ABSTRACT
The historian Eric Hobsbawm uses the term ‘Age of Extremes’1 to describe the period between the start of the First World War and the end of the Cold War: an age largely defined in and beyond Europe by swift technological advancements and by ultimately failed or overturned political ‘extremes’. This period roughly correlates with the lives of the three poets discussed in this study. Having grown up in the aftermath of the ‘war to end all wars’, Larkin, Thomas and Causley were all young adults when their country was fighting Hitler in ‘the people’s war’; the Second World War was an integral part of the young adulthood of all three, just as the Great War had been to their parents. Their responses to war against Nazism, however, and to the subsequent Cold War and associated ‘hot’ conflicts and military manoeuvrings, differed widely.
