ABSTRACT
For the most part these women were far removed in both experience and expression from the war poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves. They wrote more of pennants and banners than of mud and blood. They idealized their soldier heroes: they first urged martial patriotism, then depicted them as latter day Christs crucified and finally they mourned them as vanished ghosts. It is broadly possible to trace an unfolding of expression born of their experience: first trumpeted words of strident patriotism and chivalric romance, then stunned cadences of sad sacrifice, followed by horrified lines of bloody realism and, finally, poignant stanzas of lost love.
