The article ‘No Link Exists’ Item 334, sourced on the Literature and blog series is that of an interesting opinion. The article unfortunately failed to recognise how text and context go hand in hand with one another through War literature. Both WW1 and the Vietnam War. Text is what is written and the context is the interpretation, it is what forms from an event, statement or an idea. In which terms can be fully understood. Today’s entry will be a analysis and breakdown of some famous war poetry and how they have relations between text and context.
A Tragic time of history was The First World War, beginning in 1914 provoked writers and poets alike to write of these times, while some are Pro and some are Anti-War, both genres have the power create an image (whether it good or bad) and tell a story through experiences and creative literary devices. A soldier and poet of the Manchester Regiment during the war,
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It also Owen exposes the horror of the war and exposed many people back home what it was really like, ‘Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots’, this evokes a picture in the audience's mind and exposes the context of text by showing off the true nature of conditions. Being home and not at war people often though that these men were fighting, unharmed and pictured them as strong men. ‘But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;’ the text displays imagery and figures of these men fighting for their country, near death and despite of what is wrong. Pro War, in comparison to this anti war poetry is a more truthful eye opening experience of war. Owen died in the war. Shot in action a week before the war came to an end. Owen was the first poet to write about the true horrors of war, mor can be found in his journals which were found and later
There are many things in this world that are impossible to understand without first hand experience.This can be especially irritating for people who have the knowledge, but see everyone else with the wrong idea. Philip Larkin and Wilfred Owen show this in their poems about the common misconception of war glorification. Through imagery and the use of similes, they explain what it's really like for a person to go into battle. To outsiders, fighting in war is a noble cause worthy of envy and praise, but from the inside perspective the only thing war does is take away the innocence of
Tim O’Brien states in his novel The Things They Carried, “The truths are contradictory. It can be argued, for instance, that war is grotesque. But in truth war is also beauty. For all its horror, you can’t help but gape at the awful majesty of combat” (77). This profound statement captures not only his perspective of war from his experience in Vietnam but a collective truth about war across the ages. It is not called the art of combat without reason: this truth transcends time and can be found in the art produced and poetry written during the years of World War I. George Trakl creates beautiful images of the war in his poem “Grodek” but juxtaposes them with the harsh realities of war. Paul Nash, a World War I artist, invokes similar images in his paintings We are Making a New World and The Ypres Salient at Night. Guilaume Apollinaire’s writes about the beautiful atrocity that is war in his poem “Gala.”
The three narratives “Home Soil” by Irene Zabytko, “Song of Napalm” by Bruce Weigl, and “Dulce et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen all have the same feelings of war and memory, although not everyone experiences the same war. Zabytko, Weigl, and Owen used shifting beats, dramatic descriptions, and intense, painful images, to convince us that the horror of war far outweighs the devoted awareness of those who fantasize war and the memories that support it.
Although the aftermath of World War I was devastating to many, it did bring the literature world some of the most important work of the modernist era. Many of the writers were directly or indirectly affected by the war and their writing certainly showed this. Each writer’s work shows a view of the war from a different perspective. However, what they most have in common is they way they paint the war in a negative light. T.S. Elliot writes his poem The Wasteland to show the after affects of the war on everyone while Sassoon write They to show the after affects on the soldier. In the essay, these writers and their poems will be discussed to show how they similarly reacted to the event of World War I in reference to the themes of their poems and how differently they use those themes.
He starts the poem describing his fellow soldiers and himself as beggers, knock-kneed, coughing like ugly old women, cursed through a wet and horrible earth; feeling hatred towards the earth. As they began to march towards their distant rest point. Owen states “Many had lost their boots, but limped on, blood-shod;” saying how some were missing parts of their uniforms, mainly their boots and as they marched on the blood on their cuts had clotted creating a protecting shield in substitute for their boots. As they moved on they were tired, so tired Owen describes the feeling as “…blind; drunk with fatigue”. Moved past the Five-Nine attacks they were then attacked by gas bombs. When Owen states “Gas! GAS! Quick boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling, fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;” he shows us how even when they soldiers only had enough energy to keep walking they had to dig deep and find the strength to place their gas masks on to get through the gas attack. While going through that Owen tells us how not everyone had enough strength to get their mask on and all he heard was yelling out and as he watched one soldier through his dim, misty, thick green light as he was drowning on dry land from poison; “as under a green sea, I saw him drowning”. Owen goes on to outline how this soldier plunges at him for help
“When the rich wage war it’s the poor who die”, Jean-Paul Sartre, a prominent Marxist literary critic, existentialist philosopher and author stated in his 1951 drama, The Devil and the Good Lord. Wilfred Owen’s poetry is a profound protest at this fact. Owens poetry was shaped by the horrors of the first world war, he enlisted as a naïve young man with dreams of heroic deeds and “desperate glory” only to be exposed to the realities of what war really entailed. War opened his eyes to the “truth” of the world if looked at through a Marxist lens. He abhorred the patriotic poetry that gave a warped view of the war and wrote many poems depicting the horror and helplessness, he aimed to capture the pity of war in his poetry. Through this we can
This is in comparison to Owen’s other poems, like, S.I.W, which is five stanzas long. The uniformity of war is indicated through this and again reinforces the idea of regular success for the guns. Along with the length of each verse, the rigid construction used in each verse also complies with the regularity of war as well as, possibly suggesting the pity of war and the unchanging fate of the soldiers.
