Greater Love

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1918

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Background

Historical Context

WWI broke out on July 28, 1914, and endured for four long years until a truce was finally declared on November 11, 1918—a date that would later become an annual commemorative event known as Armistice Day, or Remembrance Day. The war was fought between two sets of allies: the Triple Entente (France, Russia, and Britain) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Italy, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire), all of which were major European powers with vast territories and resources at their disposal.

While there had of course been countless armed conflicts before throughout history, this conflict became known as the First World War due to its truly global scale and its staggering death count: Estimates of the total military and civilian death count often exceed 10 million, with tens of millions more injured, missing in action, or otherwise affected by the conflict. The war also saw major developments in military technology, such as the use of chemical weapons—especially the infamous mustard gas, which blinded and suffocated soldiers caught without a gas mask—and aerial bombardment. The war is also famous for its trench warfare, in which opposing forces spent much of their time living and fighting from a long series of deep ditches (or trenches) that usually left the soldiers exposed to the elements and living in deeply unhygienic conditions that exacerbated deadly communicable diseases.

Many historians argue that the WWI planted the seeds for the WWII, which broke out at the end of the 1930’s: The defeat and total humiliation of Germany in 1918 led to major social and economic crises in Germany that eventually enabled the rise of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi party, with Hitler promising to avenge Germany’s wartime humiliation with the establishment of a new global empire.

Literary Context

Wilfred Owen and his generation were born into a 19th century England that prided itself on its power, wealth, and empire. Major Victorian literary figures such as Lord Tennyson and Rudyard Kipling extolled the virtues of British military power, feeding into a literary tradition that presented war as heroic, manly, and chivalrous. Patriotism and unthinking jingoism were rife in literature and art, and when WWI broke out, it was enthusiastically welcomed by the majority of the British public, who believed that the war would be quick and victory easily achieved.

The brutal realities of mass warfare that Owen and his contemporaries experienced soon turned many of them from idealistic young patriots into war-weary, cynical critics of a conflict many grew to reject as pointless and cruel. This deep disillusionment is reflected in some of the most famous literary works to emerge from World War I, for which Owen’s poetry is especially famous. Instead of writing about war in a traditionally heroic or epic manner, Owen and other dissenting writers—such as poets Siegfried Sassoon (See Further Reading and Resources) and Robert Graves, and novelists like Erich Maria Remarque—instead used their writing as a means of bearing witness to the ugly reality of armed conflict and the sheer mass destruction modern weaponry was inflicting upon their troops. The literary legacy of World War I is thus famous for having given English literature some of its most powerful condemnations of war, with Owen’s generation becoming known as the “lost generation”: Men who met untimely deaths on the battlefield, or who were left permanently traumatized by the conflict.