Claire Buck's "British Women's Writing of the Great War," is wroth the read if only because she makes an excellent point about the marginalization of pro-war viewpoints in literary criticism. I, personally, would have never thought of reading the viewpoint of someone who lived through the war and liked it. Maybe it's because, as Buck says, we modern critics have difficulty connecting with someone who supports a war that we know to be so utterly destructive and world-altering. How could you support a war that has a battle anything like the Battle of the Somme? How? Why? Some misguided sense of national heroics and loyalty? 

I think this difficulty for modern readers to connect with pro-war viewpoints explains what Buck describes on page 88 as "the privileging of experience." Why would I read something by someone who didn't live through WWI when I have so many choices of veteran nurses, soldiers, etc. etc. to find and read. Who cares about the boy whose father left for war while he kept going to school, or a woman working at [insert factory job] or the politicians who sat in Parliament and did nothing while men and women died by the milllions. There was a massive war and I can read about Brittain being shot at with artillery during a bombardment or Paul Bäumer's fictionalized actions as written by a WWI veteran. Action, surprise, heroism, martyrdom, death, woosh boom pow. Both Brittain and Bäumer hit every chord you need to hit with a modern reader -- reluctance, bitter cynicism toward a faceless authority, ability and want to help save lives -- but we also get explosions. I never even would have thought about this bias of mine if Buck didn't mention it.

Buck doesn't spend much time on pro-war writers like Mary Agnes Hamilton and Rebecca West. In fact, we get only a few paragraphs on page 102. I'm suddenly very interested in the difference between pro-war poetry and the poetry of soldiers. Is there anything different other than message? Word choice, maybe. I would be particularly interested in if the pro-war writers cling to Victorian writing techniques/tropes. From what we've read so far I've gathered that much as a sort of stereotype of pro-war people. Maybe there's more to it.  

As far as our mandated journey into the MJP, I found an issue of The Little Review: Literature Drama Music Art (Vol. 1, No. 8, March 1915, edited by Margaret C. Anderson). In that issue George Soule writes a short, two page article entitled "New York Letter" (47 - 48). This article is interesting because while the author celebrates "that the New York legislature has decided to submit the question of woman suffrage to popular vote," they are also dismayed "by the revelations of a battle which most of us get into the habit of thinking was fought and won long ago." The rest of the short essay tries to reconcile a world in which women's suffrage is finally being decided upon with a world in which millions are dying in a bloody war. It's a cool look at someone realizing that while a society may take five steps forward in some aspects, it can still be ten steps behind in others. As Soule says, "Everyone is looking for the supremacy of his own pet reform or reaction as a result of the war, and it is banal to indulge in prophecies. Yet it seems to me there will be a great gain in our understanding if we approach the monster with humility. It has, to be sure, shown us the brutality lurking in modern civilization.....Yet why not go a little farther, and blame as well an intellectualism which slides about on the surface of things, a species of reform and enthusiasm which does not bite into the substance of humanity?"