School For Independent Learners

From The Guardian:

The links between the first world war and literature are enshrined in our culture: the war poets are taught in schools, and their descriptions of the horrors of the trenches have entered – and to an extent informed – our national consciousness. But why was it this war, above all others, that found its way into words?

Before 1914, of those who described war, painted it and wrote poetry about it, very few had seen battle themselves. Now a generation of the literary middle class had, and found it by turns mundane, draining and horrific. The first world war was the first time war was seen and understood by writers, by a whole generation of them, who didn’t see it remotely, through chivalrously tinted lenses but in the mud and the blood and the shrapnel. Before the real dawn of cinema and after the birth of literacy, the first world war is the only war that must be read to be understood. Perhaps that’s why modern authors such as Sebastian Faulks and Pat Barker are still inspired by it today.