war poets essay

• 1 What is War Poetry?
• 3 Conclusion

Selected Bibliography

• Version 1.0
• Last updated 31st July 2019

What is War Poetry?

Reminding us of William Wordsworth (1770-1850) dictum that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”, Jon Stallworthy (1935-2014) asserted that

there can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war: hope and fear; exhilaration; hatred – not only for the enemy, but also for generals, politicians, and war-profiteers; love – for fellow soldiers, for women and children left behind, for country (often) and cause (occasionally). 1

During the Great War, poetry had a currency that it lacks in the early twenty-first century. Newspapers , magazines, pamphlets, anthologies, and individual collections featured poems by combatants and non-combatants, by men and by women , at “home” or near the front lines. Poetry seemed a natural outlet for the intense emotions generated by the war and its range challenges the concept that only those with direct experience of fighting, i.e. soldiers, were allowed to write about war. The Great War was a total war and no one was left untouched by it. Suffering, mourning , patriotism , pity, and love were universally, if not equally, experienced. Thus “war poetry” is as all-encompassing as total war itself.

Discussions of First World War poetry tend to be dominated by English names: Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) , Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) , Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918) . Where poems are anthologised, they are done so “almost exclusively within a narrow national framework”. 2 The canon of English poetry of the First World War represents only a small fraction of verse written and read during and after the war across the combatant nations. Poets with “cosmopolitan sympathies”, to quote Isaac Rosenberg, wrestled with the same problem as their less self-consciously literary counterparts: how to represent a global conflict, dominated by modern technology , involving millions of combatants and countless civilians.

The European avant-garde poetic movements of the pre-war years seemed particularly suited to interpret the cataclysm, but traditional verse also continued to place the soldier at the centre of the national , heroic cause.

The German literary scholar Julius Bab (1880-1955) estimated that in August 1914, 50,000 poems were submitted to magazines and newspapers in the first weeks of the war with one Berlin newspaper alone receiving about 500 poems per day. He himself published twelve anthologies between 1914 and 1919 all under the title Der deutsche Krieg im deutschen Gedicht and which culminated in his 1920 bibliography Die deutsche Kriegslyrik, 1914-1918 , featuring Soldatendichter (soldier-poets) including Gerrit Engelke (1890-1918) and August Stramm (1874-1915) . Die Aktion , with its roots in Expressionism was one of the chief outlets for poetry, publishing such poets as Oskar Kanehl (1888-1929) and Wilhelm Klemm (1881-1968) .

In France , Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) declared that “Cannons are useful only in artillery”, resisting the easy classification and restrictions of particular artistic movements, whether it be Futurism or any other avant-garde coterie. His collection, Calligrammes (1918). Poèmes de la paix de la guerre , arose out of his front-line experience. Volumes such as Poèmes d’un Poilu 1914-1915 (1916) by André Martel (1893-1976) and Les Voix de la fournaise. Poèmes d’un Poilu (1916) by Gilles Normand align with the numerous volumes printed in England by “soldier-poets”. Post-war collections such as Les Poètes contre la guerre (1920) and Anthologie des écrivains français morts pour la patrie (1924-1926; five volumes), which featured, among others, Charles Péguy (1873-1914) , enshrined the nation’s poetic output.

Vittorio Locchi (1889-1917) , famous for his blank-verse poem Sagra di Santa Gorizia , which celebrated the Italian victory in August 1917, was hailed as of the poeti-eroei or hero-poets of that country’s experience of the First World War. Of the 2,000 books of homage or opuscoli di necrologia published in Italy as memorials to the Caduti or fallen, twenty-four were devoted to Locchi, who was killed when a submarine torpedoed the troopship he was on while en route to Thessalonika. Such books stand in direct contrast to the work of famous modernists, specifically the Italian Futurists, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876-1944) and Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) . A close friend of Apollinaire who served as an infantryman on the lower Isonzo front 1915-1918, then on the Western Front , Giuseppe Ungaretti (1888-1970) collection of war poetry L’Allegria (Joy) (1931) display his French Symbolist roots.

The ANZAC experience, so central to the national imaginaries of both Australia and New Zealand , was formed at Gallipoli . Leon Gellert (1892-1977) , perhaps Australia’s best-known poet of the Great War, with his Songs of a Campaign in 1917, Clarence Dennis and his volumes The Songs of a Sentimental Bloke (1915) and The Moods of Ginger Mick (1916), and along with the verse of Andrew Barton “Banjo” Paterson (1864-1941) lay claim to such experience. Only recently have the voices of Turkish poets from the other side of the campaign such as Mehmet Akif Ersoy (1873-1936) and H.S. Gezgin been given comparable attention. This is also true of voices from South-East Asia and the African continent, where poetic form extended beyond the printed text, flowering in aural and oral traditions.

A global perspective of First World War poetry – by men and by women composed in diverse languages, from different national perspectives, and on various fronts – provides a basis for a new understanding of how this literary form has enshrined the human experience of 1914-1918, to, as Laurence Cotterell (1917-2001) asserted, help make the “immense agony” of the Great War “just bearable”. 3

Jane Potter, Oxford Brookes University

• Stallworthy, Jon: The Oxford Book of War Poetry, Oxford 1984, p. 21. ↑
• Beaupré, Nicolas: Soldier-Writers and Poets, in: Winter, Jay (ed.): The Cambridge History of the First World War, Cambridge 2014, p. 471. ↑
• Cotterel, Laurence: Forward, in: Reilly, Catherine W. (ed.): English Poetry of the First World War. A Bibliography, London 1978, p. 5. ↑
• Beaupré, Nicolas: Soldier-writers and poets , in: Winter, Jay (ed.): The Cambridge history of the First World War. Civil society, vol. 3, Cambridge 2014 Cambridge University Press, pp. 445-474.
• Cotterel, Laurence: Forward , in: Reilly, Catherine W. (ed.): English poetry of the First World War. A bibliography, New York 1978 St. Martin's Press.
• Das, Santanu (ed.): The Cambridge companion to the poetry of the First World War , Cambridge, 2013: Cambridge University Press.
• Stallworthy, Jon: The new Oxford book of war poetry , Oxford, 2014: Oxford University Press.

This text is licensed under: CC by-NC-ND 3.0 Germany - Attribution, Non-commercial, No Derivative Works.

• Salonika (Thessaloniki)

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) The young poet Guillaume Apollinaire wearing a bowler hat in Cologne in 1902. Unknown photographer: Apollinaire, black-and-white photograph, n.p., 1902, in: Adhémar, Jean et al.: Apollinaire: [exposition], Paris, Bibliothèque nationale, [22 octobre-30 novembre] 1969, Paris 1969; source: Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France, ark:/12148/bpt6k64593664, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k64593664/f43.image . This image has been identified as public domain.

Gabriele D’Annunzio (1863-1938) Poet and journalist Gabriele D’Annunzio was one of Italy’s leading literary figures. During the war, he advocated strongly in favour of Italian intervention and served as a fighter pilot. Agence Rol: D’Annunzio [Gabriele], black-and-white photograph, n.p., 1919; source: Gallica, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Rol 56378, http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/btv1b53030581s . This image has been identified as public domain.

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) The poet soldier Wilfred Owen photographed in uniform. Unknown photographer, n.d., n.p. IWM (Q 101783), http://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205235090 .

External Links 11

• Apollinaire, Guillaume: Calligrammes. Poèmes de la paix et da la guerre, 1913-1916, Paris 1918 (Internet Archive) (Book)
• Apollinaire, Guillaume: Case d'armons, 1915 (Bibliothèque nationale de France) (Primary Source)
• Fishwick, Stephanie: Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) (The First World War Poetry Digital Archive) (Article)
• LibriVox: Poems by Wilfred Owen, 2012 (Internet Archive) (Audio)
• Locchi, Vittorio (in Italian): La sagra di Santa Gorizia, Milan 1919 (Internet Archive) (Book)
• "Poems: by Siegfried Sassoon 1916" and "Poems: 1917-18" (MS Add.9852/6/2) (University of Cambridge Digital Library) (Primary Source)
• Sassoon Journals (University of Cambridge Digital Library) (Database)
• Schulz-Buschhaus, Ulrich: Zwei Diskurse der literarischen Kriegführung. Marinetti und D’Annunzio (GAMS Geisteswissenschaftliches Asset Management System) (Article)
• Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) (BBC) (Article)
• Sitwell, Edith (ed.): Poems by Wilfred Owen, London 1921 (Internet Archive) (Book)
• The Collections (First World War Poetry Digital Archive) (Database)

External Links

Table of contents

Jane Potter: War Poetry, in: 1914-1918-online. International Encyclopedia of the First World War, ed. by Ute Daniel, Peter Gatrell, Oliver Janz, Heather Jones, Jennifer Keene, Alan Kramer, and Bill Nasson, issued by Freie Universität Berlin, Berlin 2019-07-31. DOI: 10.15463/ie1418.11394

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Owen Sheers: war poetry

Monday 8 September 2014 | by Owen Sheers

Owen Sheers reflects on war poetry in this thought piece

‘A voice had become audible, a note had been struck, more true, more thrilling, more able to do justice to the nobility of our youth in arms engaged in this present war’

In his 1952 poem ‘The Shield of Achilles’, Auden describes Achilles’ mother, Thetis, looking over the shoulder of Hephaestus as he forges her son a shield. She does so anticipating scenes of honour, celebration and prestige: ‘vines and olive trees’; ‘ritual pieties’; ‘athletes at their games’. But instead the blacksmith God, informed with all the terrible knowledge of Auden’s twentieth century, is busy embossing the shield with scenes of war and its aftermath. ‘An artificial wilderness/ And a sky like lead’; ‘decent folk’ watching an execution; a voice proving ‘by statistics that some cause was just’; a wandering urchin ‘who’d never heard/ Of any world where promises were kept,/ Or one could weep because another wept.’ Confronted with these unflinching depictions of what war really is and means, Thetis cries out in dismay as Hephaestus, his job done, ‘hobbles away.’

