THE WAR POETS

Different attitudes to war

The First World War was welcomed with enthusiasm; the sense of pride and exhilaration was replaced by ever-growing doubt and disillusionment. For the soldiers, life in the trenches was hell because of the rain and mud, the decaying bodies the rats fed on, the repeated bombings and the use of poison gas in warfare. The common soldiers were the first to apprehend the horror and suffering of the war in their full array. Almost from the beginning the "Tommies" improvised verses which, precisely because they were the rough, genuine, obscene songs of the trenches, did not reach the ears of the literate people living comfortably at home. There was a group of poets who actually experienced the fighting, and the most cases lost their lives in the conflict, who managed to represent modern warfare in a realistic and unconventional way, and to awaken the conscience of the readers to the horrors of the war. These poets are know as "the War Poets". Their can be considered modern poetry because its subject-matter could not be conveyed in the 19^th-century poetic conventions, and forced them to find another mode of expression.

Rupert Brooke

Was the first War Poet to die and he had contributed to the Georgian anthologies with his poems. He wrote his war sonnets in which he advanced the idea that war is clean and cleansing, rather like a good swim. He wrote that the only thing that can suffer is the body. His poems were the last to express idealistic patriotism also because, unlike the other War Poets, who  lived to witness the horrors of the trench warfare, Brooke died in 1915 at the age of 28, of blood poisoning on the Greek island of Skyros. His early death and the publication of his Collected poem in 1918, made him immensely popular: is a new symbol of the "young romantic hero".

Siegfried Sassoon

It was Sassoon who first portrayed the truth about the war. Born into an upper-class family, he enlisted at the out break of the war and soon distinguished himself for his courage. In his poems he carried out his protest against "the political errors and insincerity for which the fighting men are being sacrificed" in various ways. What S. achieved was neither compassion nor pity, but the bitter spontaneity of shocking and realistic detail. In the 1930s he became a prose writer and published  an autobiographical trilogy, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston (1937). He got involved in politics and he became a Roman Catholic.

Wilfred Owen

He started to write poetry under the influence of Keat's sensuous style. The War caused him to mature and, after meeting Sassoon in a war hospital, he produced his most brilliant poems. Owen died in action in 1918. is poems are almost unbearably painful in the quite accurate accounts of gas casualties. Also his technical innovation of "para-rhymes" should be noticed, as well as his extensive use of assonance and alliteration. When Owen was killed, among his papers was found a draft preface to a future collection of poems, which is the best commentary on the work he left.

Isaac Rosenberg

Was another victim of war. The son of a Lithuanian Jew, he struggled throughout his life against poverty and neglect. Some benefactors paid for him to pursue his training as a painter and encouraged him to pursue his vocation as a poet. His poem may be regarded as modernist in technique, since he was a friend of Ezra Pound and read many of T.E. Hulme's writing. His vision of the war was apocalyptic and less concerned with the pity of things; his use of language was "scriptural and elemental" as Sassoon described it. His finest poem was published in Collected Works in 1937.