Speak the culture britain be fluent in b 96

It began well enough, with Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier 1915 patriotically calling men to arms, but the mood blackened when Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred O

1 Identity: the

foundations

of British culture

2 Literature

and philosophy

3 Art, architecture and design

4 Performing arts

5 Cinema, photography and fashion

6 Media and communications

7 Food and drink 8 Living culture:

the state of modern Britain

“ W H AT PA S S I N G

-B E L L S F O R T H E S E

W H O D I E A S

C AT T L E ? O N LY

T H E M O N S T R O U S

A N G E R O F T H E

G U N S ”

Anthem for Doomed

Youth (1917),

Wilfred Owen

The First World War poets

The First World War was sharply chronicled in poetry It

began well enough, with Rupert Brooke’s The Soldier

(1915) patriotically calling men to arms, but the mood blackened when Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen began writing about life in the trenches Sassoon satirised the officers blithely sending thousands over the top in

The General (1917), before Wilfred Owen, writing

under Sassoon’s tutelage in hospital, considered the

wider futility of war in Dulce et decorum est (1917).

Owen died in battle a week before the war’s end

Turn left at the 1930s: the Auden Group of poets

American-turned-Englishman T.S Eliot dominated

distaste for the industrialised world in The Waste Land

(1922), using the symbolism of mythology in a hugely influential ‘fragmented’ poem that leapt wildly between settings and timeframes A new generation

of poets took Eliot’s disenchantment forward in the 1930s, even if they didn’t adopt his radical styling The Great Depression and the rise of fascism gave them plenty to write about Four (who earned the group nickname MacSpaunday) stood out:

The father of sci-fi

Woking’s favourite

ex-resident (his Martians

landed near town in

The War of the Worlds),

H.G Wells, wrote his

science fiction novels

at the tail end of the

19 th century but their

Modernist slant was

more at home in the

early decades of the

20 th The Time Machine

(1895), The Invisible

Man (1897) and The War

of the Worlds (1898) –

not bad for three years’

work – were, of course,

imaginative chunks of

science fiction, but they

also pre-empted the

Modernists’ urge to

rip up the old order,

visualising new worlds,

however bleak.