If we want to get close to the truth, we should widen our reading of the period's literature

Michael Gove provoked a storm earlier this year when he attacked "leftwing academics" for promoting a Blackadder version of the first world war. He insisted soldiers were not duped into fighting but saw the war as a "noble cause". An academic who teaches the literature of the Great War considers the problem.

I often reflect on how knowledge is communicated from one generation to another.

For many of my students at Royal Holloway, University of London, ideas about what the war means are already fixed because they have encountered Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, poets whose voices have come to stand for a whole generation.

Asked about the causes of the war, these students are usually able to recall an assassination followed, somehow, by an inexplicable bloodletting, but the notion of "futility" prevents them from giving the question due consideration. It is difficult to convince them that the soldiers who fought may not have acted simply because they were subject to conscription, lived in dread of a white feather, or had been told lies about duty.

Their ideas are reinforced by a knowledge gleaned from Horrible Histories and (yes) Blackadder, with the addition, perhaps, of Michael Morpurgo and Pat Barker.

Over the years, I have come to understand that these students expect any truthful representation of the war to be dominated by scenes of horror. For it to be realistic and "true", it must be bloody, graphic, have a high body count and represent an assault on the senses (rather like a video game). For them, war writing should be visceral and direct; it should fill them with revulsion and "pity".

This is why they need a writer like Edmund Blunden and his classic memoir, Undertones of War (1928). Blunden, a war poet who edited a collection of Owen's poetry, believed that writing a memoir would better enable him to record and perhaps understand his experience of the war.

Undertones of War collects his memories of the front line, including at the Somme, and presents these in a language remarkable equally for its antiquated expression ("Rave on, you savage east, and gloom, you small hours") and its wry understatement ("It is said that the Canadians took Passchendaele, and finding it utterly untenable, of their own accord came back to their old posts").

The narrative conjures Blunden's sense of a world sliding into an abyss. It is at once lyrical and passionate, impressionistic and refined. It does not dwell on death or the dead – or at least not in the ways one might expect.

When faced with students who claim to be thwarted (and mysteriously silenced) by Blunden's narrative, I push them a little further. I know that for these clever and articulate individuals, who can willingly embrace the triple-decker Victorian novel and revel in Joyce's word play, something more is at stake here.

"It's just not violent enough!" one reluctant student finally volunteers, to the relief of the others who, it seems, share his view. I am grateful for this student's honesty, because it allows us to move on to a discussion about art and violence and about how our expectations have been shaped by a century of myth-making.

This is challenging for us all. It forces us to ask questions about what we think we know, and how we react when something invites us to see the war differently, whether it's Sassoon's exhilarated response to battle ("I thought he was anti-war!"), Tolkien's epic rendition of his own war experience ("Oh yes, the Dead Marshes!"), or Blunden's description of a ruined church and the constant stream of soldiers who are inexplicably drawn to the "bones and skulls and decayed cerements" which spill from the shattered vaults.

In this centenary year, when politicians, historians, the media and the public are engaged in a discussion, already contentious, about the meaning of the war, it is crucial that the question of how that war has been presented – and represented in literature and art – should also be integral to the debate.

For Blunden, "the soul of war" cannot be reduced to a body count, or yet another description of a soldier broken and dismembered.

To reach a better understanding, we need to pay attention to many voices from the period and not just those who confirm what we already think we know. We still have much to learn if we want to remember and properly commemorate who and what was lost.

• Dr Betty Jay is a lecturer in the department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London

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