Literature and insights Editorial: Strange counting

Purpose – The purpose of this poem is to bring the dreadful counting of the battlefield into creative proximity with the battle over accounting for overheads and pricing of supplies to the armed forces during the First World War.
Approach – The poem is in Shakespearean sonnet form.
Findings – The poem juxtaposes the calculus of profit and loss, in terms of lives and land, on the Western Front, with the battle to control profiteering by capitalist factory owners whose industrial capacity was vital to the war effort.
Originality/value – The poem, the title of which echoes Wilfred Owen’s ‘Strange Meeting’, provides a novel perspective on the First World War (cf. Owen’s ‘the pity of war’), using a literary form that has come to be closely associated with it.
Keywords: war; Wilfred Owen; First World War; profiteering.
Paper type: Editorial