War-Poets.

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Introducción a los Estudios Literarios en Lengua Inglesa

1º Grado en Estudios Ingleses

Facultad de Filosofía y Letras

Universidad de Oviedo

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 THE WAR POETS

- Historical context: The First World War (1914-1918)

- Two groups

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o Those who celebrate the War
o Those who dislike it

1. Poets who celebrate the War

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

- In the popular mind, the first of the War Poets.
- In five war sonnets he expressed the mood of public exultation in which the country entered the War.

Julian Grenfell (1888-1915)

- “Into Battle” (1915) celebrates the fighting man’s share in the warmth, vitality, peace, and fullness
of the natural world.

Reservados todos los derechos.

2. Poets who dislike the War

Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895-1915)

- He disliked the glorification of sacrifice in Brooke’s war sonnets.
- He refused to poeticise death.

WILFRED WILSON GIBSON (1878-1962)

- His early work is in the Victorian-Romantic tradition.
- In 1905-06, driven by a newly-awakened social conscience, he began writing poems about ordinary
people in ordinary language, simple stories of life among the rural and urban poor. Some of these
poems appeared in Edward Marsh’s anthology, Georgian Poetry (1912-22), his plain style coming to
be recognized as a principal “Georgian” characteristic.
- He never served abroad, but in 1914 he was ahead of all other poets in responding to the plight of
ordinary soldiers. While others were being grandly rhetorical and patriotic, Gibson was trying to
imagine front-line realities, using his spare, Georgian style and his ready sympathy with the
underprivileged.
- Many of Gibson’s 1914-1915 war poems have their origins in actual—though necessarily second-
hand—experience.
- He wrote about mental states and may have been the first 1914-18 poet to portray shellshock:
Back from the trenches, more dead than alive,
Stone-deaf and dazed, and with a broken knee,
He hobbled slowly, muttering vacantly…
(From “The Messages”, published in The Nation on 17 October 1914)
- Most of his poems are very short, often ironic. He said he wanted to “get at” people.
- They were published in periodicals and then as a book, Battle (1915). Battle was a key influence on
later wartime poets. It was read by Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, Wilfred Owen, Ivor Gurney and
above all by Siegfried Sassoon, many of whose war poems from 1916 onwards were to be like
Gibson’s: short, ironic, realistic, Georgian studies of ordinary soldiers, aimed at the civilian
conscience.
- Gibson felt obliged to volunteer for the army, but he was rejected four times until being accepted as
a Private in the Army Service Corps Motor Transport in October 1917, later becoming a medical
clerk in south London.
- Other volumes of poetry: Friends (1916), Livelihood (1917), Neighbours (1920), Collected Poems
(1926).
- “BACK”
- “BREAKFAST”. Often anthologised, is based on a soldier’s anecdote quoted in The Nation in
October 1914.

HERBERT READ (1893-1968)

- “THE HAPPY WARRIOR”

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 Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)
- From a poor immigrant Jewish family.
- Enlisted as a private without illusions.
- “Break of Day in the Trenches”: the immediacies of trench life are sharply particularised.

Ivor Gurney (1890-1937)

- Suffered mental collapse due in part to his sufferings at the front.

SIEGFRIED SASSOON (1886-1967)

- The poet who did most to tear away false literary wrappings from the reality of the war.
- His disillusionment with the War ultimately drove him in 1917 to make a public protest against its
continuance that could well have resulted in court-martial, but influential people had him sent

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instead to Craiglockhart Hospital for shell-shocked officers near Edinburgh.
- Started his poetic career against the background of comfortable, cultured gentility remote from any
consciousness of current social problems and tensions (he came from a rich Jewish family and had a
private income).
- His War poems shattered conventional notions of nobility in battle.
- One of the techniques he used: that of setting the brutal facts of trench warfare cheek-by-jowl with
the clichés and slogans with which civilians comforted and deceived themselves at home. For
example: “THEY”.
- Turned the tables on a centuries-old tradition of evasion in poetic representation of war.
- Powerful studies of war’s real effects which make no concession to delicacy or refinement.
- His poems are characterized by shock tactics, bitter irony and masterly use of direct speech. In them
he attacks the old men of the army, church, and government whom he held responsible for the
miseries and murder of the young.

Reservados todos los derechos.

WILFRED OWEN (1893-1918)
- Sent out to the Somme battlefield in January 1917.
- By June 1917 he was at Craiglockhart Hospital for shell-shocked officers near Edinburgh.
- Became a friend of Sassoon’s.
- Both Owen and Sassoon went back to the battlefield after their stay in the hospital. Owen was killed
a week before the Armistice.
- Unlike Sassoon, Owen had had experience of the miseries of the poor in pre-war days.
- “DULCE ET DECORUM EST”
o In it he annotates the ancient motto that it is fine and noble to die for your country by a
searing account of a sudden gas attack.
o The attack overtakes men marching to rest, limping through sludge, bootless, blood-shod,
blind, drunk with fatigue.
o One man is too slow in getting his gas-mask on. They fling him in the wagon to watch the
white eyes writhing in his hanging face.

Edmund Blunden (1896-1974)

Edward Thomas (1878-1917)

Robert Graves (1895-1985)

- Also famous as a historical novelist: I Claudius.
- He lived in Majorca.

David Jones (1895-1974)

Edgell Rickword (1898-1982)

Laurence Binyon (1869-1943)

F.S. Flint (1885-1960)

T.E. Hulme (1883-1917)

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