WORLD WAR I POETRY

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WORLD WAR I POETRY

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WORLD WAR I POETRY At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them. (Binyon15-16) For the Fallen – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: WORLD WAR I POETRY

1
WORLD WAR I POETRY
At the going down of the sun and in the
morning We will remember them.
(Binyon15-16) For the Fallen
2
Popularity

Jon McCraes poem In Flanders Fields became the
inspiration for the British Legions annual poppy
campaign
Rupert Brookes The Soldier one of best known
poems in English- choice of the Prime Minister,
Tony Blair, for inclusion in The Big Book of
Little Poems

3
(No Transcript)
4
the war that was GreatVernon Scannell

First major war for British troops for a hundred
years
On such a huge and mechanized scale that very few
communities or even families were untouched
Conscription- introduced in Britain for the first
time in 1916, but even before that tens of
thousands had enlisted
Professional soldiers vastly outnumbered by
volunteers and conscripts

Officer class received education founded on the
classics and informed by the idealism of
Victorian and Edwardian culture
Universal education meant private soldiers were,
for the first time, literate and acquainted with
the English literary tradition

Came at a great time of great social, political
and cultural change
Birth of movements in the arts (modernism)
Industrial and political unrest throughout Europe

7
World War I was the catalyst for more major
military technological innovations than any other
war in history.

Aircraft and air warfare
The submarine
The tank
Poison gas
Machine gun
Artillery and high explosives
Electronic communications (field telephones)

During the war the term soldier-poet was
almost as familiar as a ration card (Edmund
Blunden)
In the television series Blackadder Goes Forth
(1989) Lord Flasheart complains, Im sick of
this damn war- the blood, the noise, the endless
poetry.

9
Popularity of Poetry THEN

Popular in ways its hard to appreciate today
Newspapers regularly printed new poems and
volumes of verse also did well
In 1914 a Georgian Poetry anthology

10
Trench Warfare

The middle part of the war,
1916 and 1917, was
dominated by continued
trench warfare in both the east and the west.
Soldiers fought from dug-in positions, striking
at each other with machine guns, heavy artillery,
and chemical weapons. Though soldiers died by the
millions in brutal conditions, neither side had
any substantive success or gained any advantage.
Threat of illness from decomposing bodies and
diseases bred in mud

11
Significance of WW1

The First World War runs through the British
modern-day psyche like no other conflict. On
Remembrance Day Sunday thoughts (of those who
have not fought) turn to the fields in Flanders
and the slaughter of the Somme and Passchendaele
more readily than Dunkirk, El Alamein, or Arnhem
(unless, of course, the date is an anniversary of
a specific battle).
It has been described as Britain's 'Vietnam',
where the true horror of War touched everyone and
everything in the country, breaking through the
class barrier and irreversibly altering the
social structure of the nation. It also closely
parallels Vietnam as it represents an
overwhelming feeling of futility, in that so many
lives were wasted for such little gain. Unlike
the Second World War, which more easily falls
into the 'just war' definition of right versus
wrong, the First World War appears as a conflict
with aims that were quickly lost, degenerating to
a war of attrition in unbelievable conditions.

Moreover, the War was dehumanizing. It brought
home how quickly and easily mankind could be
reduced to a state lower than animals. Pat
Barker, in her novel Regeneration (1992),
reflects on the War's terrible reversal of
expectations
"The Great Adventure. They'd been mobilized into
holes in the ground so constricted they could
hardly move. And the Great Adventure (the real
life equivalent of all the adventure stories
they'd devoured as boys) consisted of crouching
in a dugout, waiting to be killed.
The war that had promised so much in the
way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered
'feminine' passivity, and on a scale that their
mothers and sisters had scarcely known."

