Inglese

THE WAR POETS

The war poetry was divided into 3 groups/phases:

1. Enthusiasm and great expectations about the war: these poets were young men and teenagers, who were

sent to the war or they volunteered because they believed in the idea of helping the other and collaborating for

the greatness of England. They generally belonged to the first world war. They expressed patriotism/

nationalism.

2. Denunciation of the violences and atrocities caused by the war. They belonged to the fww and to the sww;

when they came back, they experienced the shell shock, a sort of illness, nightmare and disease caused by

remembering what they saw during the war.

3. Accusation of the officers: these poets were against the officers, the generals, because they made believe

people that war was something good. They awake the consciousness about risks.

When the First World War broke out, thousands of young men volunteered for military service; most of them

regarded the conflict as a noble adventure, needed for the country. It was not until the slaughter of thousands of

British soldiers at the Battle of the Somme in 1916 that this sense of pride and exhilaration was replaced by doubt

and disillusionment. For the soldiers, life in the trenches was hell because of the rain and mud, the decaying

bodies that rats fed on, the repeated bombings and the use of poison gas in warfare. Almost from the beginning,

the common soldiers 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. However, there was also a

group of poets who volunteered to fight in the Great War, actually experienced the fighting and in most cases lost

their lives in the conflict. They managed to represent modern warfare in a realistic and unconventional way,

awakening the conscience of the readers back home to the horrors, dangers of the war and the atrocities

committed by those who pushed people to take part in the war. These poets became known as the 'War Poets.

Their poetry can be considered modern because its subject-matter could not be conveyed in the 19th-century

poetic conventions, and forced them to find new modes of expression.

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RUPERT BROOKE (1887-1915) first phase (enthusiasm)

Rupert Brooke was born in 1887 and was educated at Rugby School, where his father was a master, and then

went to King's College, Cambridge. He was a good student and athlete, and became popular especially for his

handsome looks. He was also familiar with literary circles like the Bloomsbury Group and came to know many

important political, literary and social figures before the war. He joined up at the beginning of the conflict but

saw little combat since he contracted blood poisoning and died before reaching the trenches in April 1915, on

the Aegean Sea. He was buried on the Greek island of Skyros. purifying Brooke's reputation as a War Poet is

linked to the five sonnets of 1914, in which he advanced the idea that war is clean and cleansing (purifying). He

expressed an idealism about the conflict, in which the only thing that can suffer is the body, and even death is

seen as a reward. Traditional not only in form, his poems show a sentimental attitude which was completely lost

in the brutal turn that war poetry took in the works of the other War Poets, who lived to witness the horrors of

trench warfare. The publication of Brooke's war sonnets coincided with his death in 1915 and made him

immensely popular, turning him into a new symbol of the young romantic hero' who inspired patriotism in the

early months of the Great War, when England needed a focal point for its sacrifice, ideals and aspirations.

WILFRED OWEN (1893-1918)→ second phase (disillusionment, accusation of the violences)

Born in 1893, Wilfred Owen was working as a teacher of English in France when he visited a hospital for the

wounded and decided, in 1915, to return to England and enlist. The year 1917 was an important one: he enrolled

to reach the trenches and he was sent to France , where he experienced the atrocities of the war and also

wrote his poems; in March he was injured and sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh to recover from

shell shock. It was there that he met Siegfried Sassoon, who was also a patient and already had a reputation as a

poet. He read Owen's poems, encouraged him to continue to write and introduced him to other literary figures.

Owen returned to the front in August 1918. On 4th November 1918, just seven days before the armistice, he was

killed in a German machine gun attack.

All his poems contains the shell shock (caused by the atrocities the soldiers experienced during the war, which

caused them repeated nightmares): they are painful in their accurate accounts of gas casualties, men who have

gone mad and men who are clinically alive although their bodies have been destroyed. In his poems, he uses

innovative techniques like the 'pararhymes' – two syllables containing the same consonants but different

vowels, half-rhymes where the consonants in two different words are the same but the vowels vary - as well as

assonances and alliterations. All these are technical devices in order to give this idea of suffering and death. In

June 1918 Owen was preparing Disabled and Other Poems for publication. At that time, he was writing the

'Preface to the book, words which have now become essential in discussing his work and much of the poetry of

World War I: '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 war must be treated in a particular way,

not lying about it). / 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.

