I think it is the raw-boned honesty of the poetry I like. You can imagine when a poet was up to his kneecaps in water and mud in a trench, surrounded by dead bodies and rats, with an itchy skin because of the lice and someone was either trying to gas him or bomb him, social niceties and conventions would be stripped away. In those days of uncertainty and despair one would be reduced to being honest.
What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
wrote Wilfred Owen who tragically died a week before the armistice was signed. His parents found out about his death on Armistice Day. Can you imagine how they would have felt when they heard the armistice had been signed but too late for their boy?
Owen told it how it was.
Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind
This is an extract from his poem Dulce et Decorum est. (It is sweet and right) At the end of this poem he concludes if you had seen someone dying of gas poisoning you would not be so quick to believe the lie that it is sweet and right to die for your country which was the prevailing belief of the day.
Somehow I do not think we have learned the lessons that Owen tries to teach us in his poems.