For much of human history war poetry, which from a 21st Century perspective we might expect to have always have been on the side of the truth-telling Hephaestus, has more often than not contributed to a public narrative closer to Thetis’ anticipated scenes of honour and glory. Until recently poets wrote about war not because poetry was particularly well-suited to exposing and giving voice to its realities (although it is – more on that later), but rather because war was well-suited to poetry. Sacrifice, heroism, drama, loss, virtue, amputated love – for centuries wars and the men who fought them have presented poets with a fertile landscape in which to cultivate their craft. In doing so, writing narrative, elegiac or heroic verse at a temporal or physical distance from the battlefield, poets have tended to fuel the climate in which wars are cultivated rather than evoke the truth of conflict or challenge its over-simplified narratives. Dulce et decorum est, wrote Horace, pro patria mori – It is sweet and right to die for one’s country. 2000 years later, in ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, Tennyson might have lamented the blunder that sent ‘the noble six hundred’ into the valley of death, but to what extent does the poem actually move on from Horace’s statement? To what extent does it bring to life what it was like to have ridden into that futile carnage of cannonballs and shot? Were all six hundred of the Light Brigade truly noble? The wounds, the stench, the screams. The individual human stories of hope, fear, hate. All of what it was like for those men is smothered by a blanket of retrospective grandeur, Tennyson’s poetry investing the horror with a safely tragic mythic weight rather than any resonant human detail that might have punctured the propaganda of the day with lyrical authenticity.

Even the poetry that provoked the quote to which this essay is a response, the work of Rupert Brooke, failed to get close to sounding a true note of the war in which he died. A voice might have become audible, as Churchill said, but it was an old voice, not a new or a truthful one; a continuation of the centuries-old tradition of poetry being put to the service of war’s bland romantic narratives. Had he survived the infected mosquito bite from which he died and witnessed the bitter, cruel fighting of WWI, I’m sure Brooke would have come to use his poetry to try and sound such a note. As it was, however, he didn’t, so the sounding of that true note was left to others – the WWI poets we now know so well, Wilfred Owen (who famously re-occupied Horace’s statement for the common soldier), Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, David Jones, Issac Rosenberg, Ivor Gurney.

It was in the poems by these men, all of whom fought in the trenches, that British poetry finally took up the role of Auden’s Hephaestus in relation to conflict, deploying its unique literary qualities to speak truth to power and give voice to the full spectrum of the realities of soldiering. In doing so - in writing from war rather than about war – the WWI poets revealed poetry to be a stunningly effective form through which to unflinchingly render the multifaceted experience of conflict. ‘In war,’ Aeschylus wrote, ‘truth is the first casualty.’ The poets of WWI proved poetry could help keep that casualty breathing. Because they did, the nature of the poetry they wrote has since become a benchmark for what we ask from, and consider to be, the best of contemporary war poetry.

So why were these poems so successful? For two reasons, I think. Firstly, because of the qualities of poetry itself, a literary form that deals in the specific, the arresting image, and yet in which the specific is simultaneously made to resonant in the universal. A form in which the moment, in all its intimacy and context, is not just made to live, but to live on. A poem (I’ll assume we’re talking about good poetry here and follow the line of the WWII poet Keith Douglas who said there is no such thing as bad poetry, just poetry and not poetry) is both immediate and enduring, gaining special purchase in the memory through its calling upon every shade of our communicative selves – the intellectual, the emotional, the associative, the visual, the rhythmic and the musical. ‘Poetry’, as John Berger once wrote, ‘draws windows everywhere.’

In contrast, public discourses about war tend to close windows everywhere. Stories become simplified, brushstrokes become broad, alternative perspectives silenced. Amnesia and misplaced patriotism combine in a lethal cocktail to kill hundreds of thousands. Poetry is an antidote to this. A vital and vitalizing remembering through all five of our senses; a counter-tide against the distancing language of government and the military-industrial complex. Where a news report might talk of a ‘surgical strike’, a poem, working at the leading edge of language, can bring us inside the breathing, panicking, loving and hating body of the person trapped in the bombed building’s rubble, and do so with an immediacy and depth impossible to achieve in journalism, film or, I’d argue, a novel. Where the lexicon of war defuses language, poetry charges it.

But poetry has always had these qualities. So why the sudden sea-change with WWI? Because, quite simply, the poets were there and their poems were read. In the trenches the poet became the soldier and the soldier became the poet. They wrote from what they lived and saw, not from an inherited idea of war or from reported experience. And then, having been written, those poems were read. Not always immediately, but still relatively soon, and in time by a large and engaged readership.

In the years since the end of WWI we’ve seen a gradual reduction in such conflict poetry of immediate proximity reaching a wide audience. There were many excellent soldier poets in WWII who continued the tradition, and combatant poets on both sides of the conflict in Vietnam. But as, through the end of the 20th century and into the 21st, global conflicts have increasingly been fought either by professional armies or marginalized, disposed groups, so the sources of poetry written by those who’ve experienced conflict and its aftermath have drastically reduced. Similarly, the vast majority of civilians affected by conflict tend not to have access to the means to either write their experiences as poetry, or to distribute their work if they do. Lastly, we the readers, no longer go in search of these voices.

In response to this situation the last decade has seen a noticeable increase in war poetry written by poets working from primary sources – from interviews with or testimonials by those who have experienced war first hand. Such a poetry of personal testimony, with the poet becoming a conduit for another’s voice over their own, is crucial if we are to ensure that the stories of contemporary conflict are allowed to continue flowing with any vibrancy into the poetic bloodstream. But it is not enough. Poets’ access is often limited to their own cultural sphere, leading to a constriction of voices along national lines that war poetry already has a tendency to encourage. So the question and challenge facing us today is how can we make sure that a poetry of proximity, a poetry of witness that represents all of those involved, is still written from the frontlines of today’s wars? How can we give an effective poetic voice to the experience of the women Kurdish militia fighting against ISIS? The Syrian child refugee? How can we continue to marry the worst of manmade human experience with what I still believe to be the best of manmade human expression? How can we, to put it simply, keep creating poems that tell us what it is really like, while also making us think, feel, and never forget?

I don’t pretend to have the answers, but I do know we must try. Because if we don’t, then the conversation around war and its aftermath will become, by however small a degree, less articulate, less representative, the notes it sounds less true, and a world in which we continue to solve our disputes through violence, more likely.

Owen Sheers, September 2014

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Owen Sheers was born in Fiji in 1974 and brought up in Abergavenny, South Wales. He was educated at ...

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Great War Poems

From antiquity through the nuclear age, poets respond to human conflict

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War poems capture the darkest moments in human history, and also the most luminous. From ancient texts to modern free verse, war poetry explores a range of experiences, celebrating victories, honoring the fallen, mourning losses, reporting atrocities, and rebelling against those who turn a blind eye.  

The most famous war poems are memorized by school children, recited at military events, and set to music. However, great war poetry reaches far beyond the ceremonial. Some of the most remarkable war poems defy expectations of what a poem "ought" to be. The war poems listed here include the familiar, the surprising, and the disturbing. These poems are remembered for their lyricism, their insights, their power to inspire, and their role chronicling historic events.

War Poems from Ancient Times

British Museum Collection. CM Dixon / Print Collector / Getty Images

The earliest recorded war poetry is thought to be by Enheduanna, a priestess from Sumer, the ancient land that is now Iraq. In about 2300 BCE, she riled against war, writing:

You are blood rushing down a mountain, Spirit of hate, greed and anger, dominator of heaven and earth!

At least a millennium later, the Greek poet (or group of poets) known as Homer composed  The Illiad , an  epic poem  about a war that destroyed "great fighters' souls" and "made their bodies carrion, / feasts for the dogs and birds."

The celebrated Chinese poet  Li Po  (also known as Rihaku, Li Bai, Li Pai, Li T’ai-po, and Li T’ai-pai) raged against battles he viewed as brutal and absurd. " Nefarious War ," written in 750 AD, reads like a modern-day protest poem: 

men are scattered and smeared over the desert grass, And the generals have accomplished nothing.

Writing in Old English , an unknown Anglo Saxon poet described warriors brandishing swords and clashing shields in the " Battle of Maldon ," which chronicled a war fought 991 AD. The poem articulated a code of heroism and nationalist spirit that dominated war literature in the Western world for a thousand years.

Even during the enormous global wars of the 20th century, many poets echoed medieval ideals, celebrating military triumphs and glorifying fallen soldiers.

Patriotic War Poems

When soldiers head to war or return home victorious, they march to a rousing beat. With decisive meter and stirring refrains, patriotic war poems are designed to celebrate and inspire.

“ The Charge of the Light Brigade ” by English poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892) bounces with the unforgettable chant, “Half a league, half a league, / Half a league onward.” 

American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) wrote " Concord Hymn " for an Independence Day celebration. A choir sang his rousing lines about "the shot heard round the world” to the popular tune "Old Hundredth."

Melodic and rhythmic war poems are often the basis for songs and anthems. " Rule, Britannia! ” began as a poem by James Thomson (1700–1748). Thomson ended each stanza with the spirited cry, "Rule, Britannia, rule the waves; / Britons never will be slaves." Sung to music by Thomas Arne, the poem became standard fare at British military celebrations.  

American poet  Julia Ward Howe  (1819-1910) filled her Civil War poem, “ Battle Hymn of the Republic ,” with heart-thumping cadences and Biblical references. The Union army sang the words to the tune of the song, “John Brown’s Body.” Howe wrote many other poems, but the Battle-Hymn made her famous.

Francis Scott Key (1779-1843) was an attorney and amateur poet who penned the words that became the United States national anthem. “The Star-Spangled Banner” does not have the hand clapping rhythm of Howe’s “Battle-Hymn,” but Key expressed soaring emotions as he observed a brutal battle during the War of 1812 . With lines that end with rising inflection (making the lyrics notoriously difficult to sing), the poem describes “bombs bursting in air” and celebrates America’s victory over British forces.

Originally titled “The Defence of Fort McHenry,” the words (shown above) were set to a variety of tunes. Congress adopted an official version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” as America's anthem in 1931.

Soldier Poets

Historically, poets were not soldiers. Percy Bysshe Shelley, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Butler Yeats, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Hardy, and Rudyard Kipling suffered losses, but never participated in armed conflict themselves. With very few exceptions, the most memorable war poems in the English language were composed by classically-trained writers who observed war from a position of safety.

However, World War I  brought a flood of new poetry by soldiers who wrote from the trenches. Enormous in scope, the global conflict stirred a tidal wave of patriotism and an unprecedented call to arms.Talented and well-read young people from all walks of life went to the front lines. 

