War Poetry

[Renatus]

The WWI pieces are intensely personal, immediate, tightly focused, real, gritty, and raw. There is no glory here.

So why did we not get anything like this from antiquity?

What follows is something of a shot from the hip, without prior research, so I expect to be shot down in flames. However, it seems to me that this is the wrong question. The First World War poems are, to my mind, entirely atypical. There is nothing like them, either before or since; even the poems of the Second World War do not compare. Where are the equivalent poems of the Boer War, the Napoleonic wars or the War of the Spanish Succession, for instance? I know of none. The question should be, perhaps, not 'Why is there nothing like this from antiquity?' but 'Why is the First World War poetry as it is?'