1 September 2021
Edel Hanley, University College Cork
While women’s First World War writing reveals that women’s war experience was as psychologically scarring as the combatant experience of trench warfare, little work has considered the relationship between women’s war poetry and modernism. Having not served at the Front, women were presumed incapable of understanding war. Claire Buck highlights the problems associated with women’s war poetry claiming that, “readers have often found it disappointingly backward-looking in both style and subject matter, many poems reiterating a version of femininity rooted in home front experiences of waiting and mourning”. [1] In this article, however, I examine the ways in which women poets deploy modernist and Georgian tropes [Romantic literary tradition popularised early in the reign of King George V) to register war experience. Georgian writing emerged in the 1910s with the publication of Edward Marsh’s anthology, Georgian Poetry, 1911-1912, which featured combatants poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke. The anthology established a new style of poetry which modernists would regard as backward-looking, traditional, and overly sentimental in terms of form and content. Continue reading “The Intersection of Modernism and the First World War in Women’s Poetry”
The Modernist Review 