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Texas ISD School Guide
Texas ISD School Guide







Short Stories for Teachers

The War Poets: An Introduction
By:Stephen Colbourn

Modern poetry grew out of the First World War. English verse altered under the impact of mass murder in the trenches 1914-1918 and ceased to be cosy. The war spread to Russia and Italy and Turkey and into the Middle East, but the Western Front in France was the focus of attention at home. The opening bombardment on the Somme was heard in London.

Poetry came closer to news. Poets became war correspondents of feeling and suffering rather than celebrants of glory, honour, patria and remembrance. They ceased to be crudely national. This is not to claim that all poetry had hitherto been glossy magazine verse or that wars had never been reported graphically. The change and difference lay in mud and blood becoming fit subjects for poetry.

One of the most anthologised poems in the language is Rupert Brooke's 'The Soldier': Romantic, dreamy, patriotic: even the air has nationality. It's a poem about falling asleep and waking up dead and not feeling a thing except happy. Falling, yes, that word is deliberate - falling and rising. It celebrates memorial resurrection and the suspension of time.

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;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England's breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this heart, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness.
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

Brooke was a Greek scholar at Cambridge and the central thought turns on the idea of cosmic memory (mnemosyne) in which he will be 'a pulse in the eternal mind' reverberating still to an English tempo. The poem may be classed among the literature of martyrology, though it's not a religious poem. It plays on the poetic turn of mind that dreams of being taken up in rapture for the sake of the cause or the faith - this earth, this realm, this England invested with divinity, half in love with easeful death.

If this is the most patriotic verse after the speech before Agincourt in Henry V, notice the fundamental difference: Shakespeare tells us 'Old men forget, yet all shall be forgot,' whereas Brooke is claiming the opposite - that all shall be remembered, effortlessly. And, it is also the tranquillisation of bad memory: the 'all evil shed away' is the things you don't want to remember and which others are to be spared.

The War Poets did not come to treat war in the grand and glorious manner of Brooke, who was ignorant of the matter beyond the Iliad, and their verses gained more attention during the course of the war - in several cases after their deaths. During the conflict, much of their writing would have been regarded as defeatist and could not pass the censorship restrictions imposed early in the war. Yet, by 1916 the public mood had changed and the following appeared

When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Across your dreams in pale battalions go,
Say not soft things as other men have said,
That you'll remember. For you need not so.
Give them not praise. For, deaf, how should they know
It is not curses heaped on each gashed head?
Nor tears. Their blind eyes see not your tears flow.
Nor honour. It is easy to be dead.
(Charles Hamilton Sorley)

After two years of war, Brooke's notions had melted. Casualty lists appeared in the papers every day and the worst came in July 1916. The First Battle of the Somme claimed over a million dead and wounded on all sides. On Day 1 the British suffered almost 60,000 casualties of which 20,000 were reported dead or missing. Sorley's poem no longer seemed seditious: it sounded all too accurate.

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) was an aristocrat who won the Military Cross in the First World War and became a pacifist. He composed a protest statement in 1917 which was published in The Times newspaper and read aloud in Parliament. After this he was diagnosed as suffering from shell shock and hospitalised. A fellow patient was Wilfred Owen whose poems Sassoon collected and published in 1920.

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

That was it. That was modernity. The givens and certainties of the pre-war world had fallen to doubt and would go along with Tsars and Kaisers into the dustbin of history.

Now regarded as the most poignant and significant of the War Poets, Owen came from Shropshire, went to school in Birkenhead than studied agriculture in London and Reading. Before the war he lived in France while recovering from an illness and was unfit to enlist in 1914 - but was accepted by the army in 1915. He was wounded and received the Military Cross.

Stephen Colbourn
www.literature-study-online.com






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