In his book about the poetry of the Second World War, Not without Glory, Vernon Scannell mentions W. H. Davies as one of four poets (alongside W. W. Gibson, Harold Munro and D. H. Lawrence) who ‘pointed the way towards a style that could contain the violent challenge of war experience and was a direct help to both Sassoon and Owen’. The latter part of that statement is of course speculative; and it must also be said Davies wrote about ‘the violent challenge of war’ fairly infrequently, considering that he lived through one world war and into the other. Moreover, at his not infrequent worst Davies was a forgettable poet of romanticised whimsy. But certainly, in his more remarkable, clearly focused and nuanced poetry – of which there is plenty – Davies was a writer committed to presenting accurately the less salubrious aspects of what life could bring without pomp or undue splendour, and in simple and memorable verse. As John H. Johnston notes, Davies dealt ‘with materials from everyday life in the contemporary idiom’ and attempted to ‘establish some kind of contact, however crude, between poetry and “the lies, and truths, and pain” ‘. His earliest poetic subjects included the hardness of slum life, and struggling to get by in doss-houses, in poems such as ‘The Lodging House Fire’ (The Soul's Destroyer, 1905):

This is typical of the unromanticised clarity of his poems on these and similar topics. It is worth noting the dourness of those rhymes, ‘blow’ and ‘glow’, and the sudden, leaden drop – repeated in each stanza – from trimeter to a final line of dimeter, as though to emphasise that something vital remains missing from the lives depicted. As Lawrence Normand points out, ‘At a time when the subjects that could be treated by writers were limited by narrow codes of propriety […] Davies was writing and publishing some truly realist poems.’ So Scannell is right, in the sense that Davies – at the height of his fame around the time of the outbreak of the Great War – helped to provide an unadorned, easily understood style, but more so a tone, that would be developed in the war poetry of poets such as Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon and Davies's friend Edward Thomas.