The Imagery of Landscape in the Poetry of the First World War: From Rupert Brooke to Edward Thomas Anonymous College

At the turn of the nineteenth century, and the start of the ‘War to end all Wars’, there was a rise in an exclusive kind of poetry, born in the suffering hands of the ‘War poet’. He is often seen in a state of despair, and combines the peaceful scenes of the preceding century with a sense of extreme pain and depression. It is the descriptions of landscape that this amalgamation is most clear, where the destruction of the peaceful and stable past is evident and where a new sense of misery is observed. The First World War had Britain ask itself if the country could ever return to its prior state; the nature of politics had been impacted by the violence in Europe, and the military prosperity that had previously existed was now a mass of shattered morale. Poetry had lost much of its Romantic aspect, with many Georgian poets, such as Rupert Brooke, fighting in the trenches and becoming realists in their work.

One of Brooke’s most notable work is the poem ‘The Soldier’, which not only questions a failure of the war on the British part, but also deals with what is to become of the landscape. Brooke opens the poem with an address that; “If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field/ That is forever...