Early War Literature: Patriotism and Propaganda

In August 1914, Britain went to war in a mood of intense patriotic fervour. The literature produced in the early months of the conflict reflects this mood: confident, idealistic, drawing on classical and chivalric traditions to present war as noble, purifying, and glorious. Understanding this early war literature is essential for two reasons: first, because some of it — particularly Brooke's sonnets — is genuinely accomplished poetry that deserves serious analysis; and second, because the later war poets defined themselves against this tradition. You cannot fully understand Owen's fury or Sassoon's satire without understanding what they were rejecting.

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The Climate of 1914

Factor	Detail
Voluntary enlistment	In August 1914 alone, approximately 750,000 men volunteered to serve. By January 1915, over one million had enlisted
Social pressure	Women handed white feathers (symbols of cowardice) to men not in uniform. Recruitment posters used emotional manipulation ("Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?")
Press enthusiasm	Newspapers presented the war as a righteous crusade against German militarism and "barbarism" (real and exaggerated)
Literary tradition	The dominant literary models for war were classical (Homer, Virgil) and chivalric (Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade"). War was associated with heroism, honour, and sacrifice
The "Edwardian summer"	For the privileged classes, the pre-war period seemed a golden age of stability and certainty. The war was initially welcomed by some as an escape from peacetime complacency

AO3 Insight: The enthusiasm of 1914 was not simply naive. It was shaped by powerful cultural forces — a literary tradition that glorified martial valour, a social structure that valorised duty and sacrifice, and a press that suppressed information about the reality of modern warfare. The early war poets wrote within these constraints, not in ignorance of them.

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Rupert Brooke (1887–1915)

Brooke is the most famous — and most controversial — of the early war poets. His five war sonnets, published in 1914, captured the national mood so perfectly that they made him a celebrity. When he died of sepsis on a hospital ship in the Aegean in April 1915 (before seeing significant combat), he became a national icon — the beautiful young poet who had given his life for England.

"The Soldier" (1914)

This is Brooke's most anthologised poem and the defining text of early war idealism:

If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England.

Feature	Analysis
Form	Petrarchan sonnet — the form traditionally associated with love poetry. Brooke transfers the language of romantic devotion to patriotic devotion
Speaker	First person; addresses an implied listener ("think only this of me"). The tone is calm, assured, almost consoling
"If I should die"	The conditional mood softens the reality of death. "If" suggests possibility, not certainty; "should" is polite, almost genteel
"some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England"	The dead soldier's body sanctifies the foreign soil, transforming it into English ground. The body becomes a form of imperial expansion — even in death, Englishness claims territory
Imagery of England	"Her flowers to love, her ways to roam, / A body of England's, breathing English air" — England is personified as a mother, a beloved; the soldier's body is England's body. The imagery is pastoral, idyllic, nostalgic
Absence of combat	The poem contains no images of violence, suffering, or the physical reality of war. Death is abstracted, aestheticised, rendered beautiful

Critical Perspective: Brooke's sonnets have been read in very different ways. To contemporaries, they expressed something genuine and deeply felt — a willingness to sacrifice that was widely shared in 1914. To later readers, particularly after the Somme, they seem dangerously naive, complicit in the propaganda that sent men to their deaths. The critic Paul Fussell described Brooke as "the essentially literary man untroubled by the facts." Yet Charles Hamilton Sorley, writing in 1915, offered a more nuanced critique: Brooke had "taken the sentimental attitude" by "making a sentimental result of a thing in which sentiment has no part."

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Jessie Pope (1868–1941)

Pope was a journalist and versifier (critics hesitate to call her a poet) who wrote recruitment verse for the Daily Mail. Her work is significant less for its literary quality than for its role as a target — Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" was originally dedicated "To Jessie Pope" (later changed to "To a certain Poetess").

"Who's for the Game?" (1915)

Who's for the game, the biggest that's played, The red crashing game of a fight? Who'll grip and tackle the job unafraid? And who thinks he'd rather sit tight?