Page 68 - DENG405_BRITISH_POETRY

Unit 7: Major Literary Terms-VII

Several poets writing in English were soldiers, and wrote about their experiences of war. Number Notes
of them died on active service, most famously Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg,
Wilfred Owen, and Charles Sorley. Others including Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon survived,
but many were scarred by their experiences, reflected in their poetry.
Many poems by British war poets were published in newspapers and then collected into anthologies.
Several of these early anthologies were published during the war and were very popular, though
the tone of the poetry changed as the war progressed. One of the wartime anthologies was The
Muse in Arms, published in 1917. Several anthologies were also published in the years after the war
had ended.
In France the popular poet and song-writer Theodore Botrel was appointed as official “Bard of the
armies” in 1915. According to the New York Times he was authorised by the Minister of War “to
enter all military depots, camps and hospitals for the purpose of reciting and singing his patriotic
poems.”

Calligrammes, subtitled Poems of war and peace 1913-1916, is a collection of poems
by Guillaume Apollinaire published in 1918.

The Italians had their own war poetry, most notably that of Giuseppe Ungaretti. According to Patrick
Bridgwater in The German Poets of the First World War, the closest comparison to Owen would be
Anton Schnack, and Schnack’s only peer would be August Stramm.

Write a short note on war poets.

In Russian literature, Nikolay Gumilyov’s war poems were assembled in the collection The Quiver
(1916). Alexander Blok’s The Twelve is a culmination of apocalyptic broodings during the war
years. During the First World War, Ilya Ehrenburg became a war correspondent for a St. Petersburg
newspaper. He wrote a series of articles about the mechanized war that later on were also published
as a book, “The Face of War”. His poetry now also concentrated on subjects of war and destruction,
as in “On the Eve”, his third lyrical book. Nikolay Semenovich Tikhonov volunteered for the army
at the outbreak of World War I and served in a hussar regiment; he entered the Red Army in 1918
and was demobilized in 1922. He began writing poetry early; his first collection, Orda (The horde,
1922), “shows startling maturity” and “contains most of the few short poems which have made him
famous.”
Robert H. Ross characterises ‘war poets’ as a subgroup of the Georgian Poetry writers: those who
were in uniform including therefore Robert Graves, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Nichols, Wilfred Owen
and Siegfried Sassoon.
Robert Graves and David Jones both served in the trenches and survived. Graves did not use his
war experience as poetic material, instead recounting it as autobiography in Goodbye to All that,
whereas Jones postponed its use, incorporating it into modernist forms.
In November 1985, a slate memorial was unveiled in Poet’s Corner commemorating 16 poets of the
Great War: Richard Aldington, Laurence Binyon, Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Wilfrid Gibson,
Robert Graves, Julian Grenfell, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Robert Nichols, Wilfred Owen, Herbert
Read, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Sorley and Edward Thomas.

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