For one who sets out to study the human effects of the Great War upon those who fought it or were near to it, it is almost impossible to ignore how ubiquitous the writing of verse became among the educated young officers who suffered the highest percentage of casualty. They wrote poems, these young men, and they were blown up and machine-gunned and bayoneted, and they wrote more poems and were gassed and shell-shocked into institutions suffering from catatonia or shivering incoherence. And still they wrote poems. Most of the poems disappeared with the dead poets, the intellectual portion of the 50 to 65 percent of men who went to war and were simply lost in the barbarism that ensued, men without graves, poems without distinction, lives without dignity or value except as attritional ciphers in a blundering conspiracy of blind and heartless old men. Despite everything, an astonishing volume of poetry survived, in the diaries the soldiers kept, in the barely censored letters that officers could send back to loved ones while the enlisted men were confined to preprinted postcards provided by the army. Some of the poems that got written, like those of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen and Ivor Gurney, were luminous for all their darkness, glimmers of light in the overwhelming maelstrom. Most weren’t. They were broken, wounded attempts to articulate the incomprehensible, remarkable for the effort, but not for the product.

Yet almost all them--poets and poems alike--shared a uniqueness. It was not so much of treatment or of focus, but of persistent determination to comprehend their condition by composing poems. The poets, therefore, shared a fundamental similarity of intention: they were young men trying to explain to themselves the continued presence of beauty and particularity within a world of violence that had submerged, in the brutal lunacy of trench warfare, all familiar physical and mental significators in a cocktail of cordite, flying fragments of near-molten metal, mud and human gore.

I didn’t quite recognize the degree to which the lyric poetry of my generation followed the Great War model until I read Vera Brittain’s verse-filled autobiographical account of the Great War and its aftermath, Testament of Youth and saw how many of the British officer class headed for extermination wrote poems along the way. If you were to die, and these men quickly realized that this was their likely fate, then you wanted to explain why, if only to your own benighted senses. Trying to find some way to reconcile the hell they’d found themselves in with the continued existence of natural and human beauty, kindness, and other generous human qualities was at least a project over which they had some hope of control. Everything else that once seemed certain and serene had literally turned into madness.

The Great War therefore created a compelling frame that verse in English had not, in 1970, ventured much beyond save in the attempts to widen the field that are Ezra Pound’s Cantos, William Carlos Williams Paterson, and perhaps Charles Olson’s Maximus Poems.

And yes, this legacy of reconciling incomprehensible violence inflicted on the sensible innocent remains the problem of poets working today, even though the world conditions that made English lyric verse what it has been since the Great War have not existed for any Westerners for more than 50 years. First, the military conflicts since 1945 in which North Americans and Western Europeans have been involved have not more than nominally involved our educated classes. Not even the Second World War, with its vast increases in civilian casualties over the Great War, saw anything close to the same degree of violence directed at the young and the educated. Vietnam, the war that captured and to some extent created the social imagination of my generation, was a war to which America sent mostly black kids and rednecks to do the dying. Yet the same larks appear above the blighted landscape in the poems of my generation as could be seen in the poems of the British war poets, except that the hell beneath the wings of today’s poets consists of incitements to purchase goods, eat mediocre pre-processed foods, and suck up other entertainments of the disarticulation of the public realm.