There is no convenient canon of Irish war literature, like that which appeared in Britain, even though Ireland had three towering literary figures in Shaw, Yeats and Joyce at the time, working at the pinnacles of poetry, prose and drama
Guillaume Apollinaire, France’s most acclaimed war poet, who was born in Rome to a Polish noblewoman, survived the trenches of the first World War only to be killed by Spanish flu at the age of 38
The evolution of modernist literature was intimately bound up with the shock and devastation of the war
‘We have become wild beasts. We do not fight, we defend ourselves against annihilation . . . ’ Erich Maria Remarque’s unmatchable anti-war novel was a literary sensation in pre-Nazi Germany
Meath poet Francis Ledwidge accurately predicted the posthumous fate (until so very recently) of the thousands of Irishmen who died in the first World War
The politics they returned to meant it is only in recent years that the stories of the Irish men and women who died – and wrote – in the Great War have been heard
The Nobel laureate and staunch imperialist was one of hundreds of thousands of British and Irish parents to lose a son to the war
In the Great War, many Irish soldiers fought for Britain and Irish musicians wrote many British marching songs – but the Irish perspective was not that of the average Tommy
The Great War transformed our understanding of war, forcing writers to describe the world in new ways, and in a new language
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Patrick Smyth Europe Editor
