A contemporary poet aims to capture the terror of World War I
commonwealmagazine.org
commonwealmagazine.org
> [00:48:51] We have remembered the soldiers and tried to imagine the warfare they endured, but that's got in the way of understanding the great war's full character and impact.
> Of course we can't ignore the mud and the suffering, but I believe that a hundred years on from 1914 it's time to let go of the dead.
> We can't just feel the great war as a piece of poetry, or a stark morality play. We need to understand it as history. History that cast long shadows over the years that followed.
> A hundred years on, the great war still has enduring resonance, but our understanding of it is often a caricatured mixture of mud and death, poets and poppies.
> In this series I want to clamber out of the trenches to explore the deeper meaning of the great war and its momentous legacies.
> One paradox of the war is that it wasn't caused by profound political or ideological divisions but it did create them in its wake.
> The war made politics red-hot. It gave birth to an age of mass democracy with the vote extended to ordinary men and women.