From World War I to 20th Century Literature: An Analysis

The Causes of World War I

The first world war broke out because there were two different conflicts: on one side there was Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, on the other side there was Britain (but Britain came to war with the British empire, that made Britain very powerful), France and Russia. The situation was terrible until the arrival of the United States, which later joined the war and won.

What is the reason why Britain declared war on Germany?

Because Germany wanted to conquer Belgium (that was a neutral country); it was a matter of democracy, and this is not a case that this war was fought by a lot of volunteers who joined the war, they were very young, they were almost 18, 19, 20. Most of them lost their life, and those who came back home were totally changed and many of them also suffered from «shell shock», a terrible psychological effect caused by bombs and explosions that were used to fight. So, a lot of soldiers came back home mentally insane.

The Entry of the United States and the Treaty of Versailles

But when America joined the fight, everything ended positively. The treaty of Versailles was signed to put an end to the first world war but the conditions were terrible, because Germany had to pay a lot of money to the winning countries. Because this money was too much, this was considered to be one of the reasons for the breaking out of totalitarianism (Hitler in Germany, Mussolini in Italy, Stalin in Russia, Franco in Spain, Tito in Yugoslavia...). But at the end of the war, president Wilson decided to have an organization, named "league of nations", with the aim to give prosperity to countries and to protect countries to avoid other terrible war episodes.

Literary Production of the 20th Century

The first half of the 20th century is a period full of literary production in all fields: in poetry, in novels, in drama...
In the first decade of the century, in poetry there were different trends:

There were poets who still were dreaming of romantic poetry, the victorian's way of living and writing, they were also attracted by the quality of the countryside and by sentimentalism (these poets were called "Georgian poets” because they took the name from the king George V);

There was also another important group of poets named "War poets", because they went to fight within the first world war. They were very young, and most of their were volunteers, so they joined the army because they wanted to fight for democracy, against totalitarianism, against supremacy, Unfortunately, most of them lost their lives and those who came back home were no more the same. They wrote poems in the trenches, or when they immediately came back from the trenches, but they were not the same young people as they were before joining the army. The language of those poems was rude, unconventional, impolite, because they described reality. They are highly representative of this part of the century.

The Imagists and Ezra Pound

There were some other poets of the time, generally called "imagists". The most important was an American poet, called Ezra Pound, a great admirer of Whitman. Imagists' idea was that of saving a few words with a lot of meaning: they used images and they also gave attention to the quality of vocabulary, the sound they produced, and they described emotions they had, but without any evaluation of the people they wrote about. There was no moral concern (like in Oscar Wilde).