. Great War poetry is read, imitated, and quoted in shifting contexts. Before the Iraq War, the anthology 101 Poems Against War appeared. Its cover quotes Wilfred Owen ( “All a poet can do today is warn ”), as does an afterword by the Poet Laureate, Andrew Motion: “Towards the end of the First World War, amidst the squalor and tragedy of the Western Front, something fundamental changed . . . The patriotic imperative 'Dulce et Decorum Est' became 'that [sic] old lie,' and . . . our sense of 'a war poet' was transformed.”