War Poets: First World War Poets and Their Impact, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica War Poets: First World War Poets and Their Impact e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! WAR POETS They were the most prolific groups of poets during the war years. The phrase “War Poets” refers to a group of men who fought in the trenches during the First World War. These poets have many aspects in common: - They all took part in the war as soldiers; - They all enrolled enthusiastically when war broke out; - They were all in their late-20s when they enrolled; - They wrote poems in which the war is described as a terrible experience leading to death, suffering and alienation. Most of the War Poets died in the trenches: theirs is the voice of a generation of young people who welcomed the war as a just cause but were then confronted with its inhumanity and the terrible loss it caused. RUPERT BROOKE (1887-1915) SIEGFRIED SASSOON (1886-1967) WILFRED OWEN (1893-1918) 1 RUPERT BROOKE LIFE Rupert Brooke was born in Warwickshire in 1887. He studied in Cambridge, at King’s College, where he started writing poems. His early poetic writings were characterised by the tendency to represent an idyllic view of the English countryside. After a serious nervous breakdown, he travelled to Italy, Germany, North America, New Zealand and the Pacific Islands. He was commissioned into the Royal Naval Division shortly after the outbreak of the First World War. Brooke published his first collection of poems in 1912 with the title of Georgian Poetry, 1911-1912. This title suggests that he belonged to the group of writers and poets “Georgian Poets”, who rejected the didactic style of Victorian poetry and dealt with humble themes with a melancholic and elegiac tone. Brooke’s most famous poetic work is the sonnet collection entitled 1914 & Other Poems, published in 1915, the year of his death. This collection of poems, which express an idealistic and enthusiastic praise for war, made him immediately popular. Brooke died on a hospital ship in Greece in 1915. The obituary which appeared in The Times on the day of his death was written by Winston Churchill. THE SOLDIER This poem is addressed to the readers. With “dust is concealed”, the poet refers to the buried dead soldier. England bore, shaped and make aware the “dust”. This poem is a petrarchan sonnet. Brooke describes England as a person → personification. From the text emerges that England is like a loving mother, heaven, that has sweet landscapes and the gentleness of the people. Death symbolises a return to the eternal flux of things. As England is like a mother, dying at war, for the poet, symbolises returning to his mother’s womb. 2 WILFRED OWEN LIFE Wilfred Owen was born on 18 March 1893 in Owestry, Shropshire, England. He was an english poet noted for his anger at the cruelty and waste of war and his pity for its victims. He also is significant for his technical experiments in assonance, which were particularly influential in the 1930s. Owen was educated at the Birkenhead Institute and matriculated at the University of London; after an illness in 1913 he lived in France. He had already begun to write and, while working as a tutor near Bordeaux, was preparing a book of Minor Poems- in Minor Keys by a Minor, which was never published. These early poems are consciously modeled on those of John Keats; often ambitious, they show enjoyment of poetry as a craft. In 1915 Owen enlisted in the British army. The experience of trench warfare (tecnica di guerra) brought him to rapid maturity; the poems written after January 1917 are full of anger at war’s brutality, an elegiac pity for “those who die as cattle (come bestiame)”, and a rare descriptive power. In June 1917 he was wounded and sent home. While in a hospital near Edinburgh he met the poet Siegfried Sassoon, who shared his feelings about the war and who became interested in his work. Reading Sassoon’s poems and discussing his work with Sassoon revolutionized Owen’s style and his conception of poetry. Despite the plans of well-wishers to find him a staff job, he returned to France in August 1918 as a company commander and was awarded the Military Cross in October. He was killed a week before Armistice Day, on 4 November 1918 in France. Published posthumously by Sassoon, Owen’s single volume of poems contains the most poignant (pungente) English poetry of the war. His collected poems, edited by C. Day-Lewis, were published in 1964; his collected letters, edited by his younger brother Harold Owen and John Bell, were published in 1967. DULCE ET DECORUM EST There was no draft (leva obbligatoria) in the First World War for British soldiers; it was an entirely voluntary occupation, but the British needed soldiers to fight in the war. Therefore, through a well-tuned propaganda machine of posters and poems, the British war supporters pushed young and easily influenced youths into signing up to fight for the glory of England. Several poets, among them Rupert Brook, who wrote the poem ‘The Soldier’ (there is a corner of a foreign field/ that is forever England) used to write poetry to encourage the youth to sign up for the army, often without having any experience themselves! It was a practice that Wilfred Owen personally despised, and in Dulce et Decorum Est, he calls out these false poets and journalists who glorify war. The poem takes place during a slow trudge to an unknown place, which is interrupted by a gas attack. The soldiers hurry to put on their masks, only one of their numbers is too slow and gets consumed by the gas. The final stanza interlocks a personal address to war journalist Jessie Pope with horrifying imagery of what happened to those who ingested an excessive amount of mustard gas. 5 The earliest dated record of this poem is 8. October 1917. It was written in the ballad form of poetry – a very flowing, romantic poetical style, and by using it outside of convention, Owen accentuates the disturbing cadence of the narrative. It is a visceral poem, relying very strongly on the senses, and while it starts out embedded in the horror and in the narrative, by the final stanza, it has pulled back to give a fuller view of the events, thus fully showing the horror of the mustard gas attack. 