First world war poetry: A cultural landscape

The year 1914 was iconic already by 1915, when it provided the main title for a small volume of poems by (the now posthumous) Rupert Brooke. Inscribing the first year of the First World War in headline-like style, this title caught the sense of tremendous eventfulness in the moment. It also marked wartime against pre-war and, subsequently, post-war, drawing a line across time and defining a watershed in literary history that has grown more vivid in critical and poetic retrospect. Nearly a half-century later, in 1960, Philip Larkin revisited the year and reinscribed the date in his title as ‘MCMXIV’. The Roman numerals lend the sense of a time immemorial to the last moments of existence in history before this war, when, in anticipation of the British declaration of hostilities at eleven o’clock on the evening of 4 August 1914, a photograph from a newspaper of that day shows: These long uneven lines Standing as patiently As if they were stretched outside The Oval or Villa Park, The crowns of hats, the sun On moustached archaic faces Grinning as if it were all An August bank holiday lark. These ‘archaic faces’ depict the last pre-war moment as a kind of prehistory. This is the place in imaginative time which Larkin stakes later in the poem with a reference to ‘Domesday lines’, the first land survey of Britain, drawn up in 1085–6, which provides an image of a residual but ancient and now obviously foregone form of social order for the landscape of the last day of peace. ‘Never such innocence’, goes the poetic editorial, attributing a value he reiterates thus in the final line: ‘Never such innocence again’.