Some World War I soldier poets romanticized their lives on the battlefield, writing poems so touching they were set to music. Before he sickened and died on a navy ship, English poet  Rupert Brooke  (1887-1915) wrote tender  sonnets  like " The Soldier ." The words became the song, "If I Should Die":

If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England.

American poet Alan Seeger (1888–1916), who was killed in action serving the French Foreign Legion, imagined a metaphorical “ Rendezvous with Death ”: 

I have a rendezvous with Death At some disputed barricade, When Spring comes back with rustling shade And apple-blossoms fill the air—

Canadian John McCrae (1872–1918) commemorated the war dead and called for survivors to continue the fight. His poem, In Flanders Fields , concludes:   

If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields.

Other soldier poets rejected romanticism . The early 20th century brought the Modernism movement when many writers broke from traditional forms. Poets experimented with plain-spoken language, gritty realism, and imagism .  

British poet  Wilfred Owen  (1893-1918), who died in battle at age 25, did not spare the shocking details. In his poem, “ Dulce et Decorum Est ,” soldiers trudge through sludge after a gas attack. A body is flung onto a cart, “white eyes writhing in his face.”

“My subject is War, and the pity of War,” Owen wrote in the preface to his collection.“The Poetry is in the pity.”

Another British soldier, Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967), wrote angrily and often satirically about War War I and those who supported it. His poem “ Attack ” opens with a rhyming couplet:

At dawn the ridge emerges massed and dun In the wild purple of the glow'ring sun, and concludes with the outburst: O Jesus, make it stop!

Whether glorifying war or reviling it, soldier poets often discovered their voices in the trenches. Struggling with mental illness, British composer  Ivor Gurney  (1890-1937) believed that World War I and camaraderie with fellow soldiers made him a poet. In " Photographs ," as in many of his poems, the tone is both grim and exultant:

Lying in dug-outs, hearing the great shells slow Sailing mile-high, the heart mounts higher and sings.

The soldier poets of World War I changed the literary landscape and established war poetry as a new genre for the modern era. Combining personal narrative with free verse and vernacular language, veterans of World War II, the Korean War, and other  20th century battles and wars  continued to report on trauma and unbearable losses. 

To explore the enormous body of work by soldier poets, visit the  War Poets Association  and the  The First World War Poetry Digital Archive . 

Poetry of Witness

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American poet Carolyn Forché (b. 1950) coined the term  poetry of witness  to describe painful writings by men and women who endured war, imprisonment, exile, repression, and human rights violations. Poetry of witness focuses on human anguish rather than national pride. These poems are apolitical, yet deeply concerned with social causes. 

While traveling with Amnesty International, Forché witnessed the outbreak of civil war in El Salvador . Her prose poem, " The Colonel ," draws a surreal picture of a real encounter:

He spilled many human ears on the table. They were like dried peach halves. There is no other way to say this. He took one of them in his hands, shook it in our faces, dropped it into a water glass. It came alive there.

Although the term “poetry of witness” has recently stirred keen interest, the concept is not new.  Plato wrote that it is the poet's obligation to bear witness, and there have always been poets who recorded their personal perspectives on war.

Walt Whitman  (1819–1892) documented horrifying details from the American Civil War, where he served as a nurse to more than 80,000 sick and wounded. In " The Wound-Dresser " from his collection,  Drum-Taps,  Whitman wrote:

From the stump of the arm, the amputated hand, I undo the clotted lint, remove the slough, wash off the matter and blood…

Traveling as a diplomat and an exile, Chilean poet  Pablo Neruda  (1904-1973) became known for his gruesome yet lyrical poetry about the "pus and pestilence" of the Civil War in Spain.

Prisoners in Nazi concentration camps documented their experiences on scraps that were later found and published in journals and anthologies.The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum maintains an exhaustive index of resources for reading poems by holocaust victims .

Poetry of witness knows no boundaries. Born in Hiroshima, Japan, Shoda Shinoe (1910-1965) wrote poems about the devastation of the atomic bomb. Croatian poet  Mario Susko  (1941- ) draws images from the war in his native Bosnia. In " The Iraqi Nights ," poet Dunya Mikhail (1965- ) personifies war as an individual who moves through life stages. 

Websites like Voices in Wartime and the War Poetry Website have an outpouring of first-hand accounts from many other writers, including poets impacted by war in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel, Kosovo, and Palestine.

Anti-War Poetry

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When soldiers, veterans, and war victims expose disturbing realities, their poetry becomes a social movement and an outcry against military conflicts. War poetry and poetry of witness move into the realm of anti -war poetry.

The Vietnam War and military action in Iraq were widely protested in the United States. A group of American veterans wrote candid reports of unimaginable horrors. In his poem, " Camouflaging the Chimera ," Yusef Komunyakaa (1947- ) depicted a nightmarish scene of jungle warfare: ​

In our way station of shadows rock apes tried to blow our cover, throwing stones at the sunset. Chameleons crawled our spines, changing from day to night: green to gold, gold to black. But we waited till the moon touched metal...

Brian Turner's (1967- ) poem " The Hurt Locker " chronicled chilling lessons from Iraq:  

Nothing but hurt left here. Nothing but bullets and pain... Believe it when you see it. Believe it when a twelve-year-old rolls a grenade into the room.

Vietnam veteran Ilya Kaminsky (1977- ) wrote a scathing indictment of American apathy in " We Lived Happily During the War ": 

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we protested but not enough, we opposed them but not enough. I was in my bed, around my bed America was falling: invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

During the 1960s, the  prominent feminist poets  Denise Levertov (1923-1997) and Muriel Rukeyser (1913-1980) mobilized top-name artists and writers for exhibitions and proclamations against the Vietnam War. Poets Robert Bly (1926- ) and David Ray (1932- ) organized anti-war rallies and events that drew  Allen Ginsberg ,  Adrienne Rich ,  Grace Paley , and many other famous writers. 

Protesting American actions in Iraq, Poets Against the War launched in 2003 with a poetry reading at the White House gates. The event inspired a global movement that included poetry recitations, a documentary film, and a website with writing by more than 13,000 poets.

Unlike  historical poetry of protest and revolution , contemporary anti-war poetry embraces writers from a broad spectrum of cultural, religious, educational, and ethnic backgrounds. Poems and video recordings posted on social media provide multiple perspectives on the experience and impact of war. By responding to war with unflinching detail and raw emotion, poets around the world find strength in their collective voices. 

Sources and Further Reading

•  ​Barrett, Faith. To Fight Aloud Is Very Brave : American Poetry and the Civil War. University of Massachusetts Press.  Oct. 2012.
• Deutsch, Abigail. “100 Years of Poetry: The Magazine and War.” Poetry magazine. 11 Dec. 2012. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69902/100-years-of-poetry-the-magazine-and-war
• Duffy, Carol Ann. “Exit wounds.” The Guardian . 24 Jul 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jul/25/war-poetry-carol-ann-duffy
• Emily Dickinson Museum. “Emily Dickinson and the Civil War.” https://www.emilydickinsonmuseum.org/civil_war
• Forché, Carolyn. “Not Persuasion, But Transport: The Poetry of Witness.” The Blaney Lecture, presented at Poets Forum in New York City. 25 Oct. 2013. https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/text/not-persuasion-transport-poetry-witness
• Forché, Carolyn and Duncan Wu, editors. Poetry of Witness: The Tradition in English, 1500 – 2001. W. W. Norton & Company; 1st edition. 27 Jan. 2014.
• Gutman, Huck.  "Drum-Taps," essay in Walt Whitman: An Encyclopedia . J.R. LeMaster and Donald D. Kummings, eds. New York: Garland Publishing, 1998. https://whitmanarchive.org/criticism/current/encyclopedia/entry_83.html
• Hamill, Sam; Sally Anderson; et. al., editors. Poets Against the War . Nation Books. First Edition. 1 May 2003.
• King, Rick, et. al.  Voices in Wartime . Documentary Film:  http://voicesinwartime.org/ Print anthology: http://voicesinwartime.org/voices-wartime-anthology
• Melicharova, Margaret. "Century of Poetry and War." Peace Pledge Union. http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/poetry/​
• Poets and War .  http://www.poetsandwar.com/
• Richards, Anthony. "How First World War poetry painted a truer picture." The Telegraph . 28 Feb 2014. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/history/world-war-one/inside-first-world-war/part-seven/10667204/first-world-war-poetry-sassoon.html
• Roberts, David, Editor. War “Poems and Poets of Today.”  The War Poetry Website. 1999. http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/modernwarpoetry.htm
• Stallworthy, Jon. The New Oxford Book of War Poetry . Oxford University Press; 2nd edition. 4 Feb. 2016.
• University of Oxford. The First World War Poetry Digital Archive. http://ww1lit.nsms.ox.ac.uk/ww1lit/
• War Poets Association.  http://www.warpoets.org/

