The last two world wars were unique in our history, not least for the cultural shock inflicted on the whole of our society. Each of them took millions of young men and women away from their families and friends at the most sensitive stage of their lives. It put them into uniform to serve under strict discipline with total strangers in closed communities. It sent them abroad to kill other young men and women hundreds and thousands of miles away in cities, fields and mountains, in deserts and jungles. Finally, it subjected them to long periods of paralysing boredom, punctuated by sharp bursts of extreme excitement in which the prospect of death was always present.
For most of these men and women the war was the most intense experience they were ever to know. Thousands, who found the pressure almost too much to bear, turned to poetry as the only way of realising-for the first and often the last time in their lives. So both wars produced a cataract of poetry.
However, the poetry of the Second World War is much different from that of the first.…
