Examine the contribution made by the war poets in documenting the condition of the 20th century.
“The poetry is in the pity”
( Wilfred Owen,Preface to Poems )
Since the Greeks, poets have written about the experience of War but the young soldier poets of the first world war established war poetry as a literary genre .Their combined Voice has become one of the defining texts of 20th century Europe.
Although ‘war poet' tends traditionally to refer to active combatants, war poetry has been written by many ‘civilians' caught up in conflict in other ways: Cesar Vallejo and WH Auden in the Spanish Civil War, Margaret Postgate Cole and Rose Macaulay in the First World War, James Fenton in Combidia.
In 1914 hundreds of young men in uniform took to writing poetry as a way of striving to express emotions at the very age of experience. So there two phases may be distinguished. The first was one of Patriotic fervour and the other was frankly realistic picture of the suffering, brutality ,squalor and futility of the war.
The chief war poets are mentioned below:
a) Rupert Brooke: Though his war poetry is small in bulk , Brook is usually considered typical of the early group of War. Perhaps because his Sonnet “if I should die think only this of me”, has appeared in so many anthologies of 20th century verse. Brooke wrote with a youthful, healthy joy in life , a subtlety of observation, and an appreciation of natural beauty , which found for his work a ready place in Georgian poetry. This poem is a romantic Sonnet and is deeply patriotic .It almost celebrates the value of the liberal culture of Brooke and his contemporaries which sees death as a sacrifice which all young men should freely make for the sake of their country.
His poetry was published in “poems (1911)”; “1914 and other poems”(1915) and “ Collected poems”(1918). His one critical work , “John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama” (1916) indicates a real appreciation of The dramatist and his period, “Letters from America” is his other prose work.
b) Siegfried Sassoon: Seigfried Sassoon may be said to be base nearly all his most worthwhile work on his experience in the war.. he saw infantry service in western Europe and Palestine and was decorated for gallantry. His “counterattack” (1918) a collection of violent embittered poems, confirmed the notoriety which had rapidly grown out of his occasional writings for periodicals and it is still the best known of his collections of poetry. In this work Sassoon painted the horrors of life and death in the trenches , dug-outs and hospitals and a merciless and calculated realism gave to his work a vitality not previously found in our war poetry. To his credit it will always remain the fact that his work had inspired the greatest of all the war poets including Wilfred Owen. In a similar vein to “counterattack” though less successful were “ war poems”(1919) and “satitrical poems”(1926) but his more recent volumes The “Heart’s journey” (1928) and Vigils(1935) are more concerned with attempts to capture for his reader momentary Impressions of beauty. “ Collected Poems” was published in 1947.
c) The major poet of the first World War, Wilfred Owen, begin writing poetry in the manner of John Keats , Tennyson . His own experience in the trench had brought him rapidly to maturity and Sassoon set his feet on the part which he himself had already taken .With a frank realism ,free from the violent bitterness of so much of Sassoon's poetry , Owen set out to present the whole reality of war- the boredom, the hopelessness, the futility , the horror, occasionally the courage and self sacrifice , but, above all the pity of it. He himself wrote “ I am not concerned with poetry .My subject is war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity” and never has the Pity of war been more deeply felt or more powerfully shown .Though his satire is often sharp ,he never loses his artistic poise ,and his most bitter work has a dignity which is truly great . “The poems (1931)” of Wilfred Owen is a much more complete collection of his works and contains and excellent memoir by Edmund Blunden.
War poetry is not necessarily ‘anti-war’ it is however about the very large questions of life; identity, Innocence, guilt, loyalty ,courage ,compassion humanity ,duty ,Desire, death. Its response to this questions and its relation of immediate personal experience to moments of national and international crisis , gives war poetry an extra literary importance .Owen wrote that even Shakespeare seems ‘Vapid' after Sassoon: 'not of course because Sassoon is a greater artist, but because of the subjects.’
