War Poetry

Memorials, grief and loss

Pacificism and peace

Life on the front-line, trench conditions

Slaughter and suffering

Patriotism, nationalism and jingoism

Recruitment and propaganda

Responses to the outbreak of war

The home-front

In Flanders Fields, John McCrae, c.1915 (106)

For The Fallen, Laurence Binyon, 1914 (160)

Pre-war attitudes to conflict

Sonnet - When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead, C.H. Sorley, 1915 (107)

Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen, 1917, (139)

Heroism, duty and honour

The Soldier, Rupert Brooke, 1914, (103)

The Volunteer, Herbert Asquith, 1912 (104)

Dulce Et Decorum Est, Wilfred Owen, 1917 (140)

All the Hills and Vales Along, C.H. Sorley, 1914 (107)

Strange Meeting, Wilfred Owen, 1918 (145)

Futility of war

Exposure, Wilfred Owen, 1917 (141)

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Common Form, Rudyard Kipling, 1918 (164)

The Hero, Siegfried Sassoon, 1917 (122)

When The Hero appeared in print, in 1917, many people were shocked. Fellow-officers condemned him. They found the poem caddish, as it could destroy every mother's faith in the report of her son's death.


Sassoon made clear that the poem did not refer to anyone he had known. "But it is pathetically true. And of course, the average Englishman will hate it", he remarked - shaping a distance between the 'averages' and 'those who know better'.


Certainly Sassoon was breaking the conspiracy of silence, but many soldiers felt that those at home should be made to realize the full horror, and the ugliness, of the war as much as possible.

The Hero, Siegfried Sassoon, 1917 (122)

Glory of Women, Siegfried Sassoon, 19 (125)

My Boy Jack:

  • The play's conclusion in 1933, with Carrie and Rudyard, ('elderly and frail') listening to a BBC news announcement of Hitler's rise to Chancellor of Germany reminds the audience that this was not the 'war to end all wars' it was believed to be. In Rudyard's bitter response, 'for nothing, for nothing, for nothing,' Haig channels the angry, critical voice of Kipling's 'Epigraphs of the War' (1922): If any question why we died,/ Tell them because our fathers lied'. Ultimately, this makes Jack's sacrifice and his family's desperate search to find him seem insignificant and futile.

Futility, Wilfred Owen, 1918 (144)