It is received wisdom that the First World War – or Great War – was also the greatest of all wars in terms of the poetry it generated, and that the Second World War inspired very little poetry to rival it. Certainly, the First World War was the subject of an extraordinary amount of worthwhile and sometimes deeply moving contemporaneous poetry – indeed, it was the first war in which the term ‘war poet’ had been widely applied (and applicable) to English-language writers. As this book attempts to demonstrate, though, the claim is something of an over-simplification.

Nonetheless, partially because the poetry took people by surprise during the First World War whereas they had grown to expect it in the Second, the belief was perpetuated almost from the beginning. In 1941, Robert Graves, a prominent poet associated with the Great War, gave a talk on British radio entitled ‘Why has this War produced no War Poets?’ and it was a question many in Britain were asking. Two years later, Keith Douglas, now ironically the most celebrated of all poets associated with the Second World War, wrote an essay called ‘Poets of this War’ in which he asked why there were ‘no poets like Owen and Sassoon who lived with the fighting troops and wrote of their experiences while they were enduring them’. He concluded that though the war might ultimately have its own poetry, it would most likely be ‘created after war is over’ (PM 119–20).

Between 1939 and 1945, relatively few active servicemen were publishing strong poetry about their experiences. Why should this have been so? To answer that question, it is first of all important to consider the fundamental differences in feeling between the conscripts and enlistees of both wars. In October 1914, three months after the outbreak of the First World War and when many believed the fighting would be over by Christmas, Rupert Brooke spoke for many British soldiers with his sonnet ‘Peace’. It started by thanking God for having ‘matched us with His hour’, and compared being sent to fight to an act of cleansing and release, ‘as swimmers into cleanness leaping’.