Introduction

Summary

A History of World War One Poetry aims to represent the global and multifaceted poetry that emerged from 1914–1918. While poetry did and does not occupy the same place in all national imaginaries, it was a literary genre that flourished during the Great War.The Introduction interrogates not only the term ‘war poetry’ but also the question of ‘who is entitled to write war poetry’.It argues that the poetry that emerged from World War One extended far beyond the British soldier-poet canon, reinforced by influential studies such as Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. Rather, as the chapters demonstrate, it was generated and read by men and by women, combatant and non-combatant, and across a continuum in which protest and patriotism, modernity and tradition, propaganda and remembrance, humour and pathos, co-existed, if uneasily.