A Vital Interplay: Heroism and Christian Conscience in the World War II Poetry of Dorothy L. Sayers

Abstract

Dorothy L. Sayers’s poetry is often overlooked in the body of her writing. While referenced in surveys of Sayers’s wartime writing, a fuller analysis reveals the importance of her poems as they embody a unique wrestling with the moral implications of World War II. Building on Barbara Reynold’s discussion of the heroic and Christian in Sayer’s wartime writing, Warner analyzes the tension between these two values systems in Sayers’s poems “The English War” and “Target Area.” Exploring the friction between the nobility to fight and the cost of the conflict animates the stirring images of these poems and paints a fuller picture of the complex currents of Sayers’s response to the war.