FAST FACTS: 45 Great Poems About War

• All the Dead Soldiers by Thomas McGrath (1916–1990)
• Armistice by Sophie Jewett (1861–1909) 
• Attack by Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) 
• Battle Hymn of the Republic  (original published version) by Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910)
• Battle of Maldon  by anonymous, written in Old English and translated by Jonathan A. Glenn 
• Beat! Beat! Drums! by Walt Whitman (1819–1892)
• Camouflaging the Chimera by Yusef Komunyakaa (1947- ) 
• The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809–1892)
• City That Does Not Sleep by Federico García Lorca (1898–1936), translated by Robert Bly
• The Colonel by Carolyn Forché (1950- )
• Concord Hymn by Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
• The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)
• The Dictators by Pablo Neruda (1904-1973), translated by Ben Belitt  
• Driving through Minnesota during the Hanoi Bombings by Robert Bly (1926- )
• Dover Beach by Matthew Arnold (1822–1888)
• Dulce et Decorum Est  by Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) 
• Elegy for a Cave Full of Bones by John Ciardi (1916–1986)
• Facing It by Yusef Komunyakaa (1947- )
• First They Came For The Jews  by Martin Niemöller
• The Hurt Locker by Brian Turner (1967- ) 
• I Have a Rendezvous with Death by Alan Seeger (1888–1916) 
• The Iliad  by Homer (circa 9th or 8th century BCE), translated by Samuel Butler 
• In Flanders Fields  by John McCrae (1872-1918)
• The Iraqi Nights  by Dunya Mikhail (1965- ), translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid 
• An Irish Airman foresees his Death by William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
• I Sit and Sew by Alice Moore Dunbar-Nelson (1875–1935) 
• It Feels A Shame To Be Alive by Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)
• July 4th by May Swenson (1913–1989)
• The Kill School  by Frances Richey (1950- ) 
• Lament to the Spirit of War by Enheduanna (2285-2250 BCE)
• LAMENTA: 423 by Myung Mi Kim (1957- )
• The Last Evening by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), translated by Walter Kaschner
• Life at War by Denise Levertov (1923–1997)
• MCMXIV by Philip Larkin (1922-1985)
• Mother and Poet by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861)  
• Nefarious War by Li Po (701–762), translated by Shigeyoshi Obata
• A Piece of Sky Without Bombs by Lam Thi My Da (1949- ), translated by Ngo Vinh Hai and Kevin Bowen
• Rule, Britannia! by James Thomson (1700–1748) 
• The Soldier  by Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
• The Star-Spangled Banner by Francis Scott Key (1779-1843)
• Tankas by Shoda Shinoe (1910-1965) 
• We Lived Happily During the War by Ilya Kaminsky (1977- )
• Weep by George Moses Horton (1798–1883)  
• The Wound-Dresser from Drum-Taps by Walt Whitman (1819-1892) 
• What the End Is For by Jorie Graham (1950- )  
• What Is Narrative Poetry? Definition and Examples
• Lyric Poetry: Expressing Emotion Through Verse
• What Is Ekphrastic Poetry?
• An Introduction to Free Verse Poetry
• Poems of War and Remembrance
• 41 Classic and New Poems to Keep You Warm in Winter
• Classic Poems About Sailors and the Sea
• Octavio Paz, Mexican Poet, Writer, and Nobel Prize Winner
• Biography of Langston Hughes, Poet, Key Figure in Harlem Renaissance
• Li Po: One of China's Most Renowned Poets
• Understanding the Definition of an Acrostic Poem
• Carl Sandburg, Poet and Lincoln Biographer
• Biography of William Blake, English Poet and Artist
• Patriotic Poems for Independence Day
• A Collection of Classic Love Poetry for Your Sweetheart
• Heroic Couplets: What They Are and What They Do

War Poetry In English Literature | Fight during World War 1st | War Poets

Table of Contents

Introduction

” War Poetry” is a literary genre that developed during the period of the First World War. It is the shadow of brutal life among the soldiers during the “First World War”. The war poets were mostly young men who volunteered or were conscripted to fight in the trenches of the Western Front. The war poets wrote their poetry to raise the question of either life or death; National pride or own existence; duty Or guilt; courage or cowardness.

The war poets or Trench poets are known as “Anti-war poets” because the soldier cum poets do not show war’s gravity but the war’s futility. They witnessed the horrors of modern warfare, such as gas attacks, shell shock, machine guns, barbed wire, mud, and rats. they also experienced the boredom, futility, and disillusionment of life in the trenches. Some of them died in battle, while others survived with physical and psychological scars.

Broadly speaking Milton’s ‘Paradise Lost’ or Ancient ‘Beowulf’ are mainly concerned with battles and heroism and thus regarded the war poem. But our immediate concern is war poetry in the 1920s which is notable for the sea change in attitude. In contrast to the romantic attitude to war as a glorious occasion for showing patriotism and heroism.

The theme of ‘War Poetry’

Randall Jarrell coined the term in his essay “The Literature of War.” Jarrell defines war poetry as a poem that has its theme of war and is written during or about war.

◽ The loss of innocence ◽ Brotherhood and Relationship ◽ The Horror of War ◽ Disillusionment with Religion ◽ Destruction of Nature ◽ Irrationality of War ◽ Emotional and Feelings

Purpose of ‘War Poetry’

◽ Poetry is the best way to express someone’s emotion and expression during the war. ◽ Another main reason for writing war poetry is to show the true picture of the war. ◽ It creates a sense of honor.

Characteristics of War Poetry

◽ It uses gruesome and showing imagery. ◽ It signed a break-off from the contemporary poetic tradition. ◽ Realistic document of war with all its brutality.

most prominent Anti-War poets

The war poets used poetry as a way of expressing their feelings and opinions about the war. They also questioned the authority and morality of those who started and continued the war.

There is a list of the most prominent Anti-War poets, who were involved directly in the war and eye-witnessed to see the brutality in the name of National pride on the battlefield:

◽ Wilfred Owen ◽ Siegfried Sassoon ◽ Robert Graves ◽ Issac Rosenberg ◽ Rupert Brooke ◽ Edward Thomas

Wilfred Owen ( 1893 – 1918 )

Owen was one of the most prominent Anti-War poets during the First World War as well as a soldier. He wrote only five poems published in his Lifetime but the most important poems are published posthumously. Futility, Strange Meeting, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Dulce et Decorum Est, and Insensibility are his most important poem. In his poem, he showed the terror of trenches, the pitiful shadow of soldiers’ lives. He wrote about War poems in the preface to the Edition:

“This book is not about heroes.   Nor is it about deeds or lands nor anything about glory, honour might, majesty, dominion, or power, except war. My subject is war, and the pity of war.”

Siegfried Sassoon (1886 – 1967 )

War poetry is not complete without the work of ‘Siegfried Sasson’ who was awarded the Queen’s Medal for poetry in 1957. He was not only a poet but also a soldier. He shook the literary world to write his angry and compassionate poems about First World War. Sassoon wrote of the horror and brutality of trench warfare and ironically criticized those men who were blind supporters of a brutal war. The Hero, Counter-Attack, The Death Bed, Attack, Memorial Tablet, Banishmen, and The Last Meeting are the most important poems written by him. He wrote in his poem ‘Trench Duty’ about the extreme situation of the soldiers.

Robert Graves (1895 – 1985 )

Robert Graves was a great British writer, poet, and novelist. He served as a captain in the First World War. He was a good friend of Siegfried Sasson. He was badly wounded in the First world war and reported dead but he returns a few months later. Among his world-famous war poem include “Goodbye to All That” and “The White Goddess”.

Issac Rosenberg (1890 – 1918 )

Rosenberg is known for his “Trench Poem” written between 1916 and 1918. He was only 28 when he died. He was killed while fighting in the First World War. Among his world-famous war poems included ‘Break of Day in the Trenches’, ‘Dead Man’s Dump’, ‘In the Trenches’ and ‘On Receiving News of the War.’

Rupert Brooke ( 1887 – 1915 )

Brooke was an English poet known for his Idealistic war sonnets written during the first world war, especially The Soldier. He was also known for his good look.  W. B. Yeats described him as ‘The most handsome young man in England’. The Great, The Dead, Lover, Heaven, Peace, and Cloud Safety are his most prominent poem.

Edward Thomas ( 1878 – 1917 )

He is commonly considered a war poet. His poem ‘The Pity of the War to Aftermath’ reflects his changing attitude to the war. His most prominent poems are Owl When First, The Owl is a poem which shows the mental depression, grief, disgust, and panic of the brutal war.

The war poets had profoundly impacted the literary and cultural landscape of their time and beyond. Their poems challenged the prevailing attitudes and propaganda about war and revealed its true nature and consequences. Their poems also influenced the development of modernism and realism in literature and art. Their poems also inspired generations of readers and writers who faced or witnessed other wars and conflicts in the 20th and 21st centuries.

The war has been transmitted in the poetry and so the realistic atmosphere of deadly warfare and the bloodshed on the battlefield but the eyewitness soldier-poets. The poets mentioned above contributed a lot to the development of War poetry. Some other minor war poets are I would get Kingsley Aims, John Beaching, Sydney Keys, and Vere Britain. War poetry contributed a lot to the development of the history of English literature .

War poetry is a powerful and enduring form of expression that can help us understand and empathize with the human condition in times of war. War poetry can also help us question and critique the causes and effects of war and violence. War poetry can also help us hope and strive for peace and justice in our world.

Related Topic: Suicide In The Trenches Indo-European Language

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15+ Must-read Poems about War

(15 to start, 200+ to explore).

These haunting verses witness the devastating impact of armed conflict on humanity. War poems capture the horrors of battle, the loss of lives, and the emotional toll on soldiers and civilians alike.

They may reflect on the complexities of war, questioning its necessity and highlighting its lasting scars on societies and individuals. These poems often convey a plea for peace, emphasizing the futility of violence and the longing for a world free from the ravages of war.

They are powerful reminders of the importance of empathy, compassion, and understanding in times of conflict, urging readers to work towards a more harmonious and peaceful coexistence.

In Flanders Fields

By john mccrae.

‘In Flanders Fields’ by John McCrae is a well-known, and much revered, poem concerning the many lived lost in the Flanders area of Belgium during World War I.

In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly

by Wilfred Owen

‘Disabled’ by Wilfred Owen explores the suffering, alienation, and traumatic life of a disabled soldier who participated in the Great War.

He sat in a wheeled chair, waiting for dark, And shivered in his ghastly suit of grey, Legless, sewn short at elbow. Through the park Voices of boys rang saddening like a hymn,

Dulce et Decorum Est

‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ by Wilfred Owen is a poignant anti-war poem that exposes the harsh reality of World War I.

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Joining the Colours

By katharine tynan.

‘Joining the Colours’ was published in the midst of the First World War and details the lives of Irish soldiers joining Britain in the fight. The text depicts the soldiers moving through the streets of the city, marching in a parade.

There they go marching all in step so gay! Smooth-cheeked and golden, food for shells and guns. Blithely they go as to a wedding day, The mothers' sons.

Strange Meeting

‘Strange Meeting’ by Wilfred Owen explores soldiers’ disillusionment with war, their moral dilemma, and shared humanity.

“I am the enemy you killed, my friend. I knew you in this dark: for so you frowned Yesterday through me as you jabbed and killed. I parried; but my hands were loath and cold.

Easter, 1916

By william butler yeats.

‘Easter, 1916’ is a reflection on the events surrounding the Easter Rising, an armed insurrection that began in Dublin on Easter Monday, April 24, 1916.

I have met them at close of day    Coming with vivid faces From counter or desk among grey    Eighteenth-century houses.

Insensibility

‘Insensibility’ by Wilfred Owen explores the psychological trauma and dehumanization experienced by soldiers during World War I.