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“The poetry is in the pity”
( Wilfred Owen,Preface to Poems )
Since the Greeks, poets have written about the experience of War but the young soldier poets of the first world war established war poetry as a literary genre .Their combined Voice has become one of the defining texts of 20th century Europe.
Although ‘war poet' tends traditionally to refer to active combatants, war poetry has been written by many ‘civilians' caught up in conflict in other ways: Cesar Vallejo and WH Auden in the Spanish Civil War, Margaret Postgate Cole and Rose Macaulay in the First World War, James Fenton in Combidia.
In 1914 hundreds of young men in uniform took to writing poetry as a way of striving to express emotions at the very age of experience. So there two phases may be distinguished. The first was one of Patriotic fervour and the other was frankly realistic picture of the suffering, brutality ,squalor and futility of the war.
The chief war poets are mentioned below:
a) Rupert Brooke: Though his war poetry is small in bulk , Brook is usually considered typical of the early group of War. Perhaps because his Sonnet “if I should die think only this of me”, has appeared in so many anthologies of 20th century verse. Brooke wrote with a youthful, healthy joy in life , a subtlety of observation, and an appreciation of natural beauty , which found for his work a ready place in Georgian poetry. This poem is a romantic Sonnet and is deeply patriotic .It almost celebrates the value of the liberal culture of Brooke and his contemporaries which sees death as a sacrifice which all young men should freely make for the sake of their country.
His poetry was published in “poems (1911)”; “1914 and other poems”(1915) and “ Collected poems”(1918). His one critical work , “John Webster and the Elizabethan Drama” (1916) indicates a real appreciation of The dramatist and his period, “Letters from America” is his other prose work.
b) Siegfried Sassoon: Seigfried Sassoon may be said to be base nearly all his most worthwhile work on his experience in the war.. he saw infantry service in western Europe and Palestine and was decorated for gallantry. His “counterattack” (1918) a collection of violent embittered poems, confirmed the notoriety which had rapidly grown out of his occasional writings for periodicals and it is still the best known of his collections of poetry. In this work Sassoon painted the horrors of life and death in the trenches , dug-outs and hospitals and a merciless and calculated realism gave to his work a vitality not previously found in our war poetry. To his credit it will always remain the fact that his work had inspired the greatest of all the war poets including Wilfred Owen. In a similar vein to “counterattack” though less successful were “ war poems”(1919) and “satitrical poems”(1926) but his more recent volumes The “Heart’s journey” (1928) and Vigils(1935) are more concerned with attempts to capture for his reader momentary Impressions of beauty. “ Collected Poems” was published in 1947.
c) The major poet of the first World War, Wilfred Owen, begin writing poetry in the manner of John Keats , Tennyson . His own experience in the trench had brought him rapidly to maturity and Sassoon set his feet on the part which he himself had already taken .With a frank realism ,free from the violent bitterness of so much of Sassoon's poetry , Owen set out to present the whole reality of war- the boredom, the hopelessness, the futility , the horror, occasionally the courage and self sacrifice , but, above all the pity of it. He himself wrote “ I am not concerned with poetry .My subject is war and the pity of war. The poetry is in the pity” and never has the Pity of war been more deeply felt or more powerfully shown .Though his satire is often sharp ,he never loses his artistic poise ,and his most bitter work has a dignity which is truly great . “The poems (1931)” of Wilfred Owen is a much more complete collection of his works and contains and excellent memoir by Edmund Blunden.
War poetry is not necessarily ‘anti-war’ it is however about the very large questions of life; identity, Innocence, guilt, loyalty ,courage ,compassion humanity ,duty ,Desire, death. Its response to this questions and its relation of immediate personal experience to moments of national and international crisis , gives war poetry an extra literary importance .Owen wrote that even Shakespeare seems ‘Vapid' after Sassoon: 'not of course because Sassoon is a greater artist, but because of the subjects.’
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