War Poets

After the gas attack (painting by an unknown artist)

 The First World War (1914-1918)
► Lasted longer than people expected
► Caused millions of casualties
► Destroyed the myth of Meliorism
► Showed the incompetence of high command
► Was the last trench war
► New technological advances (chemical warfare, machine guns)
► Civilians were not involved
► Propaganda spread idealistic lies to people at home
 The trenches
► A trench is a deep ditch dug out in the
ground as defence against the enemy.

► In trenches soldiers were exposed to

cold, rain, dirt, rats, lice.

► They were surrounded by dead bodies

and stoned blind and deaf by the
explosions of the grenades.
 New technologies
► Chemical warfare was the use of gas as a
military weapon.

► The gas used in World War I was

chlorine. It was green and very quick.

► Death occurred by suffocation. Chlorine

filled the lungs with liquid, stopping the
passage to the air.

► Gas masks were used as protection.

 New technologies

► Machine guns were also introduced.

► These new technologies made the war

deadlier than any previous war.

► Military leaders were slow to adapt

their strategies to the new
technologies.
 The Spanish flu
► The 1918 influenza pandemic was the most
severe pandemic in recent history. It was
caused by an H1N1 virus with genes of avian
origin.

► It spread worldwide during 1918-1919.

► About 500 million people or one-third of the

world’s population became infected with this
virus.

► The number of deaths was estimated to be at

least 50 million worldwide.
 Propaganda
► At the beginning people believed the war would be
quick and easy to win.

► Propaganda equated war to bravery, honour and

glory.

► Many young men eager for adventure enlisted

immediately. This first phase was idealistic.

► The best representative of this phase in poetry was

Rupert Brooke.
 Propaganda
► The separation between the soldiers at the
front and the civilians at home made it
possible to spread lies about it.

► In the second phase of the war, poets

wrote to denounce the lies of “reported
war” (Read, Sassoon and Owen are the
main representatives of this phase).
 Rupert Brooke – The Soldier
1. If I should die, think only this of me:
2. That there's some corner of a foreign field ► Petrarchan sonnet (two quatrains + two
tercets)
3. That is for ever England. There shall be
4. In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
5. A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, ► Rhyming scheme : abab cdcd efg efg
6. Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
7. A body of England's, breathing English air, ► Alliteration (lines 2, 3,4,7, 11, 12, 13,14)
8. Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
9. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, ► Repetition (England/English, rich/richer,
10. A pulse in the eternal mind, no less dust, heart/hearts, give/given)
11. Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
12. Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
► Syntactical parallelism (lines 6,8)
13. And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,
14. In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
► End-stopped lines (enjambements only in
lines 2,3,10)
 Rupert Brooke – The Soldier
► Published in 1914 (first phase of the war) in the collection “1914”.

► Expresses the idealistic ideas of this phase (war = self-sacrifice, glory).

► The poet prophetically imagines his death in a foreign country.

► He will be buried there and his body (dust) will enrich that ground.

► That foreign field will be forever a part of England.

 Rupert Brooke – The Soldier

► England is personified as a mother who creates, shapes and gives the poet
gifts (lines 5-8).

► Once he is dead the poets’ heart will live eternally (a pulse in the eternal mind)
and return the mother country the gifts received (lines 9-14).

► The English landscape is idealised and so are the English people (laughter,
friends, gentleness, peace).

► The poets’ death is presented as self-sacrifice, a duty to the mother-country.

 Rupert Brooke – The Soldier

► The idealistic, rhetorical concepts, the

softness of the sounds, the choice of a
traditional format make this poem
representative of the first phase of the
war.

► Brooke joined the war and died in Greece

of blood-poisoning.
Herbert Reed – The Happy Warrior
1. His wild heart beats with painful sobs, ► Free verse
2. His strain’d hands clench an ice-cold rifle,
► Irregular broken lines
3. His aching jaws grip a hot parch’d tongue,
4. His wide eyes search unconsciously. ► Predominance of harsh sounds (t,
k)
5. He cannot shriek.
► Onomatopoeic words (sobs, shriek,
6. Bloody saliva
dribbles, stab)
7. Dribbles down his shapeless jacket.
► Anaphora and syntactical
8. I saw him stab
parallelism (lines 1-4, 11-12)
9. And stab again
10.A well-killed Boche. ► Alliteration (line 7, 8)
11.This is the happy warrior, ► Repetition (stab)
12.This is he… ► Dots ironically refer to a famous
eponymous poem by Wordsworth
written in 1806
Herbert Read – The Happy Warrior
► The poem clashes with Brooke’s pleasant, smooth
sonnet.

► It is a parody of Wordsworth the Happy Warrior,

concluding “This is He/That every man at arms
should wish to be”.

► The soldier is crazy with terror and presented as an

animal (jaws, bloody saliva).

► His instinct of survival makes him kill the enemy

(Boche) to save his own life. Boche was a
derogatory term for German soldiers (see Italian
crucco).
Herbert Read – The Happy Warrior

► The language is crude, made of harsh, monosyllabic

words.

► The form does not matter, what matters is the message.

► It voices the horror and the disillusionment of the

second phase of the war.

► Read served for four years as Captain in the war. He

survived and died in 1968.
 Siegfried Sasson – Glory of Women
1. You love us when we’re heroes, home on leave, ► Petrarchan sonnet
2. Or wounded in a mentionable place. ► Self-contained stanzas (every stanza
completes an idea and is independent from
3. You worship decorations: you believe the others)
4. That chivalry redeems the war’s disgrace. ► Rhyming scheme: abab, cdcd, efg, efg
5. You make us shells. You listen with delight, ► The tone is romantic in the first part and
apparently idealistic (heroes, decorations,
6. By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled, chivalry, crown, ardours, laurelled memories)
7. You crown our distant ardours while we fight, ► Irony appears on line 2 (in a mentionable
place)
8. And mourn our laurelled memories when we’re killed.
► In lines 9-11 the tone turns to tragic realism
9. You can’t believe the British troops “retire”
► Alliteration (lines 1, 6-7, 8, 10, 11, 13)
10. When hell’s last horrors breaks them, and they run,
► Enjambement on lines 3, 9,13
11. Trampling the terrible corpses – blind with blood.
12. O German mother dreaming by the fire,
13. While you are knitting socks to send your son
14. His face is trodden deeper in the mud.
Siegfried Sasson – Glory of Women
► The poem focuses on reported war.
► Women at home believe the propaganda lies.
► They see their men as heroes and are passionately excited
(“fondly thrilled”) by the stories from the battlefield. They even
make shells (grenades) in the factories to send their men (you
make us shells).
► They ignore the harsh reality and the shame of retreat (retire is
an euphemism for retreat)
► The poem unites all mothers, including the German enemy
soldiers’ mothers, meaning that the tragedy of war transcends
the barriers of nationality.
► While the German mother knits socks for her son, his head is
trodden into the mud by the other soldiers retreating.
 Siegfried Sasson – Glory of Women
► Sassoon was an infantry officer in France.

► Disgusted by the war, he became a pacifist.

► In 1917 he read an anti-war declaration in the House of

Commons which could put him in danger of being arrested and
tried.

► His poet friend Robert Graves saved him by convincing the

review board that he was “shell-shocked”, so he was sent to
military hospital where he met Wilfred Owen, the most famous
of the War Poets.

► Wrote anti-war poems in the collections Counter-Attack (1918)

and Satirical Poems (1926)