Nearly a hundred years ago on the 11th hour on the 11th day of the 11th month of 1918, the Great War ended. After four years of fighting 9 million soldiers were dead and 21 million were injured. Among those that survived were some of the best poets and authors of their day. Irrevocably changed by the war, the Special Collections display highlights the texts they wrote to help process the devastation of the war.
Captain Siegfried Sassoon was one of the most well-known poets of WWI and his poetry describes the horrors of the trenches and warfare in general. However, it was the satire of patriotic pretensions of those leading the war that caused him to become a focal point of dissent within the army.
Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen was heavily influenced by Sassoon. After Sassoon was injured, Owen felt it was his responsibility to return to the front and continue to write about the horrors of the war in his mentor’s absence. Unfortunately, Owen did not survive the war and was killed just one week before the armistice was signed.
Second Lieutenant Edmund Blunden survived two years on the front lines of the war. He was never fully able to recover from the mental and physical damage he received during the war (his lungs were permanently damaged from gas attacks), he wrote a year before he died, “My experiences in the First World War have haunted me all my life and for many days I have, it seemed, lived in that world rather than this.”
Second Lieutenant’s C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien both responded to the war very differently than Sassoon, Owen, and Blunden. Instead of writing about the horrors of war, they portray war as a battle between good and evil.
Erich Maria Remarque was conscripted into the German army at the age of 18 and served for a month and half before being injured at the front. After the war he wrote a number of novels detailing life at the front and disconnection returning soldiers felt after returning home.
Not everyone that served in the war, fought on the front lines. Both E.E. Cummings and Ernest Hemingway enlisted in the Ambulance Corps during the war and both fictionalized their experiences in novels. Cummings novel, The Enormous Room recounts his experiences in a detention camp after he is arrested by the French military on suspicion of espionage and undesirable activities. In A Farewell to Arms, Hemmingway uses his experience in the war to tell a tragic love story between an ambulance driver and a nurse during the war.
Others served the war effort at home. Both Rudyard Kipling and Mary Augusta Ward (writing as Mrs. Humphry Ward) were commissioned by their respective governments to write stories, poems, and novels to bolster support for the war on the home front. Ward's books were written as letters to a ‘friend’, in Towards the Goal, her correspondent was President Roosevelt who also wrote the forward to the book. Kipling’s pieces were very popular in Brittan as they glorified the British military.
To learn more about each author’s service and see the stories and poems they wrote, visit the display cases outside Special Collections anytime the library is open. Interested in learning more about these notable authors? Contact Heidi Pettitt (heidi.pettitt@loras.edu) to set up a time to visit the collection.
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