Riassunti letteratura inglese: Modernism + War Poets

John McCrae

He’s a Canadian, and he was a doctor during the war and helped everybody: a patient was a patient and it didn’t matter which nationality he was. He died of disease and he didn’t have the chance to continue his job. He wrote this poem after having buried one of his friends, but he didn’t like it and threw it away, but someone liked it and published it.

In Flanders Fields

Poppies: on November 11 in England, they wear poppies to remember the end of WWI; the colour of those flowers is associated with the blood spread during the war and they’re put also onto the soldiers’ graves.

It’s a very simple poem but at the same time it’s eloquent and its imperfections make it perfect and ambiguous.

Flanders Fields: in Belgium, where a great fighting took place during the war.

Description of a military cemetery: a terrible uniformity, each cross is absolutely identical with one another, there’s the same distance between them and they’re anonymous.

This anonymity is emphasized by row and row and underlines that it doesn't matter which religion, culture, Nation or army they belonged! People lose their individuality to become a simple white cross in a million other white crosses!

Oxymoron LIFE/DEATH underlined by the other oxymoron poppies/crosses, growing/standing, red/white and birds flying in the sky/we're shooting each other. We're shooting each other because warfare is killing everybody and under each cross there's a person who was alive a few days before in England, in Germany, in Italy and so on.

We are the Dead because we're all ending up on the same white cross.

The passage of the torch and the change from us to them refers to the fact that other soldiers will continue the fight and underline that Death is the universal destiny that does not depend on the conventional belief that we're good and they (the enemies) are bad.

Wilfred Owen

He had Welsh origins. He was excited by war and against German imperialism.

He went fighting, but a bomb blew up near him and he lived buried under mud for 3 days. When he was rescued, he was sent to a mental sanatorium in Scotland because he was shell-shocked. There he met Sassoon who suggested him to stop writing romantic poems and to start writing what he saw during war. He went back to battle to replace his friend Sassoon but was shot in the last days of the war only at the age of 24 (he had understood so much of war and of people in his 24 years of life!).

Anthem for Doomed Youth

Passing bells for those who die as cattle: bell fold when somebody dies, in this case when they die on mass (hundreds of people all together)

Guns and shells: they're as the choirs at the funerals but they take part to a parody of a funeral

What candles may be held to speed them all: all the soldiers in a traditional funeral should have candles lightened for them.

Pall is the black cloth that covers the coffin and it contrasts with the pallor of the skin of the fiancés of the dead

soldiers

Blinds to not see in the house where the dead is

Futility

Futility in trying to revive him (no sense in doing that) and futility in losing life with a shot(a single moment can break your life)

Move: imperative tense, but where?

Into the sun, because the sun always/once woke him up , until this morning to let him go working. Fields unsown and seeds let us understand that he was a farmer, but he’s dead fighting as a soldier (as everybody did) in France.

However, the sun can’t revive him because he’s dead. But why the sun? Not only because it woke him up, but also, and that’s more important, because the sun is responsible for life upon the entire Earth, for bringing life to a star or to a seed.

So, why can’t the sun revive that cold body? Because he’s a man. And a man is the product of millions years, of ages of human evolution and now we shoot each other for futile reasons and we lose our life in a single brief moment. A single moment to eliminate millions

years!This boy is the emblem of futility on Earth!

Dulce et decorum est

Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori: a quote by Horace which means that it's beautiful, noble and decorous to die for your fatherland if you're a soldier

He's always describing the reality of the battlefield during WWI, in this case when GAS was used.

Gas: it wasn't used in WWI because it could kill you instead killing the enemies because of the changing wind; green gas because of the green lenses of the masks, which were the only mean of protection; it destroys your lungs killing you right away or letting you survive with serious problems in breathing

Bent double instead of standing heroically and coughing because they were sick

We turned our backs maybe to go back home or go back to the camp to "sleep", marched asleep as they were very exhausted and blood-shod to underline that they didn't have shoes and hat their feet were covered of blood