Happy the soldier home, with not a notion How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack, And many sighs are drained. Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:

Spring Offensive

‘Spring Offensive’ by Wilfred Owen portrays the harrowing realities of World War I and the ensuing trauma endured by soldiers.

Halted against the shade of a last hill, They fed, and, lying easy, were at ease And, finding comfortable chests and knees Carelessly slept. But many there stood still

First They Came

By pastor martin niemöller.

‘First They Came’ by Pastor Martin Neimöller is a powerful poem that speaks on the nature of responsibility in times of war and persecution. 

First they came for the Communists And I did not speak out Because I was not a Communist Then they came for the Socialists

The Soldier

By rupert brooke.

‘The Soldier’ is a poem by famed war poet Rupert Brooke. It celebrates the sacrifices of soldiers during World War I.

If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;  

Explore more poems about War

Anthem for doomed youth.

‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ by Wilfred Owen presents an alternate view of the lost lives during World War I against nationalist propaganda.

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle? Only the monstrous anger of the guns. Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle Can patter out their hasty orisons.

August, 1914

By vera mary brittain.

‘August, 1914’ by Vera Mary Brittain is a short anti-war poem that speaks on the beginnings of conflict from a “divine” perspective.

God said, “Men have forgotten Me: The souls that sleep shall wake again, And blinded eyes must learn to see.”

What Were They Like?

By denise levertov.

‘What Were They Like?’ by Denise Levertov criticizes the Vietnam War, presenting the suffering of Vietnamese people while imagining genocide.

Did the people of Viet Nam use lanterns of stone? Did they hold ceremonies to reverence the opening of buds?

by Sir Walter Scott

‘Lochinvar’ is a ballad about a young and courageous knight who saves his beloved, the fair lady Ellen, from marrying another man.

O young Lochinvar is come out of the west, Through all the wide Border his steed was the best; And save his good broadsword he weapons had none, He rode all unarm’d, and he rode all alone.

Apologia Pro Poemate Meo

‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’ by Wilfred Owen defends a truthful portrayal of war in poetry, showing soldiers’ struggles and sacrifices.

I, too, saw God through mud— The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled. War brought more glory to their eyes than blood, And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.

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War Poetry and Modernism: Re-reading Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est

2023, The Criterion

World War 1 had brought in several cataclysmic changes in English society, most of which manifested in the form of war trauma and a deep longing to go back to the idyllic prewar world. War had become a symptom of the modern condition. The wartime conditions became increasingly grim leading to various appalling social repercussions. For instance, 'shell-shock', a psychological condition due to war trauma surfaced among soldiers that showcased the futility of mankind's ingenuity for inventing more effective or lethal ways to annihilate. Thus, the irrationality and futility of war called for a re-examination of the foundation of modernist society which occurred in modernist poetry. Poetry seemed to express the language of trauma, having taken the form of a 'wounded' subgenre, expressing the severe aftermaths of the hostilities of the First World War. My paper will therefore attempt to highlight the themes and techniques employed in the English war poet, Wilfred Owen's authentic poetic narratives to uncover real war trauma by inverting the very conventions of war poetry.

Related Papers

International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology

Triasha Mondal

International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology (IJRASET)

IJRASET Publication , Triasha Mondal

This study provides a prismatic view of the First World War and the jarring piece of literature salvaged from the time, by the incandescent bard, Wilfred Edward Salter Owen. This study offers a close analysis of three of Owen's poignant poems; Dulce et Decorum Est, Strange Meeting, and Futility-with every aspect of literary technique, it deploys. It will contain annals of close and comprehensive verbatim analysis, which would help understand the aspects of war in its cognitive, affective, existential, and political stridency. This study has put much weight on the unsullied reasons that might have fanned the embers of the Great War, the emotional and moral compulsion of the combatants, and the tumultuous impact on the lives of the common people. Owen; through an impressive panoply of poetry, grieves the sheer wastage of life war brings about in its trail. The smarting lassitude and inanition at the war front and the unremitting helplessness of the people in ruins. He claims, that even though a country wins, it still loses.

Paul G Methven

This in-depth study explores in detail four of Wilfred Owen’s most moving First World War poems, each selected for their variations in emphasis and viewpoint. Dulce Et Decorum Est was selected for its contempt for jingoistic recruitment verses; The Send-off was chosen for its portrayal of the dispatch of newly-conscripted soldiers; The Disabled for its depiction of life-changing, war-induced infirmity; Anthem for Doomed Youth for its disdain for death conventions and rituals. Each poem is investigated for:- Background to its composition; Stanza by stanza synopsis and meaning; Prosody and poetics; Owen’s choice of vocabulary; Conclusions and critical opinions.

The Impact of First World War I on Wilfred Owen' s Poetry

Fikret Güven

The First World War was idealized as a war to end all, however, it became the " Great War " itself, and created a great stir in Europe in terms of radical, ideological and political changes. Since literature reflects society, a change in Georgian and Modernist discourses was also reconstructed by means of poetry. While the pro-war Georgian poetry disseminated the ideas of knightly, heroic and a romantic discourse of the war with its strident rejection, the Modernist anti – war poetry adopted an oppositional and socially responsible mission to deconstruct the false heroic ideas of the pro-war poetry. The Georgian sentimental ideas such as duty to one' s country, heroic self-sacrifice, knightly glory, honor, justice, Christian values and sentimentality were under question in the anti – war poetry. Georgian poets especially fond of conjuring dream-worlds of their own and longed for a romantic return to the nature. Georgian poet Brooke shows his dashing nature and patriotism in his poetry. He represents war as an opportunity to show his patriotism. Modernist mood of trench poets, however, created a new kind of poetry of protest against disillusion of pro-war propaganda. This counter – poetry committed itself to the construction of an anti-war sentiment through its controversial representation of the war. As such Owen' s poetry of progressive protest as a means of expressing the solid truth about the harsh realities of war manifests itself in a Modernist discourse. The purpose of this paper is to bring an approach to Owen's haunting and innovative poetry, which can be interpreted as an attack against Georgian ideals of sentimentality. His poetry invites all to see and feel the shame and guilt war has brought upon them.

International Journal of Applied Linguistics and English Literature

george ngide

This article sets out to examine Wilfred Owen’s war poems which showcase his vigorous philosophy on and against war. We contend that instead of considered only as “a war poet”, Owen was more “a poet at war”, better still, a poet against war. The terms are used in this paper to mean on the one hand that Owen was less a poet who took part in war, and more a poet who wars against war. Put differently, Owen does not just describe what he himself calls “The pity of war” with the gruesome and excruciating experiences of soldiers in combat, but he also uses firsthand experience on the battlefield (having been a soldier himself) to call for an end to war. In the preface to his poems he writes that “The poetry is in the pity”. His descriptions of war experiences are so profound that they discourage any possibility of war, thus leaving the human race with one option namely, negotiation and peaceful resolution of conflicts by those he calls “better men” who in the future will profoundly be i...

Harley M . Bram

The first essay in "Pities" is a small exploratory essay on British WWI poet, Wilfred Owen. During my American Modernism course in Spring 2019, I found great interest in how the emergence of advanced warfare shifted literature in a time that was already advancing technologically and economically. I became obsessed, almost, with the brutality of Owen’s works. This led to the expansion of the paper into my final essay for the course in which I compared Owen to Robinson Jeffers, an American anti-war poet. By bringing in Jeffers, I was able to accurately portray how both countries were affected by the war and set the precedent of war literature to follow.

IIUC Studies

Dr. Mohammad Riaz Mahmud

Abstract: In 1914 the First World War broke out on a largely innocent world, a world that still associated warfare with glorious cavalry charges and the noble pursuit of heroic ideals. This was the world's first experience of modern mechanized warfare. As the months and years passed, each ...

Abstract: In 1914 the First World War broke out on a largely innocent world, a world that still associated warfare with glorious cavalry charges and the noble pursuit of heroic ideals. This was the world’s first experience of modern mechanized warfare. As the months and years passed, each bringing increasing slaughter and misery, the soldiers became increasingly disillusioned. Many of the strongest protests made against the war were made through the medium of poetry by young men horrified by what they saw. They not only wrote about the physical pain of wounds and deaths, but also the mental pain that were consequences of war. One of these poets was Wilfred Owen. In his poetry we find the feelings of futility, horror, and dehumanization that he encountered in war. World War I broke out on a largely innocent world, a world that still associated warfare with glorious cavalry charges and noble pursuit of heroic ideals. People were wholly unprepared for the horrors of modern trench warfa...

Nordic Journal of English Studies

Esther Sanchez-Pardo

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Poems & Poets

Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen, who wrote some of the best British poetry on World War I, composed nearly all of his poems in slightly over a year, from August 1917 to September 1918. In November 1918 he was killed in action at the age of 25, one week before the Armistice. Only five poems were published in his lifetime—three in the Nation and two that appeared anonymously in the Hydra , a journal he edited in 1917 when he was a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. Shortly after his death, seven more of his poems appeared in the 1919 volume of Edith Sitwell 's annual anthology, Wheels : a volume dedicated to his memory, and in 1919 and 1920 seven other poems appeared in periodicals. Almost all of Owen’s poems, therefore, appeared posthumously: importantly in the bestselling collection Poems (1920), edited by Siegfried Sassoon with the assistance of Edith Sitwell, contains 23 poems; The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1931), edited by Edmund Blunden, adds 19 poems to this number; and The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (1963), edited by C. Day Lewis , contains 80 poems, adding some juvenilia, minor poems, and fragments but omitting a few of the poems from Blunden’s edition. Owen wrote vivid and terrifying poems about modern warfare, depicting graphic scenes with honest emotions; in doing so, young Owen helped to advance poetry into the Modernist era.

