Letteratura Inglese 3

The Georgian Poets and the War Poets

The Georgian poets took their name from the ruling English king of their epoch, George V. Georgian Poetry was a poetic movement, and it basically refers to a series of anthologies showcasing the work of a school of English poetry.

Some of the most important poets of this movement are: Robert Brooke, Walter de la Mare, Sigfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, D.H. Lawrence, etc… They were very influential for their contemporaries.

This kind of poetry was characterized by the imitation of romantics (romantic nature poetry) and the avoidance of contemporary problems; however, with the outbreak of WW1 lots of Georgian poets converted into the so called 'War poets' and moved into a totally different poetry, the war poetry (or 'trench poetry'), in which patriotism and disappointment were the leading feelings.

Nowadays we don't know this movement so well because it was obscured by Modernism.

Robert Brooke (1887-1915) was born

In England, he studied at King's College and began writing poems during his university years. His early poetry was romantic, filled with descriptions of the English countryside. After graduating, he traveled extensively. Unfortunately, he contracted blood poisoning from an insect bite and passed away at the young age of 28.

Due to his premature death, he only managed to publish two collections of poetry: "Poems" (1911) and "1914 and Other Poems" (1915). However, there is another collection called "Collected Poems" that was published posthumously in 1916.

He is considered one of the War Poets, but he stands out from the others because he did not depict war in a realistic manner. Scholars believe that he wrote these types of poems because he did not participate in the war himself. Furthermore, he portrayed the period of the Great War as a golden era. As a result, his poems do not mention the war directly.

shock that the war created in the social system (the gap between rich and poor was wide and the unrest was beginning to grow among the lower classes) neither the human lost that it caused.

"The Soldier" is a poem by Rupert Brooke written during the first year of the First World War (1914). It is a deeply patriotic and idealistic poem that expresses a soldier's love for his homeland (in this case England), which is portrayed as a kind of nurturing paradise. Indeed, such is the soldier's bond with England that he feels his country to be both the origin of his existence and the place to which his consciousness will return when he dies.

The speaker feels he owes his identity itself primarily to his country. It was the personified England that 'bore' and 'shaped' him, nourished him with sun and air, and cleansed him with 'water.'

There is nothing in the poem about the horrors of war, on the contrary, there is very little of the realities.

of war at all.

The poem is written in the form of an Italian sonnet, it is made up of 14 lines divided into 2 stanzas of 8 lines (octet) and 6 lines (sestet); it also has a regular rhyme scheme: ABAB CDCD EFG EFG.

This poem put a lot of emphasis on England, for this reason we can talk about Englishness, which is a strong marker of power linked to the quality of being English or/and having characteristics regarded as typically English. This concept is closely linked to the concept of Britishness, which only differs from Englishness from the fact that it includes not only the English people, but even the Scots and the Welsh.

Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) didn’t attend a college but he was very clever. He was the first poet to describe the negative aspect of the war in a realistic way. During the year 1914 he joined the Battle of the Somme, and despite the difficulties he used to write to his mother every week, describing what he had been through. After the battle, he continued fighting.

and among the most shocking events which happened to him, we have to remember when he fell through a shell-hole into a cellar and was trapped in the dark for 3 days, suffering from nausea and concussion, soon afterward, Owen was diagnosed with neurasthenia or shell shock and then he was sent to the hospital where he spent a fortnight before rejoining his battalion and becoming involved in fierce fighting. But, it is very important that he was hospitalized together with Siegfried Sassoon, who suggested to begin to write about his painful memories in the form of poetry. His poems recreate the miserable, painful conditions and the constant stress that soldiers led. Owen is the most famous of the War Poets, as he succeeded in portraying the reality of the war without losing his artistic poise, or allowing bitterness to creep into his works. He returned to the front in 1918 and he was meant to be awarded the military cross of bravery for capturing a German machine gun, but he never received it as he was.

Killed early on the morning of 4th November, 7 days before the armistice.

"Dulce et Decorum est" by Wilfred Owen is a war poem written in 1917.

This title is ironic, it is intended to mean the opposite of the literal meaning and the aim is to shock the audience. The use of Latin reflects the classical education of the wealthier classes at the time and indicates that the audience Owen is writing for are well-educated Brits who support the war in Europe. The title means "it is sweet and glorious" and it is from Horace's "Odes".