Deaf even to the hoots of gas-shells they

didn’t hear the gas-shells arriving behind them because they were too tired. When they realized, they put on their masks just in time but someone didn’t and this man drowns in that sea of gas. His blood was gargling because gas burns inside the lungs and causes blisters. This terrible image continues to remain in the author’s mind and he always dreams about him! My friend to interpolate the reader and to consider him at the same level: through this poem, we lived the same experience the writer did. It’s as the author said “if you lived my same experience, you’d think as I do”. Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori is the OLD LIE. Why? Because the world is based upon that big lie and actually there’s absolutely nothing honourable and noble in dying for the fatherland in such a terrible way. Sigfried Sassoon He tried to imitate Owen’s style and vice versa. He died at the age of 25 after he was shot during war, but he had a great sensibility.experienced war and was so brave and courageous that he won a medal. He was pro war, but when he experienced it, he was against war: he was considered mad because in one of his letters, he affirmed that war was wrong. So, he was sent to a mental sanatorium (where he met Owen). He went back to war but because he was shot he became invalid. He could not go back to war and Owen did it for him. Suicide in the Trenches Description of a suicide, something that happened very often because people were desperate for the terrible living conditions in the trenches On the surface there's a simple and innocent nursery-rhyme with a manipulated language, but at a deeper level he's saying something terrible Soldier/boy to underline that everybody fought. Particularly, this boy was happy with his life, just before go fighting! The crowd, the society, is responsible for this exploitation and for the fact that this little boy lost his youth and his laughter in that trenches fighting in that hell He put a

• bullet through his brain: he committed suicide, we can imagine the reason but we don’t know it explicitly.
• No one spoke of him again: to underline that thing as this one happens every day and we do not speak of them
• You: interpolation of us as part of the crowds
• Smug faced: complaisant, somebody that is happy only of and with himself
• That cheer when soldier lads march by: reference to a military parade, after we encouraged them to go out and die, the soldiers go to get killed and will never come back home
• Does it matter? A sing-song rhythm meaning and referring something terrible
• Society is responsible for the loss of legs, of sight and even of life in the worst case! But even if those men have no legs or another part of their body, they will always have dreams
• Will “normal” society take care of all the a-normal men? Yes, but in a patronising way without being really nice and sincere
• He’s not criticizing war but he wants to show how horrible is the society that creates

itrelying upon the Old Lie.

William Butler Yeats

He was Irish. He was fascinated with Ireland and its folktales. He’s been the play writer for the Irish stage. His love poetry was written for his lover, who was his muse. His national experience is mixed with his personal experience (thoughts, feelings, dreams, art...). To make his poems rich he uses Irish/Greek mythology, English literature, Byzantine art, European politics and Christian imagery. His main goal is to arrive at the personal truth in his own profound personality.

An Irish Airman foresees his Death

Poem written to commemorate a person, the son of his colleague Lady Gregory, who he personally knew. This young man died shot by an Italian during war. He was fighting for British but he actually feels to belong only to his city, Kiltartan, and to his nation, Ireland. Those people are his people! It’s the young man who speaks. He poses himself almost existentialist questions about why he is there: he doesn’t want to fight.

that war; he's not interested in it because he doesn't belong to English. The only thing he knows is that he will die sooner or later somewhere because of that war (he's facing his death gesture). Everything is absurd and life has no meaning.

Sailing to Byzantium

Nature is sacrificed and modified for art. Art represented by Byzantium, which is not physically a place but an imaginary place of art that contrasts with the world in which we all live. 4 stanzas:

I: that is no country for old men: that indicates the world in which we live; old men includes who speaks too. Why? Because he's no more young and cannot participate actively to social life; it's a reference to the circle of life that involves also death (those dying generations and whatever is begotten, born and dies). Life of the body and its song affirm that his passions have a sensual music inside them which speaks about joy, love, life and death. Metaphor of the salmon falls better specifies the circle of

life: at the end of their life, salmons tend to climb up the waterfalls to get to the source they came from to reproduce and finally die. Monuments of unageing intellect to affirm that the power of artistic creation and art itself will never die and it's a close reference to Ode to a Nightingale and especially to Ode on a Grecian Urn by Keats.

II: the contrast between aged (referring to the man) and unageing (referring to the intellect) can be considered a paltry thing that has no sense. The image of the soul clapping his hands and singing opposes to the pains of the dying body; it tells us that the old man can only live through his soul and how can he survive? Dedicating himself to the study of art, because he can no longer create it. The dead body celebrates what the soul does producing some works of art. Byzantium doesn't indicate that he's physically gone there,