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen was born on March 18, 1893, in Oswestry, on the Welsh border of Shropshire, in the beautiful and spacious home of his maternal grandfather. Wilfred’s father, Thomas, a former seaman, had returned from India to marry Susan Shaw; throughout the rest of his life Thomas felt constrained by his somewhat dull and low-paid position as a railway station master. Owen’s mother felt that her marriage limited her intellectual, musical, and economic ambitions. Both parents seem to have been of Welsh descent, and Susan’s family had been relatively affluent during her childhood but had lost ground economically. As the oldest of four children born in rapid succession, Wilfred developed a protective attitude toward the others and an especially close relationship with his mother. After he turned four, the family moved from the grandfather’s home to a modest house in Birkenhead, where Owen attended Birkenhead Institute from 1900 to 1907. The family then moved to another modest house, in Shrewsbury, where Owen attended Shrewsbury Technical School and graduated in 1911 at the age of 18. Having attempted unsuccessfully to win a scholarship to attend London University, he tried to measure his aptitude for a religious vocation by becoming an unpaid lay assistant to the Reverend Herbert Wigan, a vicar of evangelical inclinations in the Church of England, at Dunsden, Oxfordshire. In return for the tutorial instruction he was to receive, but which did not significantly materialize, Owen agreed to assist with the care of the poor and sick in the parish and to decide within two years whether he should commit himself to further training as a clergyman. At Dunsden he achieved a fuller understanding of social and economic issues and developed his humanitarian propensities, but as a consequence of this heightened sensitivity, he became disillusioned with the inadequate response of the Church of England to the sufferings of the underprivileged and the dispossessed. In his spare time, he read widely and began to write poetry. In his initial verses he wrote on the conventional subjects of the time, but his work also manifested some stylistic qualities that even then tended to set him apart, especially his keen ear for sound and his instinct for the modulating of rhythm, talents related perhaps to the musical ability that he shared with both of his parents.

In 1913 he returned home, seriously ill with a respiratory infection that his living in a damp, unheated room at the vicarage had exacerbated. He talked of poetry, music, or graphic art as possible vocational choices, but his father urged him to seek employment that would result in a steady income. After eight months of convalescence at home, Owen taught for one year in Bordeaux at the Berlitz School of Languages, and he spent a second year in France with a Catholic family, tutoring their two boys. As a result of these experiences, he became a Francophile. Later these years undoubtedly heightened his sense of the degree to which the war disrupted the life of the French populace and caused widespread suffering among civilians as the Allies pursued the retreating Germans through French villages in the summer and fall of 1918.

In September 1915, nearly a year after the United Kingdom and Germany had gone to war, Owen returned to England, uncertain as to whether he should enlist. By October he had enlisted and was at first in the Artists’ Rifles. In June 1916 he received a commission as lieutenant in the Manchester Regiment, and on December 29, 1916 he left for France with the Lancashire Fusiliers.

Judging by his first letters to his mother from France, one might have anticipated that Owen would write poetry in the idealistic vein of Rupert Brooke : “There is a fine heroic feeling about being in France. ...” But by January 6, 1917 he wrote of the marching, “The awful state of the roads, and the enormous weight carried was too much for scores of men.” Outfitted in hip-length rubber waders, on January 8,  he had waded through two and a half miles of trenches with “a mean depth of two feet of water.” By January 9,  he was housed in a hut where only 70 yards away a howitzer fired every minute day and night. On January 12 occurred the march and attack of poison gas he later reported in “ Dulce et Decorum Est .” They marched three miles over a shelled road and three more along a flooded trench, where those who got stuck in the heavy mud had to leave their waders, as well as some clothing and equipment, and move ahead on bleeding and freezing feet. They were under machine-gun fire, shelled by heavy explosives throughout the cold march, and were almost unconscious from fatigue when the poison-gas attack occurred. Another incident that month, in which one of Owen’s men was blown from a ladder in their trench and blinded, forms the basis of “The Sentry.” In February Owen attended an infantry school at Amiens. On March 19,  he was hospitalized for a brain concussion suffered six nights earlier, when he fell into a 15-foot-deep shell hole while searching in the dark for a soldier overcome by fatigue. Blunden dates the writing of Owen’s sonnet “To A Friend (With an Identity Disc)” to these few days in the hospital. Throughout April the battalion suffered incredible physical privations caused by the record-breaking cold and snow and by the heavy shelling. For four days and nights Owen and his men remained in an open field in the snow, with no support forces arriving to relieve them and with no chance to change wet, frozen clothes or to sleep: “I kept alive on brandy, the fear of death, and the glorious prospect of the cathedral town just below us, glittering with the morning.” Three weeks later on April 25 he continued to write his mother of the intense shelling: “For twelve days I did not wash my face, nor take off my boots, nor sleep a deep sleep. For twelve days we lay in holes where at any moment a shell might put us out.” One wet night during this time he was blown into the air while he slept. For the next several days he hid in a hole too small for his body, with the body of a friend, now dead, huddled in a similar hole opposite him, and less than six feet away. In these letters to his mother he directed his bitterness not at the enemy but at the people back in England “who might relieve us and will not.”

Having endured such experiences in January, March, and April, Owen was sent to a series of hospitals between May 1 and June 26, 1917 because of severe headaches. He thought them related to his brain concussion, but they were eventually diagnosed as symptoms of shell shock, and he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh to become a patient of Dr. A. Brock, the associate of Dr. W.H.R. Rivers, the noted neurologist and psychologist to whom Siegfried Sassoon was assigned when he arrived six weeks later.

Owen’s annus mirabilis as a poet apparently began in the summer of 1917, but he had, in fact, been preparing himself haphazardly but determinedly for a career as poet throughout the preceding five or six years. He had worshipped Keats and later Shelley during adolescence; during his two years at Dunsden he had read and written poetry in the isolated evenings at the vicarage; in Bordeaux, the elderly symbolist poet and pacifist writer Laurent Tailhade had encouraged him in his ambition to become a poet. Also in France in 1913 and 1914 he probably read and studied the works of novelist and poet Jules Romains, who was experimenting with pararhyme and assonance. While he was stationed in London in 1915 and 1916, he found stimulation in discussions with another older poet, Harold Monro, who ran the Poetry Bookshop, a meeting place for poets; and in 1916, he read Rupert Brooke, William Butler Yeats , and A.E. Housman . Owen was developing his skill in versification, his technique as a poet, and his appreciation for the poetry of others, especially that of his more important contemporaries, but until 1917 he was not expressing his own significant experiences and convictions except in letters to his mother and brother. This preparation, the three bitter months of suffering, the warmth of the people of Edinburgh who “adopted” the patients, the insight of Dr. Brock, and the coincidental arrival of Siegfried Sassoon brought forth the poet and the creative outpouring of his single year of maturity.

Before Sassoon arrived at Craiglockhart in mid-August, Dr. Brock encouraged Owen to edit the hospital journal, the Hydra , which went through twelve issues before Owen left.  It seems likely that this sensitive psychologist and enthusiastic friend assisted Owen in confronting the furthermost ramifications of his violent experiences in France so that he could write of the terrifying experiences in poems such as “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “The Sentry,” and “The Show.” He may also have helped him confront his shyness; his intense involvement with his mother and his attempt, at the same time, to become more independent; his resentment of his father’s disapproval of his ambition for a career as a poet; his ambivalence about Christianity and his disillusionment with Christian religion in the practices of the contemporary church; his expressed annoyance with all women except his mother and his attraction to other men; and his decision to return to his comrades in the trenches rather than to stay in England to protest the continuation of the war.

When Sassoon arrived, it took Owen two weeks to get the courage to knock on his door and identify himself as a poet. At that time Owen, like many others in the hospital, was speaking with a stammer. By autumn he was not only articulate with his new friends and lecturing in the community but was able to use his terrifying experiences in France, and his conflicts about returning, as the subject of poems expressing his own deepest feelings. He experienced an astonishing period of creative energy that lasted through several months, until he returned to France and the heavy fighting in the fall of 1918.

By the time they met, Owen and Sassoon shared the conviction that the war ought to be ended, since the total defeat of the Central Powers would entail additional destruction, casualties, and suffering of staggering magnitude. In 1917 and 1918 both found their creative stimulus in a compassionate identification with soldiers in combat and in the hospital. In spite of their strong desire to remain in England to protest the continuation of the war, both finally returned to their comrades in the trenches. Whatever the exact causes of Owen’s sudden emergence as “true poet” in the summer of 1917, he himself thought that Sassoon had “fixed” him in place as poet. By the time Sassoon arrived, his first volume of poetry, The Old Huntsman (1917), which includes some war poems, had gained wide attention, and he was already preparing Counter-Attack (1918), which was to have an even stronger impact on the English public. In the weeks immediately before he was sent to Craiglockhart under military orders, Sassoon had been the center of public attention for risking the possibility of court martial by mailing a formal protest against the war to the War Department. Further publicity resulted when he dramatized his protest by throwing his Military Cross into the River Mersey and when a member of the House of Commons read the letter of protest before the hostile members of the House, an incident instigated by Bertrand Russell in order to further the pacifist cause. Sassoon came from a wealthy and famous family. He had been to Cambridge, he was seven years older than Owen, and he had many friends among the London literati. Both pride and humility in having acquired Sassoon as friend characterized Owen’s report to his mother of his visits to Sassoon’s room in September. He remarked that he had not yet told his new friend “that I am not worthy to light his pipe. I simply sit tight and tell him where I think he goes wrong.”

If their views on the war and their motivations in writing about it were similar, significant differences appear when one compares their work. In the poems written after he went to France in 1916 Sassoon consistently used a direct style with regular and exact rhyme, pronounced rhythms, colloquial language, a strongly satiric mode; and he also tended to present men and women in a stereotypical manner. After meeting Sassoon, Owen wrote several poems in Sassoon’s drily satirical mode, but he soon rejected Sassoon’s terseness or epigrammatic concision. Consequently, Owen created soldier figures who often express a fuller humanity and emotional range than those in Sassoon’s more cryptic poems. In his war poems, whether ideological, meditative, or lyrical, Owen achieved greater breadth than Sassoon did in his war poetry. Even in some of the works that Owen wrote before he left Craiglockhart in the fall of 1917, he revealed a technical versatility and a mastery of sound through complex patterns of assonance, alliteration, dissonance, consonance, and various other kinds of slant rhyme—an experimental method of composition which went beyond any innovative versification that Sassoon achieved during his long career.

While Owen wrote to Sassoon of his gratitude for his help in attaining a new birth as poet, Sassoon did not believe he had influenced Owen as radically and as dramatically as Owen maintained. Sassoon regarded his “touch of guidance” and his encouragement as fortunately coming at the moment when Owen most needed them, and he later maintained in Siegfried’s Journey, 1916-1920 that his “only claimable influence was that I stimulated him towards writing with compassionate and challenging realism. ... My encouragement was opportune, and can claim to have given him a lively incentive during his rapid advance to self-revelation.” Sassoon also saw what Owen may never have recognized—that Sassoon’s technique “was almost elementary compared with his [Owen’s] innovating experiments.” Perhaps Sassoon’s statement in late 1945 summarizes best the reciprocal influence the two poets had exerted upon one another: “imperceptible effects are obtained by people mingling their minds at a favorable moment.”

