Tanks, powerful bombs that could rip a man to shreds, poison gas, and other gruesome innovations characterized the First World War. The war left a whole generation of people dubbed “The Lost Generation,” as the war left so many of those who fought in it “shell-shocked,” disillusioned, and full of years of memories of endless bombardments and bloody clashes. These scenes of trench warfare especially bring to mind the trenches of the Western Front. One British soldier who fought in these trenches, Siegfried Sassoon, was as disillusioned as the rest of his generation that experienced the horrors of war and expressed this sentiment through poetry. Through his poem “Attack,” written in the end times of the war, he unflinchingly depicts the horror …show more content…
He experienced the effects of this new industrialized warfare, personally and physically. The year he wrote “Attack,” he was shot in the head mistakenly by a member of his own troops. Previously during his service his little brother had been killed in the trenches, and in 1916 he both risked his life by crossing no-man’s-land in order to rescue other wounded soldiers and managed to take a German trench by himself. He experienced the war to its fullest degree of bloodshed, all the while writing poetry in the vein of “Attack” about this …show more content…
They are “clumsily bowed with bombs and guns and shovels and battle-gear.” The men “jostle,” meeting the “bristling fire.” “Lines of grey, muttering faces, masked with fear” proceed out of the trenches. This scene would be familiar to many readers. Then, the last lines make Sassoon’s own interpretation of the war devastatingly clear. He calls to the scene Hope, “floundering” in mud. The very last words of the poem are “O Jesus, make it stop!” There is no ambiguity about the effect Sassoon meant these words to have on the reader. He is saying that the war is useless now, has dragged on too long, and causes senseless deaths through brutal means. Hope is, quite literally, a non-factor in Sassoon’s view of the
Many soldiers who come back from the war need to express how they feel. Many do it in the way of writing. Many soldiers die in war, but the ones who come back are just as “dead.” Many cadets come back with shell shock, amputated arms and legs, and sometimes even their friends aren’t there with them. So during World War I, there was a burst of new art and writings come from the soldiers. Many express in the way of books, poems, short stories and art itself. Most soldiers are just trying to escape. A lot of these soldiers are trying to show what war is really like, and people respond. They finally might think war might not be the answer. This is why writers use imagery, irony and structure to protest war.
In the history of modern western civilization, there have been few incidents of war, famine, and other calamities that severely affected the modern European society. The First World War was one such incident which served as a reflection of modern European society in its industrial age, altering mankind’s perception of war into catastrophic levels of carnage and violence. As a transition to modern warfare, the experiences of the Great War were entirely new and unfamiliar. In this anomalous environment, a range of first hand accounts have emerged, detailing the events and experiences of the authors. For instance, both the works of Ernst Junger and Erich Maria Remarque emphasize the frightening and inhumane nature of war to some degree – more explicit in Jünger’s than in Remarque’s – but the sense of glorification, heroism, and nationalism in Jünger’s The Storm of Steel is absent in Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front. Instead, they are replaced by psychological damage caused by the war – the internalization of loss and pain, coupled with a sense of helplessness and disconnectedness with the past and the future. As such, the accounts of Jünger and Remarque reveal the similar experiences of extreme violence and danger of World War I shared by soldiers but draw from their experiences differing ideologies and perception of war.
The poet Wilfred Owen was one of many poets who were against war. He reflected this idea of anti-war in his poems, one of his poems called “Anthem for Doomed Youth”, mirrors most aspects of war all put together in this short still deep poem. An example of that would be when the speaker stated,” What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?”(1) The speaker asks is there any sound that marks our soldier’s death other than the sounds of church bell’s which are mostly rung to represent somebody’s absence? Clearly, the speaker sets anger as the tone of the poem through this question to show that soldier’s death is unremarkable.. The speaker compares the soldiers to a “cattle” which illustrates that soldiers are treated more like animals with no feelings and also shows how they are killed indiscriminately in war. Finally the line ironically contains an iambic pentameter which is a natural rhythm for such dark, grim, dull subject. The two novels, The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane, and All Quiet on The Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, both present a similar idea of how soldiers are killed out there in the front comprehensively and the dehumanization of war towards its soldiers. The first novel is set during the Civil War, and it focuses on the psychological aspects of one soldier named Henry Fleming and how his naive thoughts about war constantly change through the course of the novel. The second novel presents the life of a soldier named Paul Baumer and his friends who were faced with the terribleness of war and how severely it affected their lives. The Red badge of Courage and All Quiet on The Western Front are similar in the way of how the main characters develop through the novel to change from naïve and innocent men ...
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.”
From sunrise to sunset, day after day, war demolishes men, cities, and hope. War has an effect on soldiers like nothing else, and sticks with them for life. The damage to a generation of men on both sides of the war was inestimable. Both the novel All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque, and the poem “I Have a Rendezvous with Death,” by Alan Seeger, demonstrate the theme of a lost generation of men, mentally and physically, in war through diction, repetition, and personification.
Autobiographies, diaries, letters, official records, photographs and poems are examples of primary sources from World War One. The two primary sources analyzed in this essay are the poems, “Anthem for Doomed Youth” by Wilfred Owen and “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae. Primary sources are often personal, written from the limited perspective of a single individual. It is very difficult for the author to capture their own personal experience, while incorporating the involvement and effects of other events happening at the same time. Each piece of writing studied describes the author’s perception of the war. Both of the poems intend to show to grave reality of war, which often was not realized until the soldiers reach the frontlines. The poems were both written at battle within two years of each other. However, the stark difference between the two poems is astonishing. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” gives a much different impression than “In Flanders Field” despite the fact that both authors were in the same war and similar circumstances. The first two lines in “In Flanders Fields” “…the poppies blow, Between the crosses, row on row.” are an image o...
