Impact of the Great War on Modern Western Literature - Essay Example

Self-awareness and politics became a more popular theme in literature. In Christine Stansell's American Moderns, she accounts how "it gained momentum with a call to arms that echoed earlier campaigns for literary realism waged by Howell and Twain" during the 1910s (148). Personally, I am instantly inspired to write whenever I experience unfortunate instances in life. I don't know but perhaps it is the sad occurrence and the lesson learned from it that drives a writer to start scribbling on a piece of paper or pounding on the computer keyboard.

In most cases, literary works reflect the writer's mood at the moment he wrote the piece. During the First World War, stories of starvation abound on the streets. Children in less developed countries die of hunger because the leaders who are supposed to take care of their welfare have joined the Great War. Families of soldiers feel more fear and longing as the war progresses. These terrifying experiences and the idealism gained from the Great War have inspired many writers, veteran and amateur alike.

Even the soldiers who survived the war wrote their own memoir to enable the public to, at least, take a glimpse inside the army camp or at the battlefield. Thus, answering the call for realism in literature - the kind of literary piece that discriminating readers like to read as they also long for information. Stansell further puts it that "serious American readers who came of age just as modernist prose was exploding in Europe formed their notions of new literature not from stylistic and narrative innovation but from a realist tradition that dwelt on contraband subject matter" (161).

In turn, the "American writers saw their task as telling the truth of modern life, an act that, in their minds, amounted to revolutionary realism" (Stansell 161). Apart from this, people became more aware of their religiosity. To some, the Great War gave them the chilling sensation of what it would be like during the Judgment Day. T.S. Elliot's The Hollow Men, for instance, depicts the feeling of a dead man who has nowhere to go to:Is it like thisIn death's other kingdomWaking aloneAt the hour when we areTrembling with tendernessLips that would kissForm prayers to broken stone (Elliot).

However, for me, this poem depicts the sense of emptiness in a person who fought a war that has claimed many lives and destroyed communities. Though Elliot did not go to the battlefield himself, somehow he has experienced the battle as he transferred to the United Kingdom on 1914 - the time when WWI is brewing.William Butler Yeats' The Second Coming has a religious or spiritual connotation as well:Surely some revelation is at hand; Surely the Second Coming is at hand. The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi (Yeats).

However, Yeats actually refers to a new phase in every man's life, particularly a life after a revolution. Certain meaning to specific phrase in the poem is offered in the website http://www.stfrancis.edu/en/yeats!.htm.Indeed, the First World War or the Great War, although not well remembered as the Second World War, has made a considerable turning point in every man's life. The controversies and the lessons learned from the war made an important impact among the writers and the readers craving for a realist literature.

This important change in Modern Western Literature is still used up to this time