Exploration of English War Poets and Their Iconic Works

In English literature the “War poets” wrote their works either to idealise the war, like Rupert Brooke, or while they were fighting in the trenches such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Let’s start with the first two.Rupert Brooke is considered the leading figure of the group of soldier-poets. He met some important literary and political figures of his time, and he lived a prestigious life until he went to war. He wrote 5 war sonnets and his most famous is "The soldier" in which he expressed nationalistic and patriotic feelings. He died in 1915 and became a symbol of war poetry. "The soldier" is a sonnet subdivided in 2 stanzas regrouped into an octave and a sextet . He composed it to celebrate the soldier’s love for his country . It’s a sort of meditation and lamentation so the rythm is slow. He meditates on the fact that if he dies his sacrifice won’t be useless because he’ll do it to defend his beloved land as a sort of purification, as he says in the first 3 lines. He adds that thanks to his sacrifice, his blood will imbiew the foreign land with his Englishness.

Siegfried Sassoon and the Critique of War

Siegfried Sassoon is another war poet, and he started his literary career when he moved to London after attending Cambridge University. He was drafted and he met Owen at the hospital when he was injured.

He developed a mental illness as a consequence of the war. He’s the most aggressive poet of the movement and he attacked and criticized the government, the church and the military authorities who wanted to prolongue the war in his "Soldier's declaration". He died in 1967. "Suicide in the trenches" is the most famous poem by Sassoon. The protagonist is a boy that lives his terrifying life in the trenches. The title is a sort of denunciation of the horrors of the war. It’s composed by 3 stanzas; the tone and language are hard, aggressive, direct. In the first stanza he describes the miserable condition of the soldier boy; in the second one, in the first two lines he describes the terrible living conditions of the trenches and in the other two lines he tells the moment when he killed himself. The last stanza is addressed to the people that go to military parades because they don’t realize how lucky they are not to live in those conditions.

Wilfred Owen and the Futility of War

Another English war poet is Wilfred Owen. He endured some financial difficulties with his family, and he started writing as a teen. He enlisted in the Infantry and experienced the horror of the war. He was injured and was sent to a military hospital where he met Sasson, who published some of his works after his death in 1918. His works reflect the feelings of life in the trenches; he describes the trauma and denounces the war because he sees no purpose in it. To reinforce the message, he uses an anxious tone and figures of speech like metaphor, personification or simile. Let’s see what he says in his poem "Futility". It's a poem in two stanzas and the speaker wants to put the corpse of the soldier into the sun. In the second stanza, he says that the sun gives life to everything; so, in the last two lines he reflects on the futility of life since we are destined to die anyway. He puts in evidence the uselessness of life.