World War One had an inevitable effect on the lives of many young and naive individuals, including Wilfred Owen, who, like many others, joined the military effort with the belief that he would find honour, wealth and adventure. The optimism which Owen initially had toward the conflict is emphasised in the excerpt, in which he is described as “a young poet…with a romantic view of war common among the young” (narrator), a view which rapidly changed upon reaching the front. Owen presents responders with an overwhelming exploration of human cruelty on other individuals through acts of war and the clash of individual’s opposed feelings influenced by the experiences of human cruelty. This is presented through the horrific nature of war which the
The title ‘Anthem of Doomed Youth’, is juxtaposed to its real meaning of anthem being something to celebrate and be proud of. The assonance between the ‘Doomed’ and collective noun ‘Youth’ can come as a shock to society as topic of death and youth do not go together. In other words, the soldiers are too young and are already fated to death by enlisting in the war. This highlights how war is cruel as the soldiers are stolen of their youth, entering a battlefield designed to ‘sapt the soldier 's spirit.’ Furthermore, Owen shows that the fallen soldiers themselves will not get a proper burial of “candles,” “pall,” nor “flowers.” Instead, these are substituted with negative imagery “The pallor of girls’ brows” and personification “patient minds” to demonstrate that the thoughts of the ones waiting for the fallen soldiers back home are the closest thing they will have to a funeral. This is epitomised in the personification “bugles calling them from sad shires,” which conveys a nation in mourning back home. Collectively, these poetic devices in “Anthem for the Doomed Youth” shows that the death of the young soldiers negatively affects the people around
Siegfried Sassoon on the other hand in his poem ‘hero’ seeks to reveal the facade and sad irony of the traditional image of the ‘war-hero’. Sassoon joined the army himself motivated by patriotism, but after his first-hand experiences he expressed his views on the ‘gritty realism’ of war through his writing. One of his most applauded pieces of work is his poem ‘the hero’ in which he touches upon a matter close to his heart; the wide gap between the public perception of the soldier fighting for his country and the stark reality of life in the trenches.
As a poet, Wilfred Owens wants to show the effects of warfare from the viewpoint of a soldier during a War. Owens uses his own experience as a fighter to capture the reader’s attention and get across his point. He often uses graphic imagery and words to depict his thoughts about war. Wilfred Owens, poems, “Dulce et Decorum est” and “Anthem for doomed youth” talk blatantly about the effects of warfare on the soldiers, their loved ones, and those who make an ultimate sacrifice by making a statement about the efficacy of war.
He wrote a letter stating, “I have seen and endured the suffering of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust” (24). He used his influence as a soldier and a poet to write so that others may know the atrocities that took place on the battlefront. Hoping that by doing so, he could help bring an end to a war that he believed was “being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it” (Bienen). It was in early 1917, while Sassoon was in London recovering, that he heard a Bishop giving a speech “on the transformative effects of war” (Quinn 24). It was in reaction to this speech that the poem “’They’” was
Today I’m focusing on Wilfred Owen who is also recognized as the greatest English poet of the First World War. Owen volunteered to fight on 21 October 1915. Like many young men, propaganda had gotten the best of him, but he would soon experience first handedly the true horrors of war. Owen wrote of the disillusionment he, like others, felt at the time. He wrote out of his intense personal experience as a soldier and wrote with unrivalled power about the physical, moral and psychological trauma of the First World War. Nothing could have prepared Owens for the shock of war: for life in the trenches, sickness, death.
In the early 20th century, many poets began to undertake a broad literary movement which was a reaction against the Romanticism of the 19th century, the purpose of which was to depict more realistic situations, rather than the more sentimental aspects of the poems that preceded them. The effects of World War I, which lasted from 1914 to 1918, had a great effect on this “modernist” movement. In Siegfried Sassoon’s “A Working Party,” we can begin to see this modern realism through the use of hard, dry, precise description, traditionally unpoetic language, and the juxtaposition of the personal and universal war experience, as an expression of the poet’s views of the harshness and horror of a world war.
'Attack ', by Siegfried Sassoon, written on the First World War, is a poem considered by many to make a lasting impression of the brutality and chaos of war. Sassoon was a strong opposer of the war; after its completion, he went on to lecture on pacifism, and to become involved in the politics linked to that topic. Writing at a time when much of the poetry being written of the war was heavily romanticised, his poetry was criticised by some as "unpatriotic" or found his graphic depictions of war too extreme. His work still sold well, despite this. These graphic depictions are one of the many things that make this poem have such an impact; the imagery is extremely vivid throughout, and everything, down to the structure of the poem itself create
Sassoon shows many examples of how the soldier in this poem gets pulled back into war-like terrors by meaningless things. The soldier is simply sitting in his home yet gets flashbacks of war and it haunts him. In this poem Sassoon is using a soldier as the example of repression as someone who has experienced war and the impacts it has on life after. “The poetic evolution related directly to Sassoon 's war experiences was initially gradual. His poetry became more serious and evocative in the early days of the war, but continued to inhabit the fatal logic of soldierly glory in poetic uniform” Avi Matalon claims (30). Poetry was influenced greatly by World War I and left poets creating new pieces that they never would have imagined