Fields of Agony: British Poetry of the First World War

A superb illustrated study guide to poetry written by men and women in all parts of the British Isles during the First World War, 1914-18. With live hyperlinks to numerous online visual, archival and auditory resources.

Contents

The book discusses significant individual poems by the writers named, exploring them within their social, political and aesthetic frames and summarising important earlier critical readings and responses.

Chapter 1: “What did they expect?” The nature of war poetry. The Invention of War Poetry; The Place of Poetry in 1914; Issues of Gender; Thomas Hardy “˜Men who March Away” Conclusion.

Chapter 2: “˜To battle for the truth”: Popular Poetry. Defining “˜Popular” Responses to war in popular art forms; Ideal, Order and Consolation; Structure, idea and ideology in popular poetry; Anthologies; Other voices.

Chapter 3: “˜Nobody asked what the women thought”: Poetry by Women. Approaching War Poetry by Women; The Variety of Poetry by Women.

Chapter 4: “˜Young blood and high blood”: Canonical writers. Displaced nature: Graves, Blunden and Gurney; Siegfried Sassoon; Wilfred Owen; Edward Thomas; Other cultures, other nations; David Jones; Irish poetry; Scottish poetry.

Chapter 5: Placing War Poetry. War poetry and Modernism; Last thoughts.

Bibliography

About the author

Stuart Sillars is Professor of English at the University of Bergen, Norway. He has written extensively on the literature and visual art of the twentieth century: his books include Art and Survival in First World War Britain (Macmillan, 1987), British Romantic Art and the First World War (Macmillan, 1991) and Structure and Dissolution in English Writing, 1910-1920 (Macmillan, 1999). He has been a visiting professor in Texas, Washington, Zagreb and New Delhi. His most recent book is Painting Shakespeare: The Artist as Critic, 1720-1820 (Cambridge University Press, 2006).