Sassoon helped Owen by arranging for him, upon his discharge from the hospital, to meet Robert Ross, a London editor who was Sassoon’s friend. Ross, in turn, introduced Owen—then and in May 1918—to other literary figures, such as Robert Graves , Edith and Osbert Sitwell, Arnold Bennett, Thomas Hardy , and Captain Charles Scott Moncrieff, who later translated Proust. Knowing these important writers made Owen feel part of a community of literary people—one of the initiated. Accordingly, on New Year’s Eve 1917, Owen wrote exuberantly to his mother of his poetic ambitions: “I am started. The tugs have left me. I feel the great swelling of the open sea taking my galleon.” At the same time, association with other writers made him feel a sense of urgency—a sense that he must make up for lost time in his development as a poet. In May 1918, on leave in London, he wrote his mother: I am old already for a poet, and so little is yet achieved.” But he added with his wry humor, “celebrity is the last infirmity I desire.”

By May 1918 Owen regarded his poems not only as individual expressions of intense experience but also as part of a book that would give the reader a wide perspective on World War I. In spring 1918 it appeared that William Heinemann (in spite of the paper shortage that his publishing company faced) would assign Robert Ross to read Owen’s manuscript when he submitted it to them. In a table of contents compiled before the end of July 1918 Owen followed a loosely thematic arrangement. Next to each title he wrote a brief description of the poem, and he also prepared in rough draft a brief, but eloquent, preface, in which he expresses his belief in the cathartic function of poetry. For a man who had written sentimental or decorative verse before his war poems of 1917 and 1918, Owen’s preface reveals an unexpected strength of commitment and purpose as a writer, a commitment understandable enough in view of the overwhelming effects of the war upon him. In this preface Owen said the poetry in his book would express “the pity of War,” rather than the “glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power,” which war had acquired in the popular mind. He distinguished also between the pity he sought to awaken by his poems (“The Poetry is in the Pity”) and that conventionally expressed by writers who felt less intensely opposed to war by this time than he did. As they wrote their historically oriented laments or elegies for those fallen in wars, they sought to comfort and inspire readers by placing the deaths and war itself in the context of sacrifice for a significant cause. But Owen’s message for his generation, he said, must be one of warning rather than of consolation. In his last declaration he appears to have heeded Sassoon’s advice to him that he begin to use an unmitigated realism in his description of events: “the true poet must be truthful.”

Owen’s identification of himself as a poet, affirmed by his new literary friends, must have been especially important in the last few months of his life. Even the officer with whom he led the remnant of the company to safety on a night in October 1918 and with whom he won the Military Cross for his action later wrote to Blunden that neither he nor the rest of the men ever dreamed that Owen wrote poems.

When Owen first returned to the battlefields of France on September  1, 1918, after several months of limited service in England, he seemed confident about his decision: “I shall be better able to cry my outcry, playing my part.” Once overseas, however, he wrote to Sassoon chiding him for having urged him to return to France, for having alleged that further exposure to combat would provide him with experience that he could transmute into poetry: “That is my consolation for feeling a fool,” he wrote on September 22, 1918. He was bitterly angry at Clemenceau for expecting the war to be continued and for disregarding casualties even among children in the villages as the Allied troops pursued the German forces. He did not live long enough for this indignation or the war experiences of September and October to become part of his poetry, although both are vividly expressed in his letters.

In October Owen wrote of his satisfaction at being nominated for the Military Cross because receiving the award would give him more credibility at home, especially in his efforts to bring the war to an end. Lieutenant J. Foulkes, who shared command with him the night in October 1918 that all other officers were killed, described to Edmund Blunden the details of Owen’s acts of “conspicuous gallantry.” His company had successfully attacked what was considered a “second Hindenburg Line” in territory that was “well-wired.” Losses were so heavy that among the commissioned officers only Foulkes and Owen survived. Owen took command and led the men to a place where he held the line for several hours from a captured German pill box, the only cover available. The pill box was, however, a potential death trap upon which the enemy concentrated its fire. By morning the few who survived were at last relieved by the Lancashire Fusiliers. Foulkes told Blunden, “This is where I admired his work—in leading his remnant, in the middle of the night, back to safety. ... I was content to follow him with the utmost confidence.” Early in his army career Owen wrote to his brother Harold that he knew he could not change his inward self in order to become a self-assured soldier, but that he might still be able to change his appearance and behavior so that others would get the impression he was a “good soldier.” Such determination and conscientiousness account for the trust in his leadership that Foulkes expressed. Owen was again moving among his men and offering encouragement when he was killed the next month.

In the last weeks of his life Owen seems to have coped with the stress of the heavy casualties among his battalion by “insensibility,” much like that of soldiers he forgives in his poem of the same title, but condemns among civilians: “Happy are men who yet before they are killed / Can let their veins run cold.” These men have walked “on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.” “Alive, he is not vital overmuch; / Dying, not mortal overmuch.” Owen wrote to Sassoon, after reading Counter-Attack , that Sassoon’s war poems frightened him more than the actual experience of holding a soldier shot through the head and having the man’s blood soak hot against his shoulder for a half hour. Two weeks before his death he wrote both to his mother and to Sassoon that his nerves were “in perfect order.” But in the letter to Sassoon he explained, “I cannot say I suffered anything, having let my brain grow dull. ... I shall feel anger again as soon as I dare, but now I must not. I don’t take the cigarette out of my mouth when I write Deceased over their letters. But one day I will write Deceased over many books.”

After Wilfred Owen’s death his mother attempted to present him as a more pious figure than he was. For his tombstone, she selected two lines from “The End”—”Shall life renew these bodies? Of a truth / All death will he annul, all tears assuage?”—but omitted the question mark at the close of the quotation. His grave thus memorializes a faith that he did not hold and ignores the doubt he expressed. In 1931 Blunden wrote Sassoon, with irritation, because Susan Owen had insisted that the collected edition of Owen’s poems celebrate her son as a majestic and tall heroic figure: “Mrs. Owen has had her way, with a purple binding and a photograph which makes W look like a 6 foot Major who had been in East Africa or so for several years.” (Owen was about a foot shorter than Sassoon.)

Harold Owen succeeded in removing a reference to his brother as “an idealistic homosexual” from Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That , and specifically addressed in volume three of his biography the questions that had been raised about his brother’s disinterest in women. Harold Owen insisted that his brother had been so dedicated to poetry that he had chosen, at least temporarily, the life of a celibate. He also explains, what was undoubtedly true, that Owen expressed himself impulsively and emotionally, that he was naive, and that he was given to hero worship of other men.

Owen’s presentation of “boys” and “lads”—beautiful young men with golden hair, shining eyes, strong brown hands, white teeth—has homoerotic elements. One must recognize, however, such references had become stock literary devices in war poetry. The one poem which can clearly be called a love poem, “To A Friend (With an Identity Disc),” carefully avoids the use of either specifically masculine or feminine terms in addressing the friend. Eroticism in Owen’s poems seems idealized, romantic, and platonic and is used frequently to contrast the ugly and horrible aspects of warfare. Of more consequence in considering Owen’s sexual attitudes in relation to his poetry is the harshness in reference to wives, mothers, or sweethearts of the wounded or disabled soldiers. The fullness of his insight into “the pity of war” seems incomprehensibly limited in the presentation of women in “The Dead-Beat,” “ Disabled ,” “ The Send-Off ,” and “ S.I.W .”

In several of his most effective war poems, Owen suggests that the experience of war for him was surrealistic, as when the infantrymen dream, hallucinate, begin freezing to death, continue to march after several nights without sleep, lose consciousness from loss of blood, or enter a hypnotic state from fear or excessive guilt. The resulting disconnected sensory perceptions and the speaker’s confusion about his identity suggest that not only the speaker, but the whole humanity, has lost its moorings. The horror of war, then, becomes more universal, the tragedy more overwhelming, and the pity evoked more profound, because there is no rational explanation to account for the cataclysm.

In “Conscious” a wounded soldier, moving in and out of consciousness, cannot place in perspective the yellow flowers beside his hospital bed, nor can he recall blue sky. The soldiers in “Mental Cases” suffer hallucinations in which they observe everything through a haze of blood: “Sunlight becomes a blood-smear; dawn comes blood-black.” In “ Exposure ,” which displays Owen’s mastery of assonance and alliteration, soldiers in merciless wind and snow find themselves overwhelmed by nature’s hostility and unpredictability. They even lose hope that spring will arrive: “For God’s invincible spring our love is made afraid.” Anticipating the search that night for the bodies of fallen soldiers in no man’s land, the speaker predicts that soon all of his comrades will be found as corpses with their eyes turned to ice. Ironically, as they begin freezing to death, their pain becomes numbness and then pleasurable warmth. As the snow gently fingers their cheeks, the freezing soldiers dream of summer: “so we drowse, sun-dozed / Littered with blossoms trickling where the blackbird fusses.” Dreaming of warm hearths as “our ghosts drag home,” they quietly “turn back to our dying.” The speaker in “Asleep” envies the comfort of one who can sleep, even though the sleep is that of death: “He sleeps less tremulous, less cold / Than we who must awake, and waking, say Alas!” All these “dream poems” suggest that life is a nightmare in which the violence of war is an accepted norm. The cosmos seems either cruelly indifferent or else malignant, certainly incapable of being explained in any rational manner. A loving Christian God is nonexistent. The poem’s surface incoherence suggests the utter irrationality of life. Even a retreat to the comfort of the unconscious state is vulnerable to sudden invasion from the hell of waking life.

One of Owen’s most moving poems, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” which had its origins in Owen’s experiences of January 1917, describes explicitly the horror of the gas attack and the death of a wounded man who has been flung into a wagon. The horror intensifies, becoming a waking nightmare experienced by the exhausted viewer, who stares hypnotically at his comrade in the wagon ahead of him as he must continue to march.

