W.W. II: Where Were
the War Poets?

With only eight months left in the war, poet and poetry editor Louis Untermeyer (1885 – 1977) asked:

“Why has no poet… emerged [from this war] to stir the heart and burn into the mind?… Why are there no names to set against Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Siegfrid Sassoon and other World War I poets?”

In his 1970s essay, Where Are the War Poets, critic Paul Fussell (1924 – 2012) answered Untermeyer’s question:

“If the poets of 1914 – 1918 marched briskly away in innocence, those of 1939 – 1945 slouched unillusioned toward fatality, adept already at understanding evil and expecting nothing.”

(Pictured above we see a combat veteran of the U.S. Second Division; we don’t know what he’s writing, but we know it isn’t in verse.)

The writer Harry Brown is mentioned in this article, you can read about him here…

You can read about the W.W. I poets here…