‘“Friend with the musing eye”: persuasion and dissonance in “call to arms” poems of the First World War’

The English poetry arising out of the First World War is commonly represented as expressing either the persuasive or the dissonant voice. Some poems, to be sure, were politically-motivated expressions of one or other position, constructed out of versified rhetoric. However, while recognising these works, I argue that the strongest poetry of the war problematises the terms of that debate, offering ambiguity, nuance and contradiction in a mode that is specifically poetic.