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The semantic interpretation of the word“War”in common dictionaries includes two main denotations: First a state, period, or techniques and procedures of open, armed, often prolonged conflict between nations, states, or parties, such military or political usage as any inter-human wars in history; second, a condition of active antagonism or contention both physical or metaphysical, or a concerted effort or campaign to combat or put an end to something considered injurious, such disciplinary or daily usage as“war of words”“price war”“the war against corona virus”“cultural wars”, or“philosophical or psychological wars within the self”. The selected readings in this critical anthology limited its denotation to the former, excluding those wars of cosmic conflict, such as biblical wars or wars with nature or God; those wars of metaphorical, symbolic, and allegorical conflict, such as wars of daily or personal conflict and even general or social conflict of what Thomas Hobbes has termed bellum omnium contra omnes (“war of all against all”). As a state of large-scale armed conflict throughout history between states, governments, societies and informal paramilitary groups such as mercenaries, insurgents and militias, war is generally characterized by extreme violence, aggression, destruction, and mortality, using regular or irregular military forces, activities and characteristics of which have not only restricted itself to purely legitimate military targets but also led to massive civilian suffering and casualties and human catastrophes.
War is one of the most important of human activities, and its place in history has always been overwhelmingly significant for it frequently reconfigures nations or national boundaries,displaces populations and ethnic proportion, devastates land or even civilization, and is even waged against each other for the sake of war that is usually“full of sound and fury”, but really“signifies nothing”. As humans fought, they also“wrote”about their fighting in such multifarious media and modes of representation as literature, art, music, and dance of every genre; film, television, radio, and the internet; and games of every description. In poetry, to find words to convey this massive and complex phenomenon encounters special difficulties:logical, ethical, psychological, and other myriad ones such as censorship, political expediency,and squeamishness.
The British and Americans largely inherited the culture of the Anglo-Saxons, who fought,and accordingly wrote about their fighting. Like those special difficulties other races have encountered, they have always been to find the words for war and to interrogate them at every stage. From 1914 to 1918, hundreds of their young men in uniform joined the first global“total war”and took to writing poetry as a way of striving to express extreme emotion at the very edge of experience, and their poetic production has endured to become what is called“a sacred national text”, at the same time generating such a new literary genre, as stated above.