Materia: Letteratura inglese, Appunti di Inglese

Scarica Materia: Letteratura inglese e più Appunti in PDF di Inglese solo su Docsity! THE WAR POETS When the First World War broke out, thousands of young men volunteered for military service; most of them regarded the conflict as an adventure undertaken for noble ends. It was not until the Battle of the Somme in 1916 that this sense of pride and exhilaration was replaced by doubt and disillusionment. For the Soldiers, life in the trenches was hell because of the rain and mud, the decaying bodies that rats fed on, the repeated bombings and the use of poison gas in warfare. The common soldiers improvised verses which, precisely because they were rough, genuine, obscene songs of the trenches, did not reach the ears of the literate people living comfortably at home. There was a group of poets who volunteered to fight in the Great War. They managed to represent modern warfare in a realistic and unconventional way, awakening the conscience of the reader. These poets became known as the “War Poets”. Rupert Brooke Rupert Brooke was born in 1887 and was educated at Rugby School and then went to King’s College, Cambridge. He was a good student and athlete, and became popular for his handsome looks. He joined up at the beginning of the conflict but saw little combat since he contracted blood poisoning and died in April 1915, on the Aegean Sea. He was buried on the Greek Island of Skyros. Brooke’s reputation as a War Poet is linked to five sonnets of 1914, in which he advanced the idea that war is clean and cleansing. He expressed an idealism about the conflict, in which the only thing that can suffer is the body, and even death is seen as a reward. Traditional not only in form, his poems how a sentimental attitude which was completely lost in the brutal turn that war poetry took in the works of the other War Poets. The publication of Brooke’s war sonnets coincided with his death in 1915 and made him immensely popular. THE SOLDIER If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam; A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven. DULCE ET DECORUM EST (Wilfred Owen) 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. Wystan Hugh Auden Wystan Hugh Auden was born in York in 1907 to middle-class Anglican parents. He was a voracious reader: his early reading consists of fairy tales, myths and legends, but also books about psychology and technical works on mining engineering. While studying at Oxford, Auden became familiar with Modernist poetry and he was the leader of the so- called “Oxford poets”, a group of young intellectuals who continue the artistic revolution started by T.S.Eliot, James Joyce. As a young man, he was deeply committed to social and political issues. In 1928 he went to Berlin, where he witnessed the rise of Nazism. During the Spanish Civil war he served as an ambulance driver. He expressed solidarity with the Jews persecuted by Hitler after 1933: in 1935 he married the German writer Thomas Mann’s daughter, Erika, only to provide her with a British passport so she could escape from Nazi Germany. He was homosexual. Homosexuality was condemned by the standards of his religious upbringing and was regarded as a criminal offense in England. In 1939 he moved to New York. In 1940 he began teaching in New York and published his best volume of the decade, “Another Time”. From then on his social poetry was to be anti-ideological, anti-political. It was at about this same time that he returned to the religion of his youth, Anglicanism. In 1948 he won the Pulitzer Prize-winning for “The Age of Anxiety”. In 1946 Auden became a citizen of the USA, and in 1956 he was elected Professor of Poetry at Oxford. He died of a heart attack after giving a poetry reading in Vienna in 1973. At the beginning of his career, Auden was deeply influenced by Freud and psychoanalysis but thought about psychological models in relation to the customs and rituals of an entire society, rather than exclusively with reference to the personal history of the individual. Another important influence in this period was that of Karl Marx. His approach took for granted the engagement of the individual with history, in order to continually question the social and political climate in which one lived. A second phase in Auden’s poetry started with his move to America in 1939 and his withdrawal from political commitment. Auden’s description of the Thirties as a “low dishonest decade” reveals his disillusionment with political events such as the Republican defeat in Spain, the Moscow purge trials ordered by Stalin and the Soviet-German non-aggression pact of 1939. He developed a style that refused identification with a sigle poetic culture or nation. He came to believe that improvement must begin with the self, not within society. Auden’s themes are various. He deals with love, trying to achieve a definition of what true love is. He often implies that love cannot be achieved without sorrow. Modern suffering, including unfaithfulness, sickness, the passing of time, greed and religious doubt, is another theme which Auden highlighted in some of his poems. The theme of death. Politics, social concerns and citizenship are other central issues. Also Refugee Blues deals with the problem of citizenship faced by Jews in America, when they escaped from Germany. The horrors of war and totalitarianism. The theme of the quest recurs in both the earlier and later periods. In the English period the quest is for a new society and a new self. Later on it becomes a quest for a new life. Auden expresses hope for the future, valuing the freedom that comes from recognizing one’s true condition whatever the circumstances are. Auden’s use of language made him an experimenter all his life. He emphasized the popularizing function of poetry. He used free verse, metre, rhyme and many forms, including sonnets and odes but also simple popular forms such as ballads and songs. His independent lyrics often start in medias res. Auden believed that the poet’s task was to act as a public voice, to analyze the social, political and economic problems, to support the causes for freedom against tyranny. Another Time. It contains some of Auden’s most famous poems. The period of its composition covered the eve and the beginning of World War II, the moment when the poet decided to leave England to emigrate to the United States. The title is symbolic: the poet entered “another time” through the exile which he shared with many other refugees and that would eventually lead to his becoming an American citizen. The poems are less radically political than those of the first period and are organized into three sections: I “People and Places”, the poet deals with the theme of and the relationship between man and nature; II “Lighter Poems” may astonish readers with their light comic tone and domesticity; III “Occasional Poems”, celebrates the death of great figures like Freud and Yeats. REFUGEES BLUES Say this city has ten million souls, Some are living in mansions, some are living in holes: Yet there's no place for us, my dear, yet there's no place for us. Once we had a country and we thought it fair, Look in the atlas and you'll find it there: We cannot go there now, my dear, we cannot go there now. In the village churchyard there grows an old yew, Every spring it blossoms anew; Old passports can't do that, my dear, old passports can't do that. The consul banged the table and said: 'If you've got no passport, you're officially dead'; But we are still alive, my dear, but we are still alive. Went to a committee; they offered me a chair; Asked me politely to return next year: But where shall we go today, my dear, but where shall we go today? Came to a public meeting; the speaker got up and said: 'If we let them in, they will steal our daily bread'; He was talking of you and me, my dear, he was talking of you and me. Thought I heard the thunder rumbling in the sky; It was Hitler over Europe, saying: 'They must die'; We were in his mind, my dear, we were in his mind. Saw a poodle in a jacket fastened with a pin, Saw a door opened and a cat let in: But they weren't German Jews, my dear, but they weren't German Jews. Went down the harbour and stood upon the quay, Saw the fish swimming as if they were free: Only ten feet away, my dear, only ten feet away. Walked through a wood, saw the birds in the trees; They had no politicians and sang at their ease: They weren't the human race, my dear, they weren't the human race. Dreamed I saw a building with a thousand floors, A thousand windows and a thousand doors; Not one of them was ours, my dear, not one of them was ours. Stood on a great plain in the falling snow; Ten thousand soldiers marched to and fro: Looking for you and me, my dear, looking for you and me. OUT OF THE BLUE