Machine Gun Sonnets

The Millions has an essay about the First World War and the poetry surrounding it.

From the piece...

But politics and agenda aside, what is rather interesting is the range and scope of First World War poetry, for war poetry has never been a mode of discourse possessing a long shelf life. It is not the thing that complements a sunny afternoon, and while there is a decent tradition in American letters of the war novel, A Farewell to Arms, The Naked and the Dead, The Thin Red Line and The Things They Carried all immediately come to mind, these works often arrive long after the final salvo, tend to be imbued with the cult of the author’s persona and to be written from the safety and distance of time, free from the possibility that a sniper bullet might arrest the author mid couplet; whereas the poems of the Great War, for the most part, exist devoid of ego and communicate a collective rather than personal mindset. As Patrick MacGill writes in the final quatrain of “Before the Charge:”

The dead leaves float in the sighing air,
The darkness moves like a curtain drawn,
A veil which the morning sun will tear
From the face of death.—We charge at dawn

Together, reads the unwritten and inferable coda; and together we die.