WW1 Literature and Poetry: Remarque, Owen and the Lost Generation
World War I literature is the trench prose, poetry and memoirs that soldiers, nurses and journalists wrote between 1914 and the 1930s, and it shaped how we picture that war more than any textbook. The key texts are Erich Maria Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1929), Wilfred Owen's poems, published after his death in 1920, Henri Barbusse's novel Under Fire (1916) and Ernst Jünger's memoir Storm of Steel (1920). Poetry travelled from the patriotic enthusiasm of 1914 to the bitter "pity of war" of 1917-1918, while the great prose books by veterans appeared only in the late 1920s.
This article is for readers who know the First World War through dates and battles and want to see it through the eyes of the people who were there, and for Frontkrieg players curious about what stands behind casualty figures and morale.
Key takeaways
- The defining novel: Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front sold 2.5 million copies in its first 18 months in print.
- The defining poet: Wilfred Owen was killed a week before the Armistice, and almost all of his poems were published after his death.
- The big shift: from Rupert Brooke's patriotic sonnets (March 1915) to the satire and horror of Siegfried Sassoon and Owen (1917).
- Women's voices: more than 500 women published poetry, and nurses left memoirs.
- Where to start: Remarque, then two poems by Owen, then Barbusse and Jünger.
WW1 literature in numbers
- 2.5 million copies of All Quiet on the Western Front in the 18 months after its book release on 29 January 1929; by 1930 it had been translated into 28 languages and world sales neared 4 million (estimates vary).
- almost 250,000 copies of Barbusse's Under Fire sold by the end of the war.
- over 2,000 poems about and during the war were written by published poets.
- 25 years old was Owen when he was killed on 4 November 1918.
- 27 years old were Brooke (died 23 April 1915) and Rosenberg (killed 1 April 1918).
- 24 impressions of Brooke's 1914 & Other Poems were printed by June 1918, though it first appeared in May 1915.
- 16 poets were commemorated on 11 November 1985 by a slate in Poets' Corner at Westminster Abbey, carrying a line by Owen.
Poetry: from 1914 enthusiasm to the "pity of war"
Rupert Brooke and the patriotic sonnet
Two of Rupert Brooke's sonnets, "The Dead" and "The Soldier", appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on 11 March 1915, and the second was read from the pulpit of St Paul's Cathedral on Easter Sunday, 4 April. The idealistic verse of 1914 was a hit: 1914 & Other Poems went through 24 impressions. Brooke never saw it. On 23 April 1915, aged 27, he died of sepsis after a mosquito bite aboard a French hospital ship off the island of Skyros, on his way to Gallipoli.
Sassoon and Owen: the truth from the trenches
In July 1917 the officer and poet Siegfried Sassoon sent his commanders a letter, "Finished with the War: A Soldier's Declaration", which was read out in the House of Commons on 30 July. Instead of a court martial he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near Edinburgh to be treated for shell shock. Wilfred Owen arrived there too, and meeting Sassoon changed his poetry: in 1917 he wrote "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Dulce et Decorum Est". Owen originally dedicated the second poem to Jessie Pope, the author of cheerful pro-war verse, and how states sold the war is covered in our article on WW1 propaganda. The poem itself describes a gas attack, and the history of poison gas is in our piece on chemical weapons in WW1.
Owen returned to the front in August 1918, won the Military Cross for the action of 1 October, and was killed on 4 November crossing the Sambre-Oise Canal, exactly one week before the Armistice. His mother received the telegram on 11 November, as church bells rang in Shrewsbury to celebrate peace. In his lifetime Owen published only a handful of texts, among them "Miners" in The Nation, and the collection Poems appeared in 1920 with Sassoon's help. In his preface Owen named his subject: "My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity." Those words are carved on the slate in Westminster Abbey.
The same year, 1917, brought a wave of mutinies, covered in our article on mutinies and desertion in the armies of WW1.
Isaac Rosenberg: a poet without illusions
Rosenberg, the son of Lithuanian Jewish immigrants and an artist by training, enlisted in October 1915 and wrote: "I never joined the army for patriotic reasons. Nothing can justify war." The critic Paul Fussell called his "Break of Day in the Trenches" "the greatest poem of the war". Rosenberg was killed on 1 April 1918 at Fampoux near Arras, aged 27; whether by a sniper or in close combat, historians still dispute.
Prose: the novel that changed how we see the war
Remarque and All Quiet on the Western Front
Remarque was conscripted into the German army at 18. He reached the Western Front in June 1917, and on 31 July shrapnel wounded his leg, arm and neck. His novel ran in the newspaper Vossische Zeitung from 10 November to 9 December 1928 and came out as a book on 29 January 1929. Publishers feared that interest in the war had faded ten years after the Armistice, but the book struck a nerve.
