‘If Armageddon’s on …’: British writers and the outbreak of the First World War

Well before the onset of the First World War, British writers had been ambivalent about the growing tensions between Britain and Germany. When the war broke out such ambivalence was at once reflected in the response of those soldier poets who would become known as the war poets. This paper argues that the conventional narrative of the literature of the Great War needs to be revised to take fuller account of the conflicted attitudes and responses of poets such as Charles Hamilton Sorley, Wilfred Owen and, in particular, Rupert Brooke. Brooke’s attitude to the prospect of fighting against Germany is too often oversimplified by those critics who assume that his sonnet sequence ‘1914’ says all that needs to be said about his views, which went beyond simple patriotism and an eagerness to fight and die for England. The paper will focus on of these poets in the opening months of the war, analysing their responses in the light of the Wellington House Declaration of September 1914, the British Government propaganda initiative designed to harness the influence of British writers and academics to promote support for the war effort.