The Great War and Modernist Poetry

This chapter examines modernist poetry during the Great War, beginning with a reading of In Parenthesis, which is influenced by T.S. Eliot's poem. It then provides a reading of the wartime writings of Ezra Pound and Eliot, who both witness the cultural and political upheaval in the British capital, and shows how these two poets mark this turning point and incorporate its impact in their own imaginative language. Next, the chapter turns to W.B. Yeats's verse of the same historical experience and then assesses the significance of the difference that Yeats's own Irish concerns make in his representation of the First World War. It also provides a detailed coverage of the major verse of literary modernism in Britain and Ireland.