War Poets

The branch of poetry that emerged in the second decades of the twentieth century especially during war time, were known as war poems. The subject matter and theme of this type of poems is war and its consequences.  The First World War had its own impact and influence over society and individual that it’s inevitable that it got reflected in literature. This group of poets greatly influenced by first World War.

v  There are two group of poems

Ø      Rupert Brook

Ø  Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Sidney Keyes, Allan Lewis.

Rupert Brook (1887-1915):- Though he had just written five poems on war, he earned his identity as war poet. He belongs to Georgian group of poet. Rupert Brook had not firsthand experience of the war and he composed sonnets. His poems are full of patriotism, enthusiasm, a wish to sacrifice oneself for nation, it motivated soldier to fight, it has stimulating and uplifting power. His sonnet like Soldier is about the nobility, patriotism, a soldier who felt proud to be an English native. He felt that the world is English world.

His five sonnets are as follow

1.       Peace :“ Nothing to shake the laughing hearts

Heart’s long peace there

But only agony, that has

Ending,

And worst friend and enemy is but death.”

2.       Safety: “Dear! Of all happy in the hour,

Most blest

He who find our hid

Security assured’ in the dark tides of the world that rests

And heard our world, “who is so safe as we?”

3.       The Dead: “There’s none of these so lonely

       And poor of old,

      But, dying, has made us rarer gift than gold” 

4.       The Dead

5.       The Soldier :“If I should die, think only this of me,

That there is some corner of foreign field

That is forever England” 

Ø  The second group of poets was those who had actually been to the war front and have experience of the war. For them war is vast crime imposed upon mankind by man. Their poetry presents immense human suffering and depravity as a result of war.

Ø  This group of poet includes

Ø  Allen Lewis

Ø  Sidney keys

Ø   Wilfred Owen

Ø  Siegfried Sassoon

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) :-  he is recognized
the greatest English poet of the first world war. He wrote out of his intense personal experience as a soldier and wrote with unrivalled power of the physical, moral and psychological trauma of the first World War. All his great poems on which his reputation rests were written in just fifteen month. While working as soldier on fourth November he was shot and killed near the village of Ors.  He stated that

“My subject is in the war,

And pity of war,

The poetry is in the pity”

v  His war poems are collected in two anthologies

v  Minds at war : it contains 27 poems

v  Out in the dark : it contains 19 poems

  

v  In his letters to his mother we found his psychological condition and even message to the nation.

o   “I can see no excuse of deceiving you about these last four days. I have suffered seventh hell,- I have not been at the front , I have been in front of it.”

o   “I’m more and more a Christian…suffer dishonor, and disgrace, but never resort to arm, be bullied, be out raged, be killed, but do not kill……”

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967):- he was an English poet writer and a soldier. His poetry both describes horror of the trenches, and satirized the patriotic pretension of those who, in Sassoon’s view were responsible for fueled war.

        He is best remembered for his angry compassionate poems of the first World War. He wrote of the war and brutality trench warfare and contemptuously satirized generals, politician and blind support of the war.

“In History of British poetry” Mc Dowell Wrote about Sassoon “Sassoon will be remembered primarily for some one hundred poems in which he protested the continuation World War one.”

In below lines we can see his frustration about war and he satires the people who sit in their home and cheer up when soldiers are killing and killed.

“You smug – faced crowds with

Kindling eye,

Who cheer when soldier lads

March by

Sneak home and pray you’ll never

Know

The hell where youth and

Laughter go….” 

His famous poem collections are

Ø  Suicide in the trenches

Ø  The rank trench of those bodies haunts me

Ø  Battalion- Relief- it contains 17 poems

Ø  A child’s prayer- 16 poems