What is war

poetry?

The power of war

poetry
Jon Stallworthy edited an anthology of war
poetry and describes the emotive force of the
poems :
'POETRY', Wordsworth reminds us, 'is the
spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings', and
there can be no area of human experience that
has generated a wider range of powerful feelings
than war: hope and fear; exhilaration and
humiliation; hatred - not only for the enemy, but
also for generals, politicians, and war-profiteers;
love - for fellow soldiers, for women and children
left behind, for country (often) and cause

What is war
poetry?

War Poetry could be described as being:

a) Poems which concentrate on the
subject of war
b) Poems which are written during a war
that seems to have a noticeable
influence on the poet.
Of these two, 'a' would be widely
accepted by most as a standard
definition of the genre.

Why write poetry about

WW1?
The First World War
has been described
as Britain's
'Vietnam', where
the true horror of
War touched
everyone and
everything in the
country, breaking
through the class
barrier and
irreversibly altering
the social structure
of the nation.

The poetry represents

an overwhelming
feeling of futility, in
that so many lives
were wasted for such
little gain. Unlike the
Second World War,
which more easily
falls into the 'just war'
definition of right
versus wrong, the
First World War
appears as a conflict
with aims that were
quickly lost,
degenerating to a war
of attrition in
unbelievable

Depicting the horror

of war
The War was dehumanising. It brought home how quickly and
easily mankind could be reduced to a state lower than animals. Pat
Barker, in her novel Regeneration(1992), reflects on the War's
terrible reversal of expectations:
The Great Adventure. They'd been mobilized into holes in the
ground so constricted they could hardly move. And the Great
Adventure (the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories
they'd devoured as boys) consisted of crouching in a dugout,
waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the
way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity,
and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known.

The draft Preface to Owens collection of poems

was found among his papers after his death

This book is not about heroes. English

Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them.
Nor is it about deeds or lands, nor
anything about glory, honour,
dominion or power,
except War.
Above all, this book is not concerned
with Poetry. The subject of it is War,
and the pity of War. The Poetry is in
the pity.
Yet these elegies are not to this
generation,
This is in no sense consolatory.
They may be to the next.
All the poet can do to-day is to warn.
That is why the true Poets must be
truthful.
If I thought the letter of this book
would last,
I might have used proper names; but
if the spirit of it survives Prussia, --

It is the vision of some