In this poem Owen describes his own experience of the horrors of the war in trenches. Furthermore, it is an attempt to communicate the pity of the war to the future generations; it is right to say that it is a manifesto against the war.

- 1st stanza > the poet introduces the situation describing the retreat of the soldiers;

- 2nd stanza > description of the gas attack;

- 3rd stanza > the poet's

nightmare;- 4th stanza > description of death and the message of the poem.

Then, we can say from a lot of particulars (such as the use of ‘we’, ‘our’) that the narrator is the poet himself.

There are a lot of onomatopoeic words, such as: ‘guttering’, ‘chocking’, ‘drowning’ and ‘hoots’.

The poet uses a lot of dynamic verbs (‘stumbling’, ‘fumbling’, etc…).

There are a lot of metaphors (‘drunk with fatigue’, etc…) and similes (‘like old beggars’, ‘couching like hangs’, etc…).

Charlotte Mew

Charlotte Mary Mew (1869-1928) was born in London in a family composed by 7 children, in which she was the eldest one. When she was little 3 of her siblings died and a brother and a sister were hospitalized for schizophrenia, so she was only left with a sister, Anne, and they both decided not to have children.

During her life she had 2 serious affairs: one with

An writer named Ella D'Arcy, the other with a novelist called May Sinclair, but she was rejected by both of them, and these rejections caused a lot of pain for Charlotte. It is important to highlight the fact that we are aware of her sexuality thanks to her biography since her works never talk about this topic.

An important event in her life was the death of her father, in 1898, because he left to his family a lot of financial problems, so they had to move in a rented home and they sublet a part of it to make ends meet. After some years, in 1923, even her sister died, but Mew was obsessed with the thought that Anne was buried alive and it was because of mental illness, indeed she was diagnosed with neurasthenia, so she voluntarily moved to a nursing home in 1928, but then she committed suicide by drinking Lysol, a powerful disinfectant.

She was considered a 'new woman' because of her quirks and her mannish way of dressing (she wore smoking); and Mew's poetry have been

Described as commonly portraying feelings, forbidden desire and physical pleasure, which are linked to the pain of hiding her lesbian identity. Charlotte Mew published her first work, “Passed”, in the middle of her 20s; it was published in a periodical called “The Yellow Book”. The narrator of this story is a woman who, while visiting a church, happens upon a unsightly scene: a desperate sex worker leads her into a room where another woman (the sex worker’s sister) lies dead. We can see from this work one of the most present topics of her production: death.

Mew’s poetry is also a poetry which talks about war, indeed one of her most famous work, “Scars Upon my Heart”, is an anthology of women’s poetry and verse of the WW1. Moreover, the atmosphere of the war appears in the shadows of all Mew’s poems of that period, in which she expressed the agonies of living in a world characterized by the absence of security.

Her poetry speaks not to the

society but to the individual experience, she doesn't have an ideal reader, and her poetry it's a poetry that has its meaning not in the content of its expression but in the tension of the dramatic relation of its 'personae'. Her poetry is considered interrupted for the use of words in french. The Cenotaph She only wrote 3 poems in which she explicitly addressed to the Great War, and this is the only one which was published while she was alive. The word 'cenotaph' means 'empty tomb', indeed in the inside there's nobody, it is just a monument that symbolizes the unprecedented losses suffered during ww1. The poem is made up of just one stanza of 25 lines of various length from 4 syllables to 23: since the poetess uses a lot of dramatic monologue, the poem is structurally irregular, but it presents an intricate and, at the same time, meaningful metrical and rhyme scheme (ABAB BBB CCB DDE BEBBB FGGFFFF). Regarding this, it is important to remember that

Mew wrote his poem in full Modernism, a period in which there was the breaking down of traditional concepts of time and space, the introduction in literary works of unconscious and introspection and of total collapses of traditional plots and of interior monologue, etc…

In order to analyze the poem, we have to divide it in 2 parts:

1. From line 1 to line 18 > it shows a great displacement of the bodies, the memorialisation of soldiers who died abroad and the terrible outcome of the war;
2. From line 19 to line 25 > in this part, Mew juxtaposes the real aim of the monument (that’s the commemoration of the dead ones), but also the effective different future it will have. In fact, her tribute goes also to those civilians who couldn’t do anything to avoid this death.

Michael Field is the pseudonym used by 2 female poets, Katherine Bradley (1846-1914) and her n