Profs & Pints DC: Poets of the First World War

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Poets of the First World War,” on the lives and legacies of writers whose accounts from the trenches changed how we put warfare into words, with Christopher Hamner, associate professor of history at George Mason University and author of Enduring Battle: American Soldiers in Three Wars, 1776-1945.

The murderous realities of World War I shattered many traditional ideas about the glory, adventure, and heroism of war. They also left a generation of writers—most of them combat soldiers themselves—struggling to find ways to capture the horrors of their experiences in prose and verse.

Finding old idioms insufficient to describe the new, mechanized form of carnage that they witnessed, a new generation of poets and writers created a new language for writing about war. Their new vernacular was steeped in realism and irony and often deeply riddled with disillusionment and cynicism. How they thought and wrote about…