Drum-Taps: Whitman’s Problematic Legacy as a War Poet (original) (raw)
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2010
There rises in my brain the thought of gravesto my lips a word for dead soldiers The Dead we left behind-there they lie, embedded low, already fused by Nature Through broad Virginia's soil, through Tennessee-The Southern states cluttered with cemeteries the borders dotted with their graves-the Nation's dead. Silent they lie-the passionate hot tears have ceased to flowtime has assuaged the anguish of the living. Walt Whitman, Manuscript Poem (both writers were born in 1819), wrote about the same event, both in poetry, and almost immediately as the events of the Civil War unfolded. This information-to my eyes-brought the two authors together, establishing what appeared as an important connection between such different writers and such different careers. This study is the result of these many discoveries and the even more unanswered doubts they fostered, which, now, in being offered this opportunity, my curiosity pushes me to explore. Despite the large number of existing publications on both Walt Whitman and Herman Melville, not many of them have centered on the effect the American Civil War produced in the literary careers of these writers, and even less have ventured to establish parallelisms between these authors' literary responses to the Civil War. In the case of Walt Whitman, the earliest publications that engaged in the exploration of the impact of the war on the poet were Sam Toperoff's (1963), Dennis J. Reader's (1971) and Mathew F. Ignoffo's (1975), which established the roots of more recent studies, such as
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.
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.
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.
" 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.