The War Poets: An Introduction

Modern poetry arose from the First World War. English verse altered under the impact of mass murder in the trenches 1914-1918 and became unwelcoming. The war spread to Russia, Italy, Turkey and the Middle East, but the Western Front in France was the focus at home. The initial bombardment on the Somme was heard in London.

Poetry approached the news. The poets became war correspondents of feeling and suffering rather than celebrants of glory, honor, homeland and memory. They ceased to be crudely national. This is not to say that all poetry has hitherto been glossy magazine verse or that wars have never been graphically reported. The change and the difference lie in the fact that the mud and blood become suitable subjects for poetry.

One of the most anthologized poems in the language is ‘The Soldier’ ​​by Rupert Brooke: Romantic, dreamy, patriotic: even the air has nationality. It’s a poem about falling asleep and waking up dead and feeling nothing but happiness. Fall, yes, that word is deliberate: fall and rise. Celebrate the commemorative resurrection and the suspension of time.

If I must die, think only this of me:

That there is some corner of a foreign field

That is forever England. there will be

In that rich earth a richer dust was hidden;

A dust England birthed, molded, made conscious,

Give, once and for all, its flowers to love, its paths when wandering,

A body from England breathing English air,

Washed by the rivers, blessed by the suns of the home.

And think, this heart, all evil poured out,

A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

Return somewhere the thoughts given by England;

Its sights and sounds; happy dreams like your day;

and laughter, learned from friends; and meekness.

In hearts at peace, under an English sky.

Brooke was a Greek scholar at Cambridge and the central thought revolves around the idea of ​​cosmic memory (mnemosyne) in which he will be ‘a pulse in the eternal mind’ still reverberating to an English rhythm. The poem can be classified among the literature of the martyrology, although it is not a religious poem. He plays with the poetic twist of the mind dreaming of being carried away in ecstasy for the sake of cause or faith: this land, this kingdom, this divinity-clothed England, half in love with a peaceful death.

If this is the most patriotic line after the speech before Agincourt in Henry V, notice the fundamental difference: Shakespeare tells us “Old men forget, but all shall be forgotten,” while Brooke asserts the opposite: all shall be remembered, effortlessly. . And, it is also the tranquilizer of bad memory: the ‘everything thrown wrong’ are the things you don’t want to remember and the others you have to do without.

The War Poets fell short of treating war in the grand and glorious manner of Brooke, who was ignorant of the subject beyond the Iliad, and her verses gained further attention during the course of the war, in several cases after her death. During the conflict, much of his writing would have been considered defeatist, and he was unable to pass the censorship restrictions imposed early in the war. However, by 1916 the public mood had changed and the following appeared:

When you see millions of mouthless dead

Through your dreams in pale battalions they go,

Don’t say soft things like other men have said,

What will you remember? Because you don’t need that.

Don’t give them praise. Because, deaf, how are they to know

Are not curses heaped upon every severed head?

Without tears. Her blind eyes do not see your tears flow.

nor honor. It’s easy to be dead.

(Charles Hamilton Sorley)

After two years of war, Brooke’s ideas had melted. Casualty lists appeared in the newspapers every day, and the worst came in July 1916. The First Battle of the Somme claimed more than a million dead and wounded on all sides. On the 1st, the British suffered almost 60,000 casualties, of whom 20,000 were reported dead or missing. Sorley’s poem no longer seemed seditious: it sounded too exact.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was an aristocrat who won the Military Cross in World War I and became a pacifist. He composed a statement of protest in 1917 which was published in The Times newspaper and read aloud in Parliament. Following this, he was diagnosed with shell shock and hospitalized. Another patient was Wilfred Owen, whose poems Sassoon collected and published in 1920.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918): The gas attack had added a new dimension to the terror: the first such attack occurred at Ypres in April 1915 and in one of the most famous anti-war poems, Wilfred Owen describes the ‘ ecstasy of groping for a gas mask and of one drowning and lost, that, if you had seen it, you would not repeat then the old lie from the Odes of Horace that it is sweet and worthy to die for your country: sweet et decorum est pro patria mori.

That was it. That was modernity. The data and certainties of the world before the war had fallen into doubt and would go along with the tsars and the kaisers to the dustbin of history.

Now regarded as the most moving and significant of war poets, Owen came from Shropshire, went to school at Birkenhead, and later studied agriculture in London and Reading. Before the war he lived in France while recovering from illness and was unfit to enlist in 1914, but was accepted into the army in 1915. He was wounded and received the Military Cross. Siegfried Sassoon encouraged his writing while they were together in an Edinburgh hospital and published the first edition of Owen’s poetry. Only five of his poems were published during his lifetime, but they attracted attention. Sympathizers tried to secure a secure position for him, but he returned to France at the end of the war and was assassinated a week before the Armistice in November 1918. His poems were chosen by Benjamin Britten for The War Requiem and his small collection of works was republished by poet laureate Cecil Day Lewis.