In accordance with war literature, this allows the stigma and opinions surrounding the war from a particular state’s perspective to remain intact. Thus further reinforcing the power of poets propaganda.
In conclusion, Owen only loosely bases the structure of this free-verse poem on the iambic pentameter. The comparison of the past and the present emphasizes on what the soldier has lost in war. There are several recurring themes shown throughout the poem, such as reminiscence and sexual frustration. Reminiscence is shown through the references to his life before the war, while sexual frustration is depicted through the unlikeliness of a girl ever loving him due to his disability. The message that Owen is trying to get across to his readers is the falseness of war propaganda and pacifism – what war can do to one - and he conveys his ideas using various themes, language and through the free-verse structure of this poem.
The tone is bitter and intense in a realistic way. It is achieved by the vivid and gruesome images in the poem. Wilfred Owen 's use of imagery in this poem is by depicting emotional, nightmarish, and vivid words to capture the haunting encounters of WWI that soldiers went through. In the first stanza, Owen depicts his fellow soldiers struggling through the battlefield, but their terrible health conditions prevent them from their strong actions in the war. When Owen says, “Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, knock-kneed, coughing like hags” (lines 1-2). This provides the readers with an unexpected view and appearance of soldiers, as they usually picture as strong, noble, and brawny-looking men. Soldiers sacrifice themselves to fight for their country and are exhausted from their unhealthy lifestyle. In lines 7-8, “Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots of gas-shells dropping softly behind,” they have lost the facade of humanity and their bodies are all wearied and weak on their march. This reveals a glimpse at the soldiers’ actions, as well as inferring to a psychological effect of the war. Then in line 5, “Men marched asleep,” the author is making abnormality to be one of the major purposes of the war, that it
Before going into the analysis of the poem, some background on Wilfred Owen may be helpful in understanding the meanings behind his poem. Owen did not want to enlist due to religious convictions. He came from an extremely Christian background that made his views on war conflict with his patriotic views, but British propaganda also made him feel obliged to join the military and defend his country (War Poetry). Owen believed killing others was wrong because of his beliefs in Christianity, which is evident in some of his poetry. He believed a man should defend his country which led him to fight and kill, and his experiences radiate through his cynical and critical views on the war (War Poetry). Owen tried to use his poems to impress upon people the impact, grotesqueness, and heedlessness of war. In Anthem for Doomed Youths, Owen forces the reader to look at the deaths the soldiers must endure, and the pain ...
Writers' Attitudes to War in Anthem for Doomed Youth by Wilfred Owen and The Dead by Rupert Brooke
In this comparative piece on these two anti-war sonnets, from World War One and the Battle of Vinegar Hill, I will attempt to explain how each writer displays the particular event in their poetry. Both these poems have irregular rhyme schemes and around 10 syllables on each line. The aim of these poems is to remind us to respect those men who lost their lives in battle, and to how disgraceful war really is.
Wilfred Owen wrote “Strange Meeting” in the spring or early summer of 1918 and stands in the forefront of Owen’s achievements. During this time, World War One is at the peak of its destruction, and is seen as the most horrendous out of the two Great Wars because of trench warfare. This poem explores a strange meeting and an even stranger fate for the innocent victims of war. Today, we study famous poets of the First World War such as John McCrae, Alan Seeger, and Isaac Rosenberg, because they captivate the horrors of war and help today’s society realize the mass destruction “titanic wars had groined” (3). I believe I fell in love with Owen’s poem because it doesn’t glorify war or make it out to be heroic. It accurately illustrates the cruel and inhumane experiences of soldiers during the wars, and the many ‘strange friends’ that managed to ‘escape’ to death in
Owen’s poem ‘Strange Meeting’ shows the horrors of war through dramatic and memorable imagery that allow us to feel deep pity for the young soldiers, whether it’s physical or the soldier’s inner mental pain. For example, “They will be swift with swiftness of the tigress” (line 29) is a metaphor describing the violent attacks during the war. Meanwhile, “With a thousand fears that vision's face was grained” (line 11) gives a clear picture of what the dead soldier’s face was like, bringing pity to the reader. These images are used to show the immense harm and the brutality of war and its effect on men. The dead soldier describes the blood that clogged their “chariot-wheels” (line 35) showing his regret for participating in the war now that he was aware of its ugliness. Thus, when the soldier states that “the foreheads of men have bled where no wounds were” (line 42), he truly expresses the cruelty of war and how it leaves men with scarred souls. All of these images highlight the pure pain of war.