13
Themes of WW1 Poetry

Patriotism
Heroism
War and Nature
Visions and Dreams

14
Rupert Brooke

Brooke's entire reputation as a war poet rests on
only 5 "war sonnets.
Brooke's war experience consisted of one day of
limited military action with the Hood Battalion
during the evacuation of Antwerp.
Consequently, his "war sonnets" swell with naive
sentiments of the most general kind on the themes
of maturity, purpose and romantic death the
kind of sentiments held by many (but not all)
young Englishmen at the outbreak of the war.
Died of blood poisoning from a mosquito bite
while en route to Gallipoli with the Navy

Brooke's poetry gives us a glimpse of a golden
era in England just before the First World War.
To be more precise, it was a golden time only for
the upper classes, who enjoyed the fruits of
Britain's imperial dominance public school
education, guaranteed employment (if they desired
it) and access to the rich and powerful members
of society.
The gap between rich and poor was wide during
this period, and unrest was beginning to grow
among the lower classes.
The war gave a huge shock to the system and,
despite the terrible human cost, led eventually
to a more equal society, not least because the
poorer classes were largely the ones dying in the
trenches as a result of orders issued by
untrained, aristocratic generals living miles
behind the lines.

The Soldier
If I should die, think only this of meThat
there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall beIn 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
dayAnd laughter, learnt of friends and
gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English
heaven.
Rupert Brooke

17
Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen was 21 when the war broke out.
Although
he had failed to win a scholarship to university,
he was
very intelligent and cultured.
Owen was not horrified or elated by the outbreak
of war, although during 1914, he became more
aware of the human sacrifice involved and was
filled with confusion.

In the second week of January,
one of the worst in memory, he
led his platoon into the Battle of
the Somme. He wrote to his
mother every week and described
what he had been through "Those
fifty hours were the agony of my
happy life... I nearly broke down
and let myself drown in the water
that was now rising slowly above
my knees. In the Platoon on my left,
the sentries over the dug-out were
blown to nothing".

In the middle of March, Owen fell through a
shell-hole into a cellar and was trapped in the
dark for three days, suffering from nausea and
concussion. He spent a fortnight in hospital
before rejoining his battalion and becoming
involved in fierce fighting. At one stage he was
blown out of the trench in which he was taking
cover from an artillery bombardment which had
already dismembered an officer in the
neighbouring trench.
He escaped uninjured, but these trials by fire
had taken their toll on his mind, and on May 1st,
he was seen by his Commanding Officer to be
behaving strangely. He was ordered to
report to the Battalion Medical Officer who
found him to be shaky and with a confused
memory. He was eventually diagnosed as
having neurasthenia (shell shock) and was
invalided back to England and then to
Craiglockhart War hospital near Edinburgh.

Apart from his joining the army, no other event
had so much influence over Owen as meeting
Siegfried Sassoon at Craiglockhart. Owen read the
published poetry of Sassoon for the first time at
the hospital. He introduced himself, and so began
a close friendship and literary partnership which
would create some of the finest poetry of the
war. Owen's most famous poems were written from
this time until he left the hospital.
Owen relived his most traumatic memories every
night through the form of obsessive nightmares.
Under Sassoon's direction, he began to write
about these memories in poetry. His poems
recreated the miserable conditions and constant
stress with which the soldiers lived the mud,
rats, barbed wire, lice, fleas, corpses, blood
and constant shelling. He also gave graphic
descriptions of the effects of poison gas.

In one of his most famous poems Anthem for
Doomed Youth, he asked angrily "what
passing-bells for these who die as cattle?",
reflecting the fact that the soldiers were simply
little more than machine gun fodder, lines of
them killed instantly as they went over the top.
Owen wrote for an entire generation of young men
killed or horribly wounded in a four year war. In
one poem Disabled, he wrote about the thousands
of young men who dreamed of glory and triumph and
joined the army with all the others in the
factory, or on their street, or at a football
match, where recruiting drives were often made.

Owen is the most famous of all the war poets as
he succeeded in portraying the reality of the war
- the boredom, the helplessness, the horror and
above all, the futility of it - without losing
his artistic poise, or allowing bitterness to
creep into his work.
Wilfred Owen returned to the front in 1918 and
was awarded the military cross for bravery for
capturing a German machine gun. He never received
it as he was killed early on the morning of 4th
November 1918, seven days before the armistice.