1. British soldiers would trudge from trench to trench, seeping further into France in pursuit of German soldiers. It was often a miserable, wet walk, and it is on one of these voyages that the poem opens. Immediately, it minimizes the war to a few paltry, exhausted soldiers; although it rages in the background (“till on the haunting flares we turned our backs / and towards our distant rest began to trudge”). Owen uses heavy words to describe their movement – words like “trudge”, “limped”; the first stanza of the poem is a demonstration of pure exhaustion and mind-numbing misery (miseria che rimbambisce). 2. The second stanza changes the pace rapidly. It opens with an exclamation – “Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!” – and suddenly the soldiers are in “an ecstasy of fumbling”, groping for their helmets to prevent the gas from taking them over. Again, Owen uses language economically here: he uses words that express speed, hurry, and almost frantic (frenetico) demand for their helmets. However, one soldier does not manage to fit his helmet on in time. Owen sees him “flound’ring like a man in fire or lime” through the thick-glassed pane of his gas mask. 3. For a brief two lines, Owen pulls back from the events happening throughout the poems to revisit his own psyche. He writes, “In all my dreams,/ before my helpless sight”, showing how these images live on with the soldiers, how these men are tortured by the events of war even after they have been removed from war. There is no evading or escaping war. 4. In the last paragraph, Owen condenses the poem to an almost claustrophobic pace (ritmo): “if in some smothering dreams you too could pace”, and he goes into a very graphic, horrific description of the suffering that victims of mustard gas endured: “froth-corrupted lungs”, “incurable sores”, “the white eyes writhing in his face”. Although the pace of the poem has slowed to a crawl, there is much happening in the description of the torment of the mustard gas victim, allowing for a contrast between the stillness of the background, and the animation of the mustard gas victim. This contrast highlights the description, making it far more grotesque. Owen finishes the poem on a personal address to Jessie Pope: “My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/ To children ardent for some desperate glory, / The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.” Jessie Pope was a journalist who published pro-war poems aiming at encouraging enlistment. The Latin phrase is from Horace, and means, “it is sweet and onorable to die for your country”. 6 . Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs, And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots, But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of gas-shells dropping softly behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time, But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime.— Dim through the misty panes and thick green light, As under a green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,— My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori. Piegati in due, come vecchi accattoni sotto sacchi, con le ginocchia che si toccavano, tossendo come streghe, bestemmiavamo nel fango, fin davanti ai bagliori spaventosi, dove ci voltavamo e cominciavamo a trascinarci verso il nostro lontano riposo. Uomini marciavano addormentati. Molti avevano perso i loro stivali ma avanzavano con fatica, calzati di sangue. Tutti andavano avanti zoppi; tutti ciechi; ubriachi di fatica; sordi anche ai sibili di granate stanche, distanziate, che cadevano dietro. Gas! Gas! Veloci, ragazzi! – Un brancolare frenetico, mettendosi i goffi elmetti appena in tempo; ma qualcuno stava ancora gridando e inciampando, e dimenandosi come un uomo nel fuoco o nella calce... Pallido, attraverso i vetri appannati delle maschere e la torbida luce verde, come sotto un mare verde, l’ho visto affogare. In tutti i miei sogni, prima che la mia vista diventasse debole, si precipita verso di me, barcollando, soffocando, annegando. Se in qualche affannoso sogno anche tu potessi marciare dietro al vagone in cui lo gettammo, e guardare gli occhi bianchi contorcersi nel suo volto, il suo volto abbassato, come un diavolo stanco di peccare; se tu potessi sentire, ad ogni sobbalzo, il sangue che arriva come un gargarismo dai polmoni rosi dal gas, ripugnante come un cancro, amaro come il bolo di spregevoli, incurabili piaghe su lingue innocenti, – amica mia (*), tu non diresti con tale profondo entusiasmo ai figli desiderosi di una qualche disperata gloria, la vecchia Bugia: Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. 7