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War of Words: Director's notes

Sebastian Barfield, producer/director

Poetry, more than any other artform, can capture a moment, and preserve it forever. Centuries on, poems allow us to understand what people in the past were feeling, and lets us feel it for ourselves. Which is why the work of the literary generation who fought at the Battle of the Somme is so precious and remarkable.

We have discovered how the battle changed these men and transformed their writing
Sebastian Barfield

Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, David Jones, Isaac Rosenberg, J.R.R. Tolkien, Ernst Jünger...most of these men would have gone on to make a literary impact even if they had not been called to serve their country. But serve they did, and at the Battle of the Somme they rubbed shoulders along the same stretch of battlefront, took part in the same actions, and (in the case of Graves and Sassoon) ended up in the same battalion, secretly swapping poems in the officers’ mess. Taken together, their work gives us multiple angles with which to view this epic battle.

This year’s WWI centenary has – in part- been about challenging the received myths about the First World War: historians such as Max Hastings take issue with the idea of the so-called ‘Poets War’ – mud, futility and dreary versifying. Perhaps he has a point - in the decades after the war, poems were anthologized, a process that disconnected the work from the events that inspired it. Depictions of specific attacks became generic descriptions of the Great War, the resonance of place-names in which thousands died fighting became forgotten.

In War of Words: Soldier-Poets of the Somme, we have tried to reconnect the literature with landscape and the historical record - showing how this work was often a response to very specific actions and tragedies. Dazzling animation has been used to help translate the poems to television. And in the process, we have discovered how the battle changed these men and transformed their writing: how it was the Somme that created Siegfried Sassoon the angry satirist; how the experience of being left for dead was a psychological trauma that turned Robert Graves into the novelist he became in later life; how Tolkien’s experience in the final months of the battle fed into the mythology of Middle Earth. Their poetry and prose remains an incredible resource that allows us to explore the Battle of the Somme through the eyes of officers and private soldiers alike.