World War I and World War II
The period after World War I and World War II, this was approximately during the years 1919 to 1944, and after 1946, various sentiments appeared ranging from loss, death, suffering, happy to be alive and family reunions. Since people are still experiencing the aftermath of the war, poets and authors alike were also feeling the fever. Rupert Brooke was well known for his war poems that vividly described what he saw, relating the fear and devastation he felt while fighting in the battlefield.
Fiction novelist D.H. Laurence, poetess Edna St. Vincent Millay and Robert Frost became well known for their works that includes Women in Love, A Few Figs from Thistles and a Pulitzer Award Winning collection of poems, respectively. However, other authors like John Hall Wheelock began publishing The Liberator, a weekly journal of criticizing the current society radically, where he soon became affiliated with the communist party.
There were some who were not contented with the result of the war and went on to protest through their writings. Filling up the people’s mind with “what if” questions, and “if this was what they want”. This somehow changed the people’s view and a mixture of reactions was raised against their current situation. For example in the aftermath of World War II, a wave of sympathy was given to the holocaust survivors, while others, still, believed in Hitler’s ideology.
From this event, numerous autobiographical accounts were published, the famous of which was The Diary of Anne Frank. Nonetheless, the conflict that arose from this era was that people became too sensitive in what was written down in journals, poems, stories or even in any articles. Such sensitivity was somehow dreadful for the literature world since authors did not have the liberty anymore to write anything out of topic and was not able to deviate from the current issues that were going on at that time.
Works Cited
Online Focus. War Poets. A Newshour with Jim Lehrer Transcript. February 17, 2003. November 5, 2007. http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/entertainment/jan-june03/war_poets_2-17.html
World Chronology(1919, 1920). Answers.Com Website. November 5, 2007. http://www.answers.com/topic/1919?cat=technology#literature
http://www.answers.com/topic/1920?cat=technology#literature
Between The Covers Rare Books, Inc. Website. November 5, 2007. http://www.betweenthecovers.com/btc/awards/1000304