THOMAS STEARNS ELIOT

Introduction Eliot is the most important one in the Modern age for poetry, while Joyce is the most important

from the point of view of the novel. Eliot belongs to that kind of poetry which corresponds to Imagism and

Symbolism (he sums up different tendencies of the modern poetry). Imagism because he wanted to describe some

particular images, specific flashes about his mind and what he was going to experience. He is important because

he uses the stream of consciousness technique in his masterpiece The Waste Land: a kind of interior monologue

(psychological aspect) where the poet describes some particular situations and feelings. This technique in Eliot

implies two devices (these ideas together created the stream of consciousness):

- The mythical method: he wanted to go back to the origin, to the primitive myth of people, of civilization, in

order to pull down society and the horrors of modern life to rebuild another society. He uses a lot of myths.

- Objectives correlatives: to put together some ideas, sentences or objects which are able to give a particular

sensation or feeling.

Life Background and education Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St Louis, Missouri, America in 1888 and was

educated at Harvard. Though an American by birth, his cultural background was first of all English and then

European. In fact, he studied the English Metaphysical poets and John Donne (they described impossible and

absurde situations). He also learned Italian by studying Dante. In 1910 Eliot went to Europe and studied in Paris

at the Sorbonne. He was also attracted by the idea of novelty represented at the time by Bergson and his

philosophy and in the poetry by the French Symbolists.

Home life and career Eliot's first important work was the collection of poems Prufrock and Other Observations,

which established him as an important avant-garde poet and which are considered to be the example of what is

the Modern idea of poetry and literature. Poetry became his refuge where he expressed all his horror at his

unhappy home life and he transcended his personal situation in order to represent the general crisis of Western

culture. In Lausanne he finished his masterpiece, The Waste Land, a long poem which was published in 1922

after Ezra Pound had contributed to reduce it to its final form. This is a summing up not only of the new type of

poetry but also of the new ideas on making it.

From the conversion to the last years In 1927 Eliot became a British citizen and in the same year he joined the

Church of England, finding the answer to his own uncertainties and to the despair of the modern world's lack of

faith and religion. The death of his wife, however, created a terrible sense of guilt within the soul of the poet. In

the 1930s and 1940s, Eliot's writing became more concerned with the ethical and philosophical problems of

modern society. In 1948 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. He was deeply influenced by the death of his

wife, which made him considered the life in two different moments:

- The pessimistic vision of the world linked to the death of his wife

- Purification and hope which correspond to the moment in which he won the Nobel Prize for literature (he

wrote a tragedy, Murder in the cathedral)

Works Eliot's work can be divided into two different periods: before and after the conversion to Anglicanism.

- The works of the first period are all characterised by a pessimistic vision of the world, without any hope, faith,

ideals or values. They depict a nightmarish land where spiritual aridity and lack of love have deprived life of all

meaning. Prufrock and Other Observations, The Waste Land belong to this period.

- Purification, hope and joy are the key words of the works of the second period.

The impersonality of the artist Eliot is also important because he introduced the concept of the impersonality

of the artist; he shared with the modern novelist James Joyce the view of the importance for the artist to be

impersonal. Differently from the other people of the modern age, the poet is someone superior, he is impersonal:

he separates himself from those who suffer, the rest of men. He considers the human beings of the modern age as

suffering people, on the contrary the artist is the one, who is able to create a new society, who has the skill of

mind to create something new, by pulling down the suffering society of the modern age in order to build up a

new one. Thus the characters of his first works are archetypes, stereotypes of 20th-century human beings who

turn their own subjective experience into a universal form with which anyone can identify. To rebuild up a

society, we need to go back to the primitive values of the society: not the religion, because it arrived later; the

first spirituality of the men were the legends and the myths, the primitive rights. In order to recover those

values, which we have lost in the modern age, we have to go back to these legends and myths. (That’s the

mythical method).

Eliot was also an influential literary critic: his critical essays on authors, both ancient and modern, as well as on

the theory of poetry and on the foundations of literary criticism ar