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.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame all
blind
Drunk with fatigue deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped
behind.
Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And floundring like a man in fire or lime
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green
light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

Dulce Et Decorum Est Wilfred Owen
24
Siegfried Sassoon

born in England, in 1886
educated at Marlborough and Cambridge where he
studied both law and history before leaving
without taking
a degree.
After Cambridge, Sassoon lived the life of a
sportsman, hunting, riding point-to-point races
and playing cricket until the outbreak of the
War.
Although Sassoon wrote poetry before the War he
was no more than a minor Georgian poet.
Sassoon enlisted on 2 August 1914, two days
before the British declaration of war, and
initially joined as a trooper in the Sussex
Yeomanry later Sassoon was commissioned in the
Royal Welsh Fusiliers (May 1915). Between
November 1915 and April 1917 he served as a
second lieutenant in both the First and Second
Battalions R.W.F.
On November 1, 1915 Sassoon suffered his first
personal loss of the War. His younger brother
Hamo was buried at sea after being mortally
wounded at Gallipoli. Sassoon subsequently
commemorated this with a poem entitled To My
Brother. Then on March 18, 1916 second lieutenant
David C. 'Tommy' Thomas was killed whilst out
with a wiring party.

These losses upset Sassoon and he became
determined to "get his revenge" on the Germans.
To this end, he went out on patrol in
no-man's-land even when there were no raids
planned. Such reckless enthusiasm earned him the
nickname "Mad Jack", but he was saved from
further folly by a four-week spell at the Army
School in Flixecourt.
About a month later, he was involved in a raid on
Kiel Trench. His actions in getting his dead and
wounded men back to the British trenches earned
him a Military Cross, which he received the day
before the start of the Battle of the Somme, in
July 1916.

Sassoon participated in the second Battle of the
Scarpe where he was wounded in the shoulder. This
particular incident started a train of events
which culminated in Sassoon's Declaration, for it
was whilst on convalescent leave after being
wounded that Sassoon talked to several prominent
pacifists (including John Middleton Murry and
Bertrand Russell).
His Declaration of "wilful defiance" was written
during this time, and he returned to the Depot in
Liverpool having sent his statement to his
Colonel, miserably determined to take whatever
punishment was given out.
Fortunately for Sassoon, his friend and fellow
Welch Fusilier, Robert Graves, intervened,
pulled strings with the authorities and managed
to persuade them to have Sassoon medically
boarded (or referred), with the result that in
July 1917 he was sent to Craiglockhart War
Hospital, Edinburgh officially suffering from
shell-shock.

It was at Craiglockhart that Sassoon met the poet
Wilfred Owen (also diagnosed with shell-shock).
Sassoon's encouragement of Owen's writing has
been well-documented.
Sassoon himself wrote a good deal of poetry
whilst at Craiglockhart and the material he wrote
at that time later appeared in Counter-Attack and
Other Poems. After four months at Craiglockhart,
Sassoon was again passed fit for General Service
abroad.
He had spent many hours talking to his
psychiatrist,
Dr. W.H.R. Rivers and eventually realised that
his
protest had achieved nothing, except to keep him
away from his men his decision to apply for
General Service seems to have been based on his
perceived responsibilities at the front.

Sassoon eventually found himself in the Front
Line again, near Mercatel. From there he moved to
St. Hilaire and the Front Line at St. Floris
where his old foolhardiness took over, despite
the responsibility of being a Company Commander.
Sassoon decided to attack the German trenches
opposite them, and he went out with a young
Corporal. His actions were paid for with a wound
to his head on July 13, 1918, and Sassoon was
invalided back to England. That was the end of
Sassoon's War.
After a period of convalescence
he was placed on indefinite sick
leave until after the Armistice,
eventually retiring officially from
the Army in March 1919.