This is a side-issue to your specific point, but two things come to mind:
1) Tom Shippey's point that The Lord of the Rings is a very, very long-delayed literary response to WW1.
2) Kingsley Amis's observation that the reason there were better war poets in WW1 than WW2 is that most of the better young poets weren't in military service. (I think they were a little less desperate for medically-dubious cannon fodder in the second war.) He's thinking particularly of Larkin and Wain; but Amis himself did serve.
I'm sure that's right about LotR. No doubt such experiences find indirect expression in genres other than memoir and realist fiction, but of course the cases aren't usually quite as clear cut.
Keith Douglas is the only significant WWII poet I can even think of, which I'm sure is an injustice to many others. Larkin's myopia would surely have kept him out of all but the unfussiest armies: instead, he went to Wellington spent the last of his war years mooning about with my aunt.
I suppose that Amis's lack of consideration as a WW2 poet is probably due to his lack of specifically war poems. Though in the Army, he wasn't directly in combat, as far as I recall.
Wain wasn't drafted because he was basically blind in one eye.
Then there were the rather older, but still of military age, "Pylon poets." But I don't think any of them were in the military during the war.
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1) Tom Shippey's point that The Lord of the Rings is a very, very long-delayed literary response to WW1.
2) Kingsley Amis's observation that the reason there were better war poets in WW1 than WW2 is that most of the better young poets weren't in military service. (I think they were a little less desperate for medically-dubious cannon fodder in the second war.) He's thinking particularly of Larkin and Wain; but Amis himself did serve.
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Keith Douglas is the only significant WWII poet I can even think of, which I'm sure is an injustice to many others. Larkin's myopia would surely have kept him out of all but the unfussiest armies: instead, he went to Wellington spent the last of his war years mooning about with my aunt.
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Wain wasn't drafted because he was basically blind in one eye.
Then there were the rather older, but still of military age, "Pylon poets." But I don't think any of them were in the military during the war.