"You are all a "génération perdue." Stein, in telling Hemingway the story, added, "That is what you are. That's what you all are ... all of you young people who served in the war. You are a lost generation.”
It was Hemmingway, in his
1926’s novel, The Sun Also Rises that
established the term ‘The Lost
Generation’, used as an epigraph epitomixing the post-war expatriate
generation. The term attempted to define an essence of moral loss/aimlessness
and what the WWI had done to the society, young generation of men specifically.
Many went to war and die, some might returned home with physical or mental
wound, faith within themselves were no longer valid hence they were all ‘lost’. Hemmingway coined the term from
his, mentor and patroness, Gertrude Stein.
The First World War witnessed
an emergence of a group of poets who produced an immense volume of writings (be
it poetry, prose, or memoirs) concerning on the matter of the war itself. The
contemporary establishment of the time was to validate their strong emotional
consciousness and experiences towards the basic notion of the war; from their
sheer pride and determination in serving the Nation’s front to their most
detestation concerning on every ounce of wasted dedicated human talent, energy,
resources as well as the destruction of human’s life.
Some of them were soldiers, who
fought alongside their now long lost dead and forgotten comrades. Their
testimonials were recorded in each and every works crafted, purposely
reimagining the state of devastation, in bearing horrific reality of witnessing
million of life ripped away with their very own eyes. These poets, including
Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Gurney and Jones were all wounded and shell shocked,
shared the same mutual dreadful experience on the battlefield. This communal
experience of the events aided them perfectly in producing such powerful and
poignant works regarding the effects of war concerning the horror and memory of
conflict.
"My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity." - Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) poet, patriot, solider, pacifist
Arms and the Boy
Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.
Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-heads
Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads.
Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth,
Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.
For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.
Wilfred Owen