The nightmare aspect reaches its apogee in “The Show.” As the speaker gazes upon a desolate, war-ravaged landscape, it changes gradually to the magnified portion of a dead soldier’s face, infested by thousands of caterpillars. The barbed wire of no-man’s-land becomes the scraggly beard on the face; the shell holes become pockmarked skin. Only at the end does the poet’s personal conflict become clear. Owen identifies himself as the severed head of a caterpillar and the many legs, still moving blindly, as the men of his command from whom he has been separated. The putrefying face, the sickening voraciousness of the caterpillars, and the utter desolation of the ruined landscape become symbolic of the lost hopes for humanity.

“Strange Meeting,” another poem with a dreamlike frame, differs from those just described in its meditative tone and its less—concentrated use of figurative language. Two figures—the poet and the man he killed—gradually recognize each other and their similarity when they meet in the shadows of hell. In the background one becomes aware of multitudes of huddled sleepers, slightly moaning in their “encumbered” sleep—all men killed in “titanic wars.” Because the second man speaks almost exclusively of death’s thwarting of his purpose and ambition as a poet, he probably represents Owen’s alter ego. Neither figure is differentiated by earthly association, and the “strange friend” may also represent an Everyman figure, suggesting the universality of the tragedy of war. The poem closes as the second speaker stops halfway through the last line to return to his eternal sleep. The abrupt halt drives home the point that killing a poet cuts off the promise of the one more line of poetry he might have written. The last line extends “the Pity of war” to a universal pity for all those who have been diminished through the ages by art which might have been created and was not.

Sassoon called “Strange Meeting” Owen’s masterpiece, the finest elegy by a soldier who fought in World War I. T.S. Eliot, who praised it as “one of the most moving pieces of verse inspired by the war,” recognized that its emotional power lies in Owen’s “technical achievement of great originality.” In “Strange Meeting,” Owen sustains the dreamlike quality by a complex musical pattern, which unifies the poem and leads to an overwhelming sense of war’s waste and a sense of pity that such conditions should continue to exist. John Middleton Murry in 1920 noted the extreme subtlety in Owen’s use of couplets employing assonance and dissonance. Most readers, he said, assumed the poem was in blank verse but wondered why the sound of the words produced in them a cumulative sadness and inexorable uneasiness and why such effects lingered. Owen’s use of slant-rhyme produces, in Murry’s words, a “subterranean ... forged unity, a welded, inexorable massiveness.”

Although Owen does not use the dream frame in “ Futility ,” this poem, like “Strange Meeting,” is also a profound meditation on the horrifying significance of war. As in “Exposure,” the elemental structure of the universe seems out of joint. Unlike the speaker in “Exposure,” however, this one does not doubt that spring will come to warm the frozen battlefield, but he wonders why it should. Even the vital force of the universe—the sun’s energy—no longer nurtures life.

One of the most perfectly structured of Owen’s poems, “ Anthem for Doomed Youth ,” convinced Sassoon in October 1917 that Owen was not only a “promising minor poet” but a poet with “classic and imaginative serenity” who possessed “impressive affinities with Keats.” By using the fixed form of the sonnet, Owen gains compression and a close interweaving of symbols. In particular, he uses the break between octave and sestet to deepen the contrast between themes, while at the same time he minimizes that break with the use of sound patterns that continue throughout the poem and with the image of a bugle, which unifies three disparate groups of symbols. The structure depends, then, not only on the sonnet form but on a pattern of echoing sounds from the first line to the last, and upon Owen’s careful organization of groups of symbols and of two contrasting themes—in the sestet the mockery of doomed youth, “dying like cattle,” and in the octave the silent personal grief which is the acceptable response to immense tragedy. The symbols in the octave suggest cacophony; the visual images in the sestet suggest silence. The poem is unified throughout by a complex pattern of alliteration and assonance. Despite its complex structure, this sonnet achieves an effect of impressive simplicity.

Poems (1920), edited by Sassoon, established Owen as a war poet before public interest in the war had diminished in the 1920s. The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1931), edited by Blunden, aroused much more critical attention, especially that of W.H. Auden and the poets in his circle, Stephen Spender , C. Day Lewis, Christopher Isherwood, and Louis MacNeice . Blunden thought that Auden and his group were influenced primarily by three poets: Gerard Manley Hopkins , T.S. Eliot, and Wilfred Owen. The Auden group saw in Owen’s poetry the incisiveness of political protest against injustice, but their interest in Owen was less in the content of his poems than in his artistry and technique. Though they were moved by the human experience described in Owen’s best poems and understood clearly his revulsion toward war, they were appalled by the sheer waste of a great poet dying just as he had begun to realize fully his potential. Dylan Thomas, who, like Owen, possessed a brilliant metaphorical imagination, pride in Welsh ancestry, and an ability to dramatize in poetry his psychic experience, saw in Owen “a poet of all times, all places, and all wars. There is only one war, that of men against men.”

C. Day Lewis, in the introduction to The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen (1963), judiciously praised Owen’s poems for “the originality and force of their language, the passionate nature of the indignation and pity they express, their blending of harsh realism with a sensuousness unatrophied by the horrors from which they flowered.” Day Lewis’s view that Owen’s poems were “certainly the finest written by any English poet of the First War” is incontestable. With general agreement critics—J. Middleton Murry, Bonamy Dobree, Hoxie Fairchild, Ifor Evans, Kenneth Muir, and T.S. Eliot, for example—have written of his work for six decades. The best of Owen’s 1917-1918 poems are great by any standard. Day Lewis’s conclusion that they also are “probably the greatest poems about the war in our literature” may, if anything, be too tentative. His work will remain central in any discussion of war poetry.

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War Poetry: Poets’ Attitudes Towards War Expository Essay

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Introduction

Works cited.

People always express their views about contemporary issues in the society in different ways. For example, some people express their views by writing articles, giving speeches, and debating on various issues. Poems can also be used as a means of conveying ones feelings and attitudes about a given event or issue in a more passionate manner.

This is because the use of figures of speech in poetry makes the message being conveyed more clear and interesting to the audience. This paper will discuss the different attitudes adopted by four poets towards war.

“The Charge of the Light Brigade” is a poem that talks about the Crimean war. This war took place from 1853 to 1856. During this war, Britain and its allies fought against the Russians.

And much of the conflict took place in the Crimean Peninsula. The Battle of Balaclava was one of the popular events that took place during the war. The Russians were so amazed by the great courage demonstrated by the British Light Brigade, to an extent that they did not feel humiliated by the defeat. They instead blamed it on an error that was made by an army official.

The poet presents a glorifying perspective of the war by using an interesting beat, and narration about a noble heroism. The poet has also used a lot of imagery and metaphors in explaining the tragic events that Brigade experienced.

Further more, the tone of the poem has been developed using figures of speech. However, this poem has some contradictions. This is because it conveys a sense of glory and honor, and at the same time it talks about war and defeat (Probst 75).

“Concord Hymn” is a poem that was recited in Concord in 1837 to commemorate the role that was played by the people who lived in Concord in the “Battle of Concord Lexington”. This war took place during the American Revolution. This poem refers to the continuous struggle that North American colonies underwent in order to be emancipated from the British domination.

The poet has recognized the great determination of the Americans when they fought against the British. The poet has presented a mixture of somber and joyous mood in the poem. This makes the poem relevant to the ceremony which was meant to commemorate the war.

In the poem, the raising of flag symbolizes the great honoring of the people who died during the war and it also encourages the people who survived to continue fighting for more freedom. Although the language used in the poem is quite complicated, it is however a good way of expressing the important ideals of nationalism (Emmerson 4).

The poem “The Man He Killed” talks about meaningless nature of war, in which a soldier killed another simply on the basis that they were fighting on different fronts. The first verse suggests that the two soldiers hated each because of war and had they met elsewhere they could have been good friends.

The use of repetition in the poem is meant to justify the action of the soldier who killed his colleague because they were enemies. The narrator in this poem is trying to say that the action he took was unavoidable. The theme of the poem reveals the strange nature of war in which people are compelled to kill each other for no good reasons.

The use of conversation tone in the poem gives the impression that the soldier is trying to make us understand and accept his action. The language that was used in this poem is simple and easy to understand (Hardy 67). From the poem we learn that war affects the good relationship that people have.

The poem “Dulce ET Decorum Est” was written by Wilfred Owen who served as a captain in the British military. His aim for writing this poem was to show his disapproval of the notions about nationalism that were often spread by journalists.

He has the feeling that war is so terrible and against humanity. He also expressed his negative feelings a bout the impacts of war in the society and also on the soldiers (Kerr 18).

The above analyses of the four poems indicate the different attitudes of the poets towards war. However, Wilfred Owen in his poem “Dulce ET Decorum Est” has the most powerful sentiments a bout war. This is because he has used many strong poetic devices to show the brutal and horrifying nature of war experiences.

For example alliteration has been to make the poem easy to recite and memorize. Unlike the other poets, he has used his personal experience in war to show the effects of war on people and the soldiers. For example, he says that some soldiers are always brutally killed and they do not even get decent burials (Kerr 89).

Apart from this, their relatives suffer after losing their loved ones. Last but more importantly, Owen has tried to give a true account of the nature of war in contrast to the other poets who give justifications for war by talking about its glorification and honor.

Emmerson, Ralph. The concord hymn and other poems. New York: Dover Publishers, 1996. Print.

Hardy, Thomas. Penguin classics. New York: Penguin Books, 1998. Print.

Kerr, Wilfred. The works of Wilfred Owen. Hertfordshire: Words Worth, 1999. Print.

Probst, Robert. Response and analysis: teaching literature in secondary school . New York: Heinemann, 2004. Print.

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IvyPanda. (2018, May 23). War Poetry: Poets' Attitudes Towards War. https://ivypanda.com/essays/english-discussion-board-post/

"War Poetry: Poets' Attitudes Towards War." IvyPanda , 23 May 2018, ivypanda.com/essays/english-discussion-board-post/.

IvyPanda . (2018) 'War Poetry: Poets' Attitudes Towards War'. 23 May.

IvyPanda . 2018. "War Poetry: Poets' Attitudes Towards War." May 23, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/english-discussion-board-post/.

1. IvyPanda . "War Poetry: Poets' Attitudes Towards War." May 23, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/english-discussion-board-post/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "War Poetry: Poets' Attitudes Towards War." May 23, 2018. https://ivypanda.com/essays/english-discussion-board-post/.