World War I’s Transformative Effect on Literature
WWI’s Profound Impact on Society and Literature
The period of World War I may seem short in the history of human beings or art, but its influence on technology, politics, people, their lifestyles, and art was so huge that the conflict was called the Great War. Part of this effect was deeply felt in literature. World War I changed people and their points of view; writers altered their subjects and literary techniques, while readers’ expectations and tastes shifted. The class system was rocked by trade unions and the Labour party; beliefs in King and Country, patriotism, and duty were betrayed by the carnage of the war. The strength of patriarchy was challenged as women entered the workforce outside the home and the suffrage movement gained momentum. As a result, it became difficult, even absurd, to celebrate noble ideas like human dignity in art or blithely assert a belief in human progress.
The Scale and Trauma of the Great War
The Great War, fought between the Central Powers and the Allied or Entente Powers, began in July 1914.
- Central Powers: German Empire, Austro-Hungarian Empire, Ottoman Empire, Kingdom of Bulgaria
- Allied (Entente) Powers: Russian Empire, France, British Empire, Italy, Empire of Japan, United States (among others)
The progress of the war implied that there wouldn’t be a swift end, and mass slaughter (along with the technology to achieve it) had to be planned for. The result was over 40 million casualties, including approximately 20 million deaths. Thousands upon thousands who did not die on the fronts suffered from shell shock, which haunted their post-war lives.
Shifting Literary Landscapes and Techniques
This radical, instigating event changed the form and content of literary texts in English. Matthews explains that American émigrés like T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound insisted on using the innovative literary techniques they had experimented with in previous years, but they changed their subject matter. They moved from high concerns about aestheticism to the nature of the ‘civilization’ the war was supposedly fought to preserve. Fears about cultural degeneration and ‘civilization’ (as opposed to barbarism) became keywords in literary reviews at that time. The war necessitated stylistic and formal changes in the works of emerging English novelists, including D. H. Lawrence and Virginia Woolf.
Post-War Disillusionment and Modernist Responses
That war, ironically intended by some as the war to end war itself, instead altered the face of our civilization. It left European nations impoverished, shell-shocked, discouraged, and unsettled. This was the time when T. S. Eliot shifted the focus of his key essays to questioning the very civilization that had endured four years of World War I.
T.S. Eliot and the Search for Order in Chaos
Eliot’s poem, The Waste Land (1922), refers to the mass destruction and the enormous scale of the slaughter. In a 1921 essay by Eliot, Matthews observes that Eliot established his ideal poetry as one uniting ideas and physical sensations. Eliot additionally praises James Joyce’s (and Yeats’s) use of the ‘mythical method’ of writing, which brings “artistic order to the chaos of modern life” and suggests a continuous parallel between the contemporary and antiquity. Eliot implies that the shapelessness of history can only hope to be partially restored through literary means that bridge such gaps or dissociations.