The War Poets

Performer Heritage
Marina Spiazzi, Marina Tavella,
Margaret Layton © 2017
 The War Poets

1. Who were the soldiers?

• World War I was fought on such a huge and
mechanised scale that very few communities
remained untouched.

• Before conscription was introduced into Britain

for the first time in 1916, lots of young men
enlisted.

• The officers had mainly received an education

Soldier mourning a comrade, 1917, Imperial War
based on the classics and the Victorian and Museum.
Edwardian ideals of nationalism.

• Universal education meant that even private

soldiers were, for the first time, literate and
familiar with the English literary tradition.

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 The War Poets

2. Attitudes to war

When the war After the Battle

broke out of the Somme
in 1916

many young men pride and

enlisted regarding excitement were
the war as a noble replaced by doubt
adventure. and
disillusionment.

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 The War Poets

3. Trench warfare
Life in the trenches was hell
because of

•rain and mud;

•decaying bodies;
•repeated bombings;
•use of poison gas.
Soldiers wrote

Poems
Songs
Draining Trenches. 22nd Infantry Battalion (French Canadian),
July, 1916.

Letters

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4. The War Poets

A group of poets:

•volunteered to fight;
•experienced the fighting;
•in most cases lost their lives in the conflict.

• They managed to
• They were modern
represent modern
in subject-matter.
warfare in a realistic and
unconventional way. • They tried to find
new modes of
• They awoke the
expression.
conscience of their
readers to the horrors of
the war.

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 The War Poets

5. Recurrent themes
Courage Patriotism Glory

Pain and
Themes Duty
suffering

Loss of
Violence Heroism innocence

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 The War Poets

6. Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

• Brooke’s entire reputation as a War

Poet is linked to the 5 sonnets of
1914.

• Brooke had limited war experience.

• He died of blood poisoning.

• He is buried on the Greek island of

Skyros.

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6. Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

His sonnets express a sentimental attitude
to war.

War is clean and cleansing.

The only thing that can suffer is the

body.

Death is seen as a reward and it is glorious to

die for one’s country.

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7. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

•He was 21 when the war broke out, he was working in
France as a teacher and visited a hospital for the
wounded.
•In 1915 he went back to England and enlisted.
•In 1917 he was sent to France and experienced
military action.
•He had traumatic experiences:
 He fell through a shell-hole into a cellar and was
trapped in the dark for three days.

 He was blown out of the trench in which he was

taking cover from an artillery bombardment.
 He was eventually diagnosed as having shell
shock and was sent to Craiglockhart War
hospital near Edinburgh.

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 The War Poets

7. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

• At Craiglockhart he met the poet Siegfried
Sassoon.

• Owen read the published poetry of Sassoon

for the first time.

• A close friendship and literary partnership

began which would create some of the finest
poetry of the war.

• Owen wrote his most famous poems from

this time until he left the hospital.

• Every night Owen had haunting nightmares.

Sassoon suggested that he should write
about these memories in poetry.

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7. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

• Wilfred Owen returned to the front in

1918.

• He was awarded the military cross

for bravery for capturing a German.

• He never received it because he was

killed on 4th November 1918, seven
days before the armistice.

• He is regarded as the greatest of the

War Poets.

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7. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

In June 1918 Owen was preparing Disabled
and Other Poems for publication.
In the ‘Preface’ to the book he wrote

‘This book is not about heroes. English poetry is

not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about
glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power,
except War.
Above all I am not concerned with Poetry.
My subject is War, and the pity of War.
The Poetry is in the pity. Yet these elegies are to
this generation in no sense consolatory. They may
be to the next. All a poet can do today is warn.
That is why the true Poets must be truthful.’

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7. Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

• His poems describe the miserable conditions and
constant stress experienced by the soldiers:

mud, rats, barbed wire, lice, fleas, corpses, blood,

constant shelling, the effects of poison gas.

• He introduced the technical innovation of

pararhymes
half-rhymes where the consonants in two
different words are the same but the vowels vary.

• His poems have a haunting quality, a gravity

and moral force which make them suitable for
any situation in which people must suffer and die.

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8. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

• He was educated at Marlborough and Cambridge
where he studied both law and history before
leaving without taking a degree.

• He lived the life of a sportsman, hunting, riding

and playing cricket until the outbreak of the War.

• He wrote poetry before the War but he was a minor

Georgian poet.

• He joined the wae in 1915 and was sent to France.

• He was noted for his bravery in action, which

earned him the nickname of ‘Mad Jack’.

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8. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

• His reactions to the realities of the war were bitter
and violent.

• He expressed them through irony in his poems.

• Sassoon protested publicly against the war,

reading out a declaration against it in the House
of Commons in July 1917.

• He was not court-martialled because his friend

and fellow poet Robert Graves convinced the
review board that Sassoon was suffering from
shell shock.

• He was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital near

Edinburgh, where he met and influenced Wilfred
Owen.

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 The War Poets

8. Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

• His poems were collected in The Old Huntsman (1917)
and in Counter-Attack (1918).

• Sassoon denounced the political errors and insincerities

for which the soldiers were being sacrificed in various ways.

• He used a documentary manner, by which he recreated the

physical horror of the war, through anger and satire and
through sardonic distancing.

• His poems express neither compassion nor pity, but the

bitter spontaneity of shocking and realistic detail.

• After the war, he became a resolute pacifist and got

involved in politics with the Labour Party.

• In 1957 he became a Roman Catholic.

 
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9. Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)

• He was born in 1890 into a working-class

Jewish family that had emigrated to the
East End of London from Lithuania.

• He was a talented artist and enrolled at

the Slade School in London.

• He enlisted in 1916 and was killed at the

front on 3rd April 1918.

Self-portrait, 1915.

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9. Isaac Rosenberg
• His poems may be regarded as modernist
in technique.

• His vision of the war was unsentimental

and less concerned with the pity of things.

• He presented realistic and shocking

details, with a touch of irony or through
paradox and contrast.

• His finest poems were published in Self-portrait, 1915.

Collected Works in 1937.

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