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

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.

Youthful Death and Melancholia: The Case of Rupert and Mary Brooke

This article considers how Mary Brooke, the mother of the poet-soldier Rupert Brooke, managed her mourning and melancholia in the wake of the death of her sons in the First World War. It briefly considers how Brooke’s death and poetry framed and, to some extent, predicted his popularity during and after the war. It goes on to explore how Mary Brooke constructed lasting literary and physical monuments to her son, which reframed his public life narrative and reflected her own culturally ingrained philosophical and aesthetic preferences. It examines how her experience reflects established and changing practices with respect to women and public death, and the elements that made her case exceptional. Finally, it places her story in the wider history of European melancholia as it relates to war, grief and creative expression.

A United Voice

In this article, I consider three influential poets of the Great War: Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Hamilton Sorley and Rupert Brooke. Since the birth of the modernist movement, the historical legacy of Great War poetry has tended to focus on the differing levels of “disenchantment” expressed in the works of these three poets when considered separately, applauding Sassoon and Sorley and criticizing Brooke. While I recognize a separation of the works of Brooke from those of Sorley and Sassoon in terms of modernist disillusionment, I argue that analysing instead the literary elements which unify the works of all three poets offers a comprehensive understanding of the experience of trench warfare experience, unavailable through traditional methods of evaluating Great War poetry.

“Sons of Two Empires”: The Idea of Nationhood in Anzac and Turkish Poems of the Gallipoli Campaign

An unexpected failure of the Allied forces and a monumental victory for the Turks, the Gallipoli Campaign (1915) is thought to be the first notable experience for Australians and New Zealanders on their way to identify themselves as nations free from the British Empire. For the war-weary Turks, too, the victory in Gallipoli was the beginning of their transformation from a wreck of an empire to a modern republic. Despite the existence of a substantial body of research on the military, political, and historical aspects of the campaign, studies on the literature of Gallipoli are very few and often deal with canonised poets such as Rupert Brooke or national concerns through a single perspective. Aiming to bring to light underappreciated poets from Gallipoli, this paper is a comparative study of less known poems in English and Turkish from Gallipoli. While doing this, the study traces the signs of the nation-building processes of Australia, New Zealand, and Turkey with emphasis on national identity. To this end, the paper examines a number of Gallipoli poems in English and Turkish that were composed by combatant or non-combatant poets by using close reading analysis in search of shifts in discourse and tone. The study also underlines how poets from the two sides identified themselves and the ways the campaign is reflected in these poems. At length, the study shows that Gallipoli poems display similar attitudes towards the idea of belonging to an empire although they differ in the way warfare is perceived. With emphasis on less known poems and as one of the very few comparative studies of the poetry of the Gallipoli Campaign, this paper will contribute to the current research into the legacy and literature of the First World War.

Owen, Wilfred (1893–1918)

Wilfred Edward Salter Owen (1893–1918) is among the most renowned British poets of the First World War (1914–1918). His style can best be described as elegiac or tragic, standing defiantly against the idealized or propagandistic depictions of the battlefield prevalent during the ‘Great War’s early stages. In opposition to the sentiments of Rupert Brooke (1887–1915) and Rudyard Kipling (1865–1936), and more akin to those of Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918) and Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967), Owen considered such reductive glorifications of mass slaughter ignorant, if not outright dishonest — a radical viewpoint at the time. Owen’s influences range from Dante and Shakespeare to Thomas Gray, William Collins, Percy B. Shelley, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Burns, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and especially John Keats. Owen’s poetic signature and chief innovation was his subversion of traditional rhyme schemes. He experimented with consonantal end-rhyme (or ‘pararhyme’), a technique that, along with Edmund Blunden (1896–1974), he helped popularize. Critic Sasi Bhusan Das interprets Owen’s use of this technique, in conjunction with broken rhythms, as an effort to capture ‘the disharmony of the [Great] War’ (13).