How to Kill: Poetry and War (original) (raw)
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The SAGE Encyclopedia of War: Social Science Perspectives, 2017
Across the globe throughout history, war has had an inhuman effect on the human condition, and the insensate destruction has apparently brought a hideous pattern of terror over time. Technological advancements, particularly in military technology, have developed more powerful ways to massacre millions of people and horrify a state or country. Throughout history, many writers have written on war without having a direct experience of it; however, world literatures have been filled with firsthand knowledge of war provided by “soldier-poets,” reflecting what war can do to the psyche and body.
The impact of the First World War on the poetry of
2008
Abstract: In 1914 the First World War broke out on a largely innocent world, a world that still associated warfare with glorious cavalry charges and the noble pursuit of heroic ideals. This was the world’s first experience of modern mechanized warfare. As the months and years passed, each bringing increasing slaughter and misery, the soldiers became increasingly disillusioned. Many of the strongest protests made against the war were made through the medium of poetry by young men horrified by what they saw. They not only wrote about the physical pain of wounds and deaths, but also the mental pain that were consequences of war. One of these poets was Wilfred Owen. In his poetry we find the feelings of futility, horror, and dehumanization that he encountered in war. World War I broke out on a largely innocent world, a world that still associated warfare with glorious cavalry charges and noble pursuit of heroic ideals. People were wholly unprepared for the horrors of modern trench warfa...
In the beginning, war poetry was all about patriotism, indicating nobleness of war, written mostly by civilians, who had no or little experience of war. But the poetry written by the soldiers painted a totally different picture of war. This paper is concerned with a comparative study of the work of First World War poets, such as Rupert Brooke, Laurence Binyon, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon. Brooke and Binyon's poetry was concerned with the theme of nationalism and the immortality of soldiers. But, Sassoon and Owen wrote about the horrific experience they witnessed during the war. Through their writing these poets countered and argued against all the noble ideologies related to war; instead, by expressing their true emotions, they depict war as inhumane, war weapons destructive and the lives of soldiers as uncertain.
" Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, "-Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind. The literature of war is a literature of paradoxes, the greatest of which is the fact that it comments continuously on its own failure. War writers often lament their incapacity to describe the realities of armed combat, the inexpressible nature of the subject matter, the inadequacy of language, and the inability of their audiences to understand. Tim O'Brien writes of the war he experienced in Vietnam: " There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. " From ancient Nordic ballads to Masai folk songs or Red Indian sagas, war has always been a predominate theme in literature. Zafon in The Shadow of the Wind portrays a war ravaged Barcelona and comments, " There's something about that period that's epic and tragic " for like the Old English Elegiac poetries, the Arthurian Romances, Gorky's Mother or Tolstoy's War and Peace, the literature of the Great Wars have altered human perception and the very fabrics of literature. However, we witness a distinct line between the literature of both world wars. The Second Great War threatened the humankind like never before. It was a manmade crisis which threw us to the brink of extinction, and thus displaying the futility of human existence. As humanity experienced the terror of the 'absurdity' of reality, the philosophy if 'nothing to be done' surfaced in their consciousness. This paper aims to evaluate the marked change in the form of poetry written in the two Great Wars and how far the Second World War was responsible for the advent of Modernism.
How War Poetry Shaped Modernism
2019
The first essay in "Pities" is a small exploratory essay on British WWI poet, Wilfred Owen. During my American Modernism course in Spring 2019, I found great interest in how the emergence of advanced warfare shifted literature in a time that was already advancing technologically and economically. I became obsessed, almost, with the brutality of Owen’s works. This led to the expansion of the paper into my final essay for the course in which I compared Owen to Robinson Jeffers, an American anti-war poet. By bringing in Jeffers, I was able to accurately portray how both countries were affected by the war and set the precedent of war literature to follow.
The Theme of 'Futility'in War Poetry
Nebula
This paper discusses the notion of the futility of war and its impact on the psychological state of the soldiers in a representative sample of WWI and WWII poems. Futility expands to refer to the futility of war, the futility of institutions, as well as the futility of human existence. The ...
Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses, 2018
For the last century, historians of the conflict have not systematically used the poetry of the First World War as a source. Whether reduced to a canon established a posteriori or excluded from literary periodisation altogether, this corpus needs to be considered from a transdisciplinary perspective and be used as a document about the experience of war itself, and not just about the conflict’s remembrance. The present article aims to present the French and British landscape of research about and usage of the poetry of the Great War and to establish a theoretical framework combining literary history, anthropology, literary criticism, and linguistics, which will allow for the usage of poetry as a historical source. Finally, the article will discuss two digital humanities projects which draw upon the Centenary to contribute to the establishment of a relation between History and Poetics in the context of the sources available to the cultural historian looking at how individuals internalised a culture shared by all those who experienced the war and at how the poetic gesture shaped the experience of war itself.
