Cultural losses were severe. Spain's most successful composer, Enrique Granados, was drowned at sea in a U-boat attack while returning home from a Metropolitan Opera premiere. The German Expressionist Franz Marc, renowned for blue horses, was killed at Verdun. The inspirational French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska died at Neuville. Saki, the English short-story writer, fell to a German sniper. The British war poets—Edward Thomas, Rupert Brooke, Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen, who declared "my subject is war, and the pity of war"—earned a posthumous fame.

Poetry turned surprisingly popular, a tendency easily explained. A poem could be written in a trench on a single sheet of paper; a slim book of poetry slipped easily into the pocket of a combat jacket. War was kind to terse verse, cruel to the longer forms. There was no fiction of quality for almost a decade, until Ernest Hemingway, Robert Graves and Erich Maria Remarque published frontline novels of gritty realism. 

In Russia, the Diaghilev Ballet was suspended and composers emigrated en masse. The poet Boris Pasternak returned home from Germany, expecting to die. His teacher, Alexander Scriabin, miserable in Moscow, died of a casual infection. Stravinsky went hungry in Switzerland. Prokofiev, perpetually self-absorbed, wailed "I am on neither side," when revolution broke out. 

In Britain, D.H. Lawrence spent the war being harassed for having a German wife. He finished Women in Love, but could not publish it until 1920. On the Sussex Downs, the Bloombsury circle philandered away, while Henry James awaited the postman thrice daily for news of fallen youths. No artist was immune to intimate loss. 

On the German side, Rainer Maria Rilke's enthusiasm for the "God of war" and Hugo von Hofmannstahl's unfettered "joy" gave way within a combat year to Arthur Schnitzler's "horror upon horror, injustice upon injustice, madness upon madness". To Vienna's leading playwright, war was a colossal "failure of imagination".