Poets of the first and second world war.

Essay by julianA, March 2003

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War Poetry

The lives and writings of world war poets.

Contents

Introduction......................................................... Pages 2,3

A retrospective view of world war poets: world war two...Pages 4,5

Introduction to world war one poets.............................pages 6,7

Into Battle.............................................................pages 8-13

A poetic vision........................................................pages 14

Bibliography..........................................................pages 15

Introduction:

The last two world wars were unique in our history, not least for the cultural shock inflicted on the whole of our society. Each of them took millions of young men and women away from their families and friends at the most sensitive stage of their lives. It put them into uniform to serve under strict discipline with total strangers in closed communities. It sent them abroad to kill other young men and women hundreds and thousands of miles away in cities, fields and mountains, in deserts and jungles. Finally, it subjected them to long periods of paralysing boredom, punctuated by sharp bursts of extreme excitement in which the prospect of death was always present.

For most of these men and women the war was the most intense experience they were ever to know. Thousands, who found the pressure almost too much to bear, turned to poetry as the only way of realising-for the first and often the last time in their lives. So both wars produced a cataract of poetry.

However, the poetry of the Second World War is much different from that of the first. Most of the poets that we know of in the First World War were writing in hope of publication. They were nearly all men, and men with university degrees, largely from public schools; Isaac Rosenberg was one of the few exceptions. The patriotic exaltation, which led them to volunteer, stumbled when they came face to face with trench warfare. For the first time they began to ask how the war came...