Poetry and the First World War
The Poetics of Otherness, 2015
This pacific mood was merely transient, While Britain vas outside the war it was remote from the hearts of the British people, for most of whom Serbia and Sarajevo were no more than names. The threats to neighbouring France and to 'little Belgim', however, were swiftly realised, and the proclamation of war on 4 August brou^t with it a change of attitude that was overwhelming. The,Times for 5 August reported that the crowds which gathered to hear the Proclamation of War read "were filled with the war spirit", and the Daily News, which two days earlier had affirmed that "there is no war party in this country", now described how "The enthusiasa culminated outside Buckingham Palace when it became known that war had been declared", Newspapers and periodicals of ttie first month of the war did much to encourage the wave of fervent patriotism and war-eagemess which swept over the country, and it was not long before every available wall bore the famous poster of Eitcdiener with its pointing finger and arresting caption "Tour King and Country Need Tou", On 12 August The, Times was able to report that "there was again a large queue of young men waiting outside the Central Recruiting office at Great Scotland-yard yesterday to respond to Lord Kitchener's call for 100,000 men. The wozk of enlistment proceeded briskly all day, and new recruits were-5 s w o m in at the rate of between 80 and 100 an hour," There was scarcely a discordant voice ax^rwhere in the country. Internal strife and party faction were forgotten. The fitting spirit of Ireland was diverted from civil to world war, and divisions of Irishmen were soon ready to join in the greater conflict. Amidst all this enthusiasm it is sobering to read a letter from Lord Weardale in The Times for 5 August, This letter shows him to have been one of the most clear-sighted statesmen Britain could boast of in those troublous days. This is what he wrote for publication the day after war was declared: The indignation of Austria at the crime of Sarajevo is as natural as the racial and religious sycqjathy of Russia with the Servian people; but what rational man can contend that such a question and such tmporary antagonisms can justify the horrors of a great Emrapean war-the worst, perhaps, the world has ever seen-with its countless dead and maimed, its ruined homes, its irremediable industrial losses? Both victors and vanquished can only emerge from such a conflict bankrupt in resources and in ell the hi^er attributes of humanity. w > g #• His vas the voice in the wilderness proclaiming the true and deadly character of the war. Before long he would be joined by otiiérs who spoke not from a lively apprehension of what war could moan, but from the terrible eaperlence of twentieth century warfare. Keaawfaile the var was on end enlistment continued, and among those who enlisted during the next few years were the young men idio were to become the voice and the conscience of their age-the poets of En^andi Edzpund Blundmi, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, Robert Nicdiols, Vilfred Oven, Siegfried Sassoon, to mention only some of the better known. Vhen war broke out Siegfried Sassoon, who was the oldest of these young men I have mentioned, was twenty-ei^t; Edmund Blunden was seventeen. Even the most sensitive scarcely foresaw the horrors that were before them. Althcu^ Wilfred Owen wrote in 1914, War broke: and now the Winter of the world With perishing great darkness closes in.ĥ e yet wrote home in a letter to his mother when he first joined the fitting forces in France: "Ihere is a fine heroic feeling 3. Collected Poems, p, 129.-7about being in France# and X an in perfect epirits. A tinge of ezcitenent is about It was mainly this "tinge of excitement" xdiich prevailed during the flMt two years of the war. In his journal for August 1914 Aubrey Herbert wrote# "The men were very pleased to have been under fire, and compared notes aa to how they 5 felt," but the Battle of Hone in which his men were engaged was followed by the Battle of Le Gateau and of the Marne and tlm first Battle of Tpres. Meanwhile Antwerp had fallen and the hopes of peace "before Christmas" began to recede. The tone of reports from the Front began to changet The Tinea reported from the Battle of Kons that "[The British soldier] was cheerful, steady and confident."^ Biz weeks later another report told how the wounded were "as happy and as eager to be well enou^ to go to the front again as if they 7 were schoolboys going home for the holidays." But a sourer note was creeping into the reports; first, the confession that war and the idea of war were two very different things; 4. 1 January 1917, Collected Letters, p. 421. 5. Kons. Ansae end Kuts. p. 48. 6. 23 August 1914. 7. 8 October 1914* 8 «# "I had not the slightest conception what war could mean, even 8 in the wildest flights of fancy"; secondly, descriptions of the real horrors of war; "Tou cannot imagine what a battlefield is like after a battle-a huddled mass of corpses, some of which have been lying there since the q fighting round here in October last...." and thirdly, the beginnings of condemnation; By the touchstone of the men it has broken this war is judged and the makers of this war. And more than ruined villages end desecrated churches these soldiers pronounce condemnation. They, idio have given 80 much, are, in a sense, without joy and without enthusiasm; rather they shun recollection. There is no sest in the killing of men.... The war is revealed as a thing gross and dull-witted, a crime even against the ancient, chivalrous spirit of war.^D uring 1915 the frontiers of war were extended and its horrors intensified. Early in the year Zeppelin raids wore made on England; in February the Germans began their D-boat 8. Letter from an Officer, The Times.
Writing War, and the Politics of Poetic Conversation
Critical Asian Studies, 2022
The version of record has been published open-access by Critical Asian Studies, at: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14672715.2022.2030776 This article's premise is that war is ontological devastation, which opens up questions as to how to write about it. The paper contends that even critiques of war, whether critical-geopolitical analyses of global structures or ethnographies of the everyday, center war in ways that underscore erasures of non-war life, and therefore risk participating in that same ontological devastation. Engagement with extra-academic conversational worlds, both their social lives and their intellectual ones, is ethically necessary in writing war. To that end, this article examines poetic production from one front in the US-led "Global War on Terror": Swat Valley, Pakistan. Poets in Swat have produced an analysis of war as ontological devastation, but also protest their reduction, in the minds of others and themselves, to the violence-stricken present. This intervention is not an intellectual critique alone. Focusing on a new genre of "resistance" poetry, this article shows how poets resist war by maintaining worlds partly beyond it. In this, the critical content and the social lives of poetry are inseparable.