The narrator is nineteen-year-old Paul Bäumer, who volunteers with his whole class after the patriotic speeches of their teacher Kantorek. The battles in the novel have no names, scraps of land change hands, and the main enemies are hunger, shelling and chance. The book ends in October 1918: Paul is killed on a "quiet" day, when the frontline report consists of a single line, "All quiet on the Western Front". In his foreword Remarque says he will tell of a generation that the war destroyed, even if it escaped the shells.
Men like Paul are what people mean by the "Lost Generation". The term is credited to Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway made it famous by using it as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926). On 10 May 1933 the Nazis declared Remarque's work "unpatriotic" and his books were publicly burned, while Edward Berger's German film of 2022 won four Academy Awards.
Other voices from the front
- Henri Barbusse, Under Fire (1916): a trench novel by a French stretcher-bearer, on which Remarque partly drew.
- Ernst Jünger, Storm of Steel (1920): the memoir of a German officer, first published in English in 1930.
- Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929): an American in the ambulance corps of the Italian army.
- Jaroslav Hašek, The Good Soldier Švejk (1921-1923): a satire on the Austro-Hungarian army that the author did not live to finish.
Women at war: voices that went unheard for decades
Until the late 1970s "war poetry" was treated as a male genre, because only the experience of those who fought and died was seen as authentic. That pushed grief, the care of the wounded and the home front to the margins. Yet more than 500 women published poetry during the war, and nurses left prose: A Diary without Dates by Enid Bagnold (1918), Forbidden Zone by Mary Borden (1929) and Testament of Youth by Vera Brittain (1933).
Why the great books appeared only in the late 1920s
Literature appeared throughout the war, but the real boom in war books in Britain came in the late 1920s and early 1930s, and the next one in the 1960s, around the fiftieth anniversary. That is when the "canon" formed: Sassoon, Owen, Gurney, Thomas, Sorley, Jones and Rosenberg entered school curricula. Scholars warn that this selection stresses horror, suffering and anger at those who wage war, and pushes aside the patriotic voices that were dominant in 1914. So read both Brooke and Owen: the first shows what people believed at the start, the second how it ended.
What to read: a route of six texts
- Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front - the easiest way in, about 250 pages.
- Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth" and "Dulce et Decorum Est" - two poems for ten minutes.
- Brooke's "The Soldier" - to see where it all began.
- Rosenberg's "Break of Day in the Trenches" - the poem Fussell thought the greatest.
- Barbusse's Under Fire - the view of a French infantryman.
- Jünger's Storm of Steel - a German officer's view in a different tone from Remarque's.
How these books help you understand Frontkrieg
In Frontkrieg, a free browser strategy game about the First World War, what Remarque writes about has become rules. Province morale is a number from 0 to 100: it multiplies tax income and construction speed, and in battle an army's strength falls from ×1.00 at morale 100 to ×0.55 at zero, so a demoralised garrison fights almost half as hard as a fresh one. The details are in the guide to province morale. The nameless battles for scraps of land that Remarque describes are the same positional deadlock explained in our article on trench warfare.
Frequently asked questions
What is All Quiet on the Western Front about?
It is Remarque's semi-autobiographical novel about Paul Bäumer, a nineteen-year-old German soldier on the Western Front in 1916-1918. The book shows trench routine, hunger, fear and estrangement from civilian life rather than heroism. It was published in 1929 and became one of the best-known anti-war novels of the twentieth century.
What is the "Lost Generation"?
The term describes young people who went through the First World War and could not find their place in peacetime. It is credited to Gertrude Stein, and Hemingway used it as an epigraph to The Sun Also Rises (1926). Remarque says something similar in his foreword: a generation destroyed by the war even if it survived the shells.
What is Wilfred Owen's most famous poem?
"Dulce et Decorum Est", written in 1917 and published after the poet's death in 1920. The title is a line from Horace: "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country". Owen turned it into bitter irony by describing a gas attack and the death of a soldier who could not be saved in time.
Where should I start reading WW1 literature?
Start with Remarque: the novel is short and the easiest way in. Then read a few poems by Owen and Rosenberg, and move on to Barbusse and Jünger to compare the views of a French and a German veteran. For historical background, add our article on trench warfare.
Conclusion
World War I literature is the testimony of people who went through the trenches: from Brooke's rapturous sonnets to the unsparing truth of Owen, Rosenberg and Remarque. It answers a question that casualty figures cannot: what this generation was like from the inside. Start with Remarque and two poems by Owen, and to see the same decisions from a commander's side, play a match in Frontkrieg: a new game starts every day, and it is free with no pay-to-win. More history and strategy articles are in our blog. The memory of the war also lives on in Remembrance Day and the poppy on 11 November.