The literature of war is a literature of paradoxes, the greatest of which is the fact that it comments continuously on its own failure. ' Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, '-Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind. I attempt to set this discussion within the critical, historical and theoretical contexts of the period in order to present the Great War canon as one engaged with unique forms of temporal-spatial articulation. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.” The paper engages with this notion and Bakhtin’s wider descriptions of chronotopic form in terms of the poetry of Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon as well as some of the lesser-known poets of the time, like Eleanor Farjeon. Central to this discussion is Bakhtin’s own definition: “In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. My article, therefore, examines concepts of the “artistic chronotope” in the trench lyric and examines representations of temporality within the unique site-specific artwork of the Great War canon. Whilst Bakhtin’s core chapter from The Dialogic Imagination concerns itself with an exploration of the distinctive development of the novel, the 1938 essay ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’ also offers us abundant means of clearing space for a fresh look at other areas of literature as he himself points out: “the chronotope is developed in different ways in the various genres”.

Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen