Whenever the term 'war poetry' is mentioned, it is almost invariably the British poets of World War I who come to mind. The magnificent flowering of poetry amid the horrific trenches of the Somme and elsewhere produced such luminaries as Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke and Edward Thomas, all of whom except one – Sassoon – died during the conflict.

But why wasn't there an equal flowering of poetry during World War II?

Wasted lives
Ironically, it was the sheer waste of lives - not only of superb poets but also of millions of other 'ordinary' people – that may have prevented a similar 'school' of poetry from developing in Britain during World War II. According to the critic Harry Blamires:

The educated young men who went off to fight in 1939 and 1940 had been brought up under the shadow of the First World War. They had read Owen and Sassoon and seen Journey's End. They had also seen human wrecks left over from Passchendaele and had listened to soured ex-servicemen, often jobless, angrily denouncing the wickedness of the war and the hypocrisy of those who had directed it, glorified it, or profited by it. Awareness of the gigantic waste of the First World War, conjoined with hatred of Nazi tyranny, determined the mood of the new servicemen. The war could neither be glorified nor evaded. And it could not this time be mistaken for a monstrously unique aberration.

Sidney Keyes (1922–43) – who is considered with Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis to be one of the three major poets of World War II, and was the youngest when he, too, died – obviously felt this pressure. In his 'War Poet', he wrote: 'I am the man who groped for words and found/An arrow in my hand.'

And Alun Lewis felt it, too. In a letter to a friend written in December 1939, he said: 'We shouldn't join up in a spirit of renunciation. The world doesn't get better through that sort of heroism. 1914–18 showed that.'

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Safer for the military
Other reasons have been put forward to explain the relative dearth of poets who wrote emotionally of their experience of war in the 1940s. 'And were there war poets?' asks critic Martin Dodsworth, then answers his own question:

Barely. The Second World War was safer for the military than for the civilian stay-at-homes, by and large; it was mobile; it was thoroughly mechanised. Its poets for the most part were, aptly, writers in the alert, observant style of [W H] Auden, sobered down by the new circumstances.

Dodsworth does see Keith Douglas as almost an exception to the rule, claiming for him 'some new kind of sensibility'. However:

the Second World War did not make a poet of him in the way that the First did Wilfred Owen or Siegfried Sassoon. Instead, he used it to see himself and his English society better. This is typical of the literary experience of that war. Since the twenties, the British had been caught up in great social changes whose nature was unclear to them. What lay ahead? A classless industrialised Paradise or some kind of oligarchy or dictatorship?

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The values of the private life
The literary editor G S Fraser echoes those sentiments. The poets who came to prominence in the decade or so before the war, such as W H Auden, tended, he says, 'to be at the mercy of external forces, the poetic conscience directed to public issues' - issues that included not only the fall-out from World War I but also the Depression and the Spanish Civil War. But everything changed once the new war started:

The Second World War, strangely enough, slackened that sense, for the young poet, of the primacy of politics. Young men in the army found themselves defending a social system about which they felt a great scepticism against a system, that of Nazi Germany and its satellites, which was positively evil. And one effect of life in the forces, of course, is to impress upon poets the values of the private life, home surroundings, family affections, things which the Auden group had, on the whole reacted against.

All these circumstances may have meant that fewer poets were inspired by their experiences in the mechanised, mobile forces of World War II than had their counterparts in the static, mud- and corpse-filled trenches of World War I. However the few who have come to the fore have perhaps more to say to us in the aftermath of two wars in Iraq, when computer-guided missiles were seen blowing up targets on television like so many sequences of a video game …

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