ABSTRACT
The War Poets wrenched the emotion of anger from its place behind the arras in English lyric poetry and placed it front and centre as a legitimate and, indeed, necessary emotion. This chapter begins by illustrating how earlier generations of poets, from Shakespeare to Masefield, distanced themselves from anger and intellectualised it in terms of religious binaries, gender, degeneracy, socioeconomic class, and other forms of social liminality. The later section explores how that traditional practice was disrupted by a subgroup of War Poets—represented here by Robert Graves, Robert Nicholas, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried Sassoon—who wrote poems in which the display of anger was of primary importance both as a response to the horrors of war and as a means of sharpening a critique of the social and cultural values that condoned and prolonged the Great War. The paper concludes by identifying some characteristic “anger” influences in selected poems by three Movement Poets—D.J. Enright, Kingsley Amis, and Philip Larkin.
