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War Poets

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41 views5 pages

War Poets

Uploaded by

pkrk7xk7pj
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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THE POETS OF WAR

From these last verses we can enclose the feeling


felt by the poet soldiers who fought in the First
World War from whose experience he brought out
numerous works that constitute the masterpieces of
English literature of the war type.
The theme of war was not new to the British: we
remember the Beowulf saga but also in romanticism
with Wordsworth or Byron.
Important, however, is the work of George Gordon
Byron, who lived on his skin the experience of war,
of which he was a victim: in 1823 he joined the
pro-Hellenic association in support of the Greek
war of independence against the Ottoman Empire.

“Soldiers are dreamers; when the guns begin


They think of firelit homes, clean beds, and wives.”
The Byronian vein was joined by the testimonies of
the so-called "War Poets", or soldiers-poets who
fought alongside England in the First World War,
and whose experience they wrote in their works that
became fundamental to approach literary themes
combined with the psychological and emotional
analysis experienced in the battle. Many of these
poets died during the world war, such as Owen and
Sorley, while others managed to survive but were
marked both physically and psychologically for a
lifetime, as evidenced by the life and works of the
great poet Sigfried Sassoon.
The themes and styles are very different: from
Brooke's patriotic feeling to Sassoon's protest-satire
against war. These English poet-soldiers have the
particularity of dealing with war in a very realistic,
concrete way, without hiding their basic idea that
underlines the uselessness, futility of war that only
overshadows death, despair, cries for help and the
will to annihilate the other. Such themes also
influenced Italian poets as D'annunzio who will write
works on exaltation that exalt the conquest of Libya
or Tommaso Marinetti that in the Manifesto of
futurism that is in the wake of the patriotic feeling
already encountered in the war poets that outlines the
image of war as a place of vitality as well as the only
hygiene in the world.
But the tragic experience of war is also witnessed in the works of Giuseppe Ungaretti, emblem of the poet-soldier
who writes while working in the trenches and tries to revive the emotional conditions experienced in those
situations.

All the work of Ungaretti, which follows the


example of the great English poet-soldiers, It was
in short a "rational" attempt to justify, but also
and above all to condemn, a war system designed
in order to destroy and annihilate the "enemies".

It showed itself as the ongoing representation of


the human drama, of that desire that
characterizes the human being since the
beginning: the will to kill.

It is precisely this that the works of the War


Poets, and in particular the poems of Sassoon,
are the bearers: of the desire to be reborn, to
change in the face of absurdity towards an event
like war

because of the tragic conditions in which they lived and to which they were subjected in the trenches, and
for which the only way of salvation was, as Sasoon points out with subtle irony, rum, which helped to forget
and confine the experience of war in the oblivion of history.
The images of the conflict are so strong and so vivid that they remain etched in the mind of the Poet.
SASSOON AND UNGARETTI
COMPARISON
HAVE you forgotten yet? ...
For the world's events have rumbled on since those gagged days, Si sta come
Like traffic checked a while at the crossing of city ways:
And the haunted gap in your mind has filled with thoughts that flow
Like clouds in the lit heavens of life; and you're a man reprieved to go,
d'autunno
Taking your peaceful share of Time, with joy to spare.
But the past is just the same - and War's a bloody game... sugli alberi
Have you forgotten yet? ...
Look down, and swear by the slain of the War that you'll never forget.
Do you remember the dark months you held the sector at Mametz - le foglie
The nights you watched and wired and dug and piled sandbags on
parapets?
Do you remember the rats; and the stench
Of corpses rotting in front of the front-line trench -
And dawn coming, dirty-white, and chill with a hopeless rain?
Do you ever stop and ask, 'Is it all going to happen again?'
Do you remember that hour of din before the attack -
And the anger, the blind compassion that seized and shook you then
As you peered at the doomed and haggard faces of your men?
Do you remember the stretcher-cases lurching back
With dying eyes and lolling heads - those ashen-gray
Masks of the lads who once were keen and kind and gay?
Have you forgotten yet? ...
Look up, and swear by the slain of the war that you'll never forget!

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