The Soldier-Poets of the First World War

When people in Britain, Canada, and many other countries picture the First World War, they often see it through the eyes of a few poets. Mud, gas, and young men lost in their thousands; anger at leaders far from the front; deep pity for the dead. Much of that picture comes from soldiers who wrote poetry while they served. Their work is some of the most powerful writing ever produced about war. It is also worth understanding where it came from, and what it leaves out.

From early idealism to the voice of the trenches

At the start of the war, much popular poetry was patriotic and hopeful. Rupert Brooke's sonnet "The Soldier," published in 1915, is often remembered as an example of that early mood. As the war on the Western Front settled into years of trench fighting and heavy losses, a different kind of poetry emerged from men who had been there. It was plainer, angrier, and more focused on what the war did to the people who fought it.

Four of those poets are especially well known today. Their lives and their poems show both the power of firsthand writing and the way a few voices can come to stand for millions.

John McCrae: In Flanders Fields

John McCrae was a Canadian doctor and teacher, born in Guelph, Ontario, on 30 November 1872. According to Veterans Affairs Canada, he had already served in the South African War. When the First World War began he was 41, and he joined as a medical officer with the First Brigade of the Canadian Field Artillery.

In April 1915 he was near Ypres, Belgium, in the region called Flanders. On 2 May 1915 his friend Lieutenant Alexis Helmer was killed and buried in a makeshift grave. Wild poppies were blooming between the crosses that marked the graves, and McCrae wrote his poem the next day:

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place: and in the sky

John McCrae, "In Flanders Fields," first published in Punch, December 1915

Veterans Affairs Canada notes that within months the poem had come to symbolize the sacrifice of all who were fighting. McCrae did not survive the war. He died of illness on 28 January 1918 and is buried in Wimereux Cemetery, near Boulogne, France. The poppies of his poem remain closely tied to remembrance today.

Siegfried Sassoon: the protesting officer

Siegfried Sassoon was born in Kent on 8 September 1886. The National Army Museum records that he joined up in 1914, was commissioned into the Royal Welch Fusiliers in 1915, and won the Military Cross for rescuing a wounded soldier under heavy fire. His men knew him as "Mad Jack."

After being wounded in April 1917 and losing friends in the fighting, Sassoon turned against the way the war was being carried on. He wrote a statement, "A Soldier's Declaration," dated 15 June 1917. It was published in The Times and read out in Parliament on 31 July 1917. Rather than court-martial a decorated officer and create a public scandal, the army declared him unfit for service and sent him to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. He later returned to active service and was wounded again in July 1918.

Sassoon's war poems are often short and sharply ironic. In "The General," a cheerful senior officer greets men on their way to the front:

"Good-morning; good-morning!" the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.

Siegfried Sassoon, "The General," from Counter-Attack and Other Poems (1918), Project Gutenberg

Sassoon lived until 1 September 1967. After the war he also wrote a well-known series of semi-autobiographical prose books about a character named George Sherston.

Wilfred Owen: "the pity of War"

Wilfred Owen was born on 18 March 1893 in Oswestry, near the border of England and Wales. He enlisted in 1915 and was later commissioned in the Manchester Regiment. In 1917, suffering from what was diagnosed as shell shock, he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital. The Poetry Foundation notes that Sassoon arrived there in mid-August 1917, and the two men met. Sassoon encouraged and influenced the younger poet.

Owen returned to the front and won the Military Cross in October 1918. The Commonwealth War Graves Commission records that he was killed in action on 4 November 1918 while crossing the Sambre-Oise Canal, a week before the Armistice. He is buried at Ors Communal Cemetery. His mother received the telegram about his death as the bells were ringing to celebrate the end of the war.

A reputation built after his death

Only five of Owen's poems were published in his lifetime. In 1920 a collection, Poems, was edited by Sassoon with the help of Edith Sitwell. Its preface, written by Owen, contains his best-known statement of purpose:

Above all, this book is not concerned with Poetry. The subject of it is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.

Wilfred Owen, Preface, Poems (1920), Project Gutenberg edition

His "Anthem for Doomed Youth" asks what funeral rites are left for soldiers killed in such numbers:

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

Wilfred Owen, "Anthem for Doomed Youth," Poems (1920), Project Gutenberg edition

Another of his poems, "Dulce et Decorum Est," takes its title from a Latin line meaning that it is sweet and fitting to die for one's country, and ends by calling that idea "the old Lie."

Isaac Rosenberg: a private's eye

Isaac Rosenberg's background was very different from that of most of the well-known war poets. According to the University of Oxford's First World War Poetry Digital Archive, he was born in Bristol on 25 November 1890 and grew up in the East End of London. He studied painting at the Slade School of Fine Art. He enlisted in late October 1915 and never rose above the rank of private, unlike Owen and Sassoon, who were officers.

His poem "Break of Day in the Trenches" begins with a quiet, strange moment at dawn:

The darkness crumbles away
It is the same old druid Time as ever,
Only a live thing leaps my hand,
A queer sardonic rat,

Isaac Rosenberg, "Break of Day in the Trenches," first published in Poetry (Chicago), December 1916

The rat, free to cross between the British and German lines, becomes a way of looking at the soldiers on both sides with a calm, unsettling clarity. Rosenberg was killed at dawn on 1 April 1918 while on a night patrol.

How the poets shaped memory of the war

Over the following decades, these poets became central to how the war was taught and remembered, especially in Britain. On 11 November 1985, a memorial was unveiled in Westminster Abbey naming sixteen poets of the First World War, among them Owen, Sassoon, and Rosenberg. Its inscription uses Owen's words: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity."

Scholarship played a part as well. Paul Fussell's study The Great War and Modern Memory, in print since 1975, drew heavily on soldier-poets and memoirists and argued that the war gave rise to a distinctly modern, ironic way of seeing the world. In an essay on the book's legacy, literary scholar Kate McLoughlin notes that it was enormously influential, and also widely challenged. Critics pointed out that its narrow focus on combat writers left out the home front, the air and sea war, and the voices of women and noncombatants, and several historians disputed its broader claims.

Reading the war poets today

The war poets do not speak for every soldier. Soldiers' letters, diaries, and memoirs record a wide range of feelings, and the poets' grief and anger are only part of that range. Respecting the poets means reading them carefully, not treating them as the whole story.

Still, their achievement is real. They found words for experiences that many men could not or would not describe at home, and they made later generations pay attention to the human cost of war. In that way they continued a long tradition, from the grief of the oldest epics to the frank letters of Civil War soldiers. Every veteran's account, whether a poem, a letter, or a recorded interview, adds one more voice to that record. If someone in your family served, our guide to recording a veteran's story can help you make sure their voice is kept too.