W.B.Yeats: Memoirs; The Myth Against Myth: A Study of Yeat's Imagination in Old Age; An Adequate Response: The War Poetry of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon; Dylan Thomas: The Code of Night

1973 ◽  
Vol 22 (113) ◽  
pp. 83-84
Author(s):  
H. Peschmann
Keyword(s):  
Old Age ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Adequate Response ◽  
Dylan Thomas ◽  
Wilfred Owen

scholarly journals Il nazionalismo della letteratura britannica prima della Grande Guerra e l’esperienza dei War Poets

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 65-86
Author(s):  
Angelo Giunta
Keyword(s):  
War Poetry ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Rupert Brooke ◽  
Wilfred Owen

L’immagine di un Regno Unito visto come Eden inconsapevole della tragedia che sta per lacerarlo è diffusa, ma piuttosto falsa. L’apparente serenità nasconde una violenza latente e gravi questioni interne e la guerra, quindi, non fa altro che accelerare un processo già in atto. Di tutta la letteratura inglese del Ventesimo secolo, la poesia di guerra sembra, sotto molti punti di vista, una “parentesi” all’interno del panorama letterario. La war poetry è il prodotto di un determinato periodo storico, sociale e culturale venutosi a formare nella Prima guerra mondiale. Tra i migliori poeti della Grande Guerra troviamo Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen e Siegfried Sassoon. Il fatto che molti poeti siano ufficiali – ma non alti ufficiali – permette loro di essere in contatto, a livello socio-culturale, con i ranghi elevati dell’esercito e, fisicamente, con i soldati semplici. In questo modo hanno una visione più ampia della realtà in trincea.

scholarly journals From Soldier-Poet to Veteran Memoirist: Siegfried Sassoon, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, and the Limits of Life-Writing in Prose

2021 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sean A. McPhail
Keyword(s):  
Life Writing ◽  
Great War ◽  
Front Line ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Complete Account

The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston is a key text supporting Siegfried Sassoon’s reputation as Britain’s pre-eminent Great War-writer. Critics have nevertheless reached no consensus as to whether these lightly fictionalised “memoirs” represent true accounts of Sherston’s/ Sassoon’s war or fictional constructions. They have also yet to account for the differences between the Memoirs and Sassoon’s war-poetry, and between Sherston’s stated commemorative goals and his complete account. This article dissects the Memoirs’ adaptation of Sassoon’s front-line poetics of commemoration: it reads their new application of this poetics via his compositional difficulties, his dependence upon his own wartime writings, and life-writing’s uneasy relationship to truth. As I show, Sherston has more in common with his author than Sassoon intended, but differences remain; still, his memoirs have as much right to that appellation as any other text in the language.

scholarly journals Meeting the Enemy in World War I Poetry: Cognitive Dissonance as a Vehicle for Theme

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 30
Author(s):  
David Poynor
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Cognitive Dissonance ◽  
Personal Exposure ◽  
Internal Conflict ◽  
Therapeutic Effects ◽  
Ford Madox Ford ◽  
World War ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Wilfred Owen

Some World War I poems show an enemy soldier up close. This choice usually proves very effective for expressing the general irony of war, to be sure. However, I submit that showing interaction with the enemy also allows the speaker space to wrestle with internal conflict, guilt, or cognitive dissonance, and that it allows—or even forces—readers to participate in that struggle along with the speaker. While the poets’ writings no doubt had therapeutic effects for the poets themselves, I focus more on the literary effects, specifically arguing that the poems are powerful to us readers since they heighten the personal exposure of the poets’ psyches and since they make us share the dissonance as readers. I consider poems by Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Robert Graves, Ford Madox Ford, Herbert Read, and Robert Service.

Trouble at the Explosive Plant: Ceri Richards and Dylan Thomas

2019 ◽  
pp. 157-178
Author(s):  
Leo Mellor
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Close Analysis ◽  
Art Works ◽  
Dylan Thomas ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Second World ◽  
Organic As

This chapter analyses Thomas’s Second World War poetry within a comparative context; it reads it alongside – and also through – the art of Ceri Richards, another individual who combined a Swansea-lineage, some European aesthetic influences, and a compulsive – if horrified – fascination with beauty-in-destruction. The wartime works of both Richards and Thomas repeatedly return to representations of the organic as a way of capturing moments of intense violence. In doing so, they raise a number of vital questions. If these works aim to capture the incendiary horrors and transformative energy of the moment when all is in flux, how can they do this using the organic? If a violent moment is knowable through a version of the natural world, how then is destruction changed? What other kinds of temporalities are imported into such a ‘timeless second’ – to use William Sansom’s phrase? And, concomitantly, how is the idea of nature and the natural changed if it is being utilised to portray blast and terror? The chapter proceeds through close analysis of a number of Thomas’s wartime poems – including ‘Deaths and Entrances’ and ‘A Refusal to Mourn’ – and sets them alongside art works by Richards such as Blossoms (1940) and Cycle of Nature (1944).

23 Wilfred Owen, War Poetry

2021 ◽  
pp. 381-396
Author(s):  
Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż
Keyword(s):  
War Poetry ◽  
Wilfred Owen

A tragic harp: Ritual, irony and myth in the war poetry of Wilfred Owen

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
William Kevin Penny
Keyword(s):  
Stylistic Analysis ◽  
War Poetry ◽  
Rhetorical Devices ◽  
Classical Language ◽  
Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen stands out as one of the foremost poets writing on the theme of war and the pity of war. This article examines Owen’s innovative use of Romantic, biblical, and Classical language in conjunction with specific literary and rhetorical devices as a way of developing irony in his work. Also central to the poet’s stylistic approach was his deliberate collapse of conventional literary modes of expression, which included the traditional sonnet form. The enquiry which follows examines how Owen’s use of antiquated language and literary patterning — which the poet relied on to undercut established ritual and myth and their associated symbolism — served to juxtapose the classically ‘heroic’ with the sacrificial ‘heroes’ he had encountered on the battlefields of Europe. To assist him in this the poet — somewhat paradoxically — relied on a mythopoeic approach that mirrored later Modernist attempts to address issues of personal nobility amidst the perceived dissolution of society. Close stylistic analysis contributes to an understanding of the intricate ironic patterning in Owen’s war poetry, which defamiliarizes, yet also heightens, a reader’s intuitive response to the poet’s work.

scholarly journals Poetry as Antidote to Toxic Certainty

Lumen et Vita ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 29-44
Author(s):  
Matt Kershaw
Keyword(s):  
Great War ◽  
Siegfried Sassoon ◽  
Rhetorical Force ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Wilfred Owen

In examining the discursive environment surrounding the Great War (1914-1918), one finds a familiar reduction of reality into flat and mutually exclusive binaries written in what Robert Graves called "Newspaper Language." In this article, I suggest such discursive flattening to be both unproductive and dehumanizing, employing the term "toxic certainty" to refer to language used by a given partisan over and against the perceived other, where the rhetorical force of an assertion is taken to be the proof of that assertion. To counter dehumanizing discourse both in and out of the pulpit, I suggest a remedy in an alternate reading of James 1:22, where preachers can aspire to be "poets of the word," rather than just self-deceiving hearers. This idea is developed through an examination of the poetic efforts to humanize the full reality of the Great War undertaken by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document