Writes Matthew Hilton-Dennis, Head of English
Tuesday’s lecture focused on the industrial science and technology that drove the First World War, developments in military technology which led to death and destruction on a scale never witnessed before. It also led to completely new genre of poetry, some of which is well known and celebrated; but there is much that has been half-forgotten and Professor Galloway sought to bring these to our attention. They carry different voices: those of combatants anticipating their own death, the grief of parents who have lost their sons, survivors broken in body and spirit. All carry a very deep, personal humanity.
It was a war in which science, at once its handmaiden and its offspring - technology - came into its military own. …death mass-produced, tens of millions killed. But, a war that created its own poetry, powerful and often crystalline in its terrible clarity …science was arguably the mainspring of an entire field of verse. Today, much of it is half- forgotten, and not included in anthologies. I have chosen 13 poems in an attempt to redress the loss.
Professor John Galloway
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