Why did soldiers in ww1 write poems?
Poetry is a means of conveying complicated emotions, to portray images that conjure up images and paint pictures in the mind of scenes, sounds, scents, smells etc. It can also be reflective. War poems portray images of war and sometimes reflect peace or the yearning for peace and normality. For soldiers, most of whom were very young and had never travelled away fromhome, the experience of war was totally different than anything else they had ever experienced. They witnessed the depths of human depravity, the stench of death, the suffering etc as well as the community spirit of the troops trying their best to cope in a real but “unreal” situation. Love figures highly because the soldiers were missing loved ones: families, girffriends etc. Before the first world war there hadn’t been too many written records of war that related to the lives and experiences of the young soldiers. A lot of the first world war was trench warfare so soldiers were holed up in muddy trenches and many suffered.
