When the United States entered the First World War in April 1917, it did so in part under the banner of its founding principles. In his war message to Congress, President Woodrow Wilson echoed the universal aspirations of the Declaration of Independence: “We shall fight for the things which we have always carried nearest our hearts, for democracy, for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own Governments, for the rights and liberties of small nations, for a universal dominion of right by such a concert of free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all nations and make the world itself at last free.” These ideals furnished the public language through which many Americans, including Wilson and a broad spectrum of intellectual opinion, understood and justified the nation’s entry into the war.

Among the most enduring literary responses to the Great War was the conviction that industrial warfare had exposed a profound disjunction between public language and lived experience. Writers who had endured the trenches returned with a vision of war whose scale and destructiveness defied inherited notions of honor, courage, and glory. Heroism had not disappeared, but it had been thrust into an environment dominated by machine guns, heavy artillery, poison gas, barbed wire, and mechanized logistics, where individual valor could no longer overcome the impersonal machinery of industrial war. To be sure, the aftermath of the war produced a certain amount of disillusionment.  But, more constructively, there arose a requirement that the language of sacrifice, duty, and freedom be made answerable to reality.

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