First World War Poetry Online

This is a beautiful and moving project. The Wilfrid Owen Multimedia Digital Archive has been created by Oxford University in conjunction with The Imperial War Museum. Wilfrid Owen was one of the poets of the the First World War, alongside Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke. This project is particularly timely as the last remaining few of that generation of young men will soon be all lost to us - there are only three surviving First World War veterans now in the UK, all over 100 years old.

The Wilfrid Owen Digital Archive puts online a vast collection of Wilfrid Owen’s poetry, including fascimiles of his original hand written manuscripts - in some cases, you can follow the drafts as he amended them and tinkered with the wording. You can see how The Anthem for Doomed Youth, for example, was developed from the original piece which he named Anthem for Dead Youth .

There is also an archive of contemporary film footage taken at the time - there are numerous clips from the infamous Battle of the Somme, such as one showing the young soldiers fixing their bayonets.

What is especially interesting is the examples of publications circulating at the time. The Hydra was published by patients of the Craiglockhart Military Hospital, to which Owen contributed when he arrived there after being wounded at the front. There are also a number of mazazines published by the soldiers such as Poison Gas, the unofficial ‘Organ of 3rd Battalion Queen Victoria’s Rifles’. The last century and our present one both opened with wars. In today’s wars, soldiers blog from Iraq. Back then the urge to communicate was just as strong and these magazines are the blogs of their day - satirical, critical and also moving.

The memory of the Great War is a particularly Western/ European cultural memory. There isn’t a similar mythology and ritual around the Second World War in Asia. I think, though, that the First World War has shaped the sensibilities, culture and anxieties of the 20th century across cultural boundries. It was horrendous and brutal and affected millions of people. It happened to nations that were supposedly civilised. And it had a group of young men and women who could articulate the personal horrors in moving and powerful prose, poetry and symbolism that has lasted through the generations. The Great War was the war to end all wars. It was the war that created the two minute silence every November 11th and the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier. We will remember them, we promised, we who lived in the 20th century, repeating the mournful and beautiful words of another war poet Laurence Binyon.

And yet, wars have ravaged the last century and will continue into the next. As those who lived through it finally leave us, it becomes more important than ever to remember - even though wars still explode around us, remembering means that we do not become immune to the horrors and the human tragedy that they bring in their wake.

Photo: thanks to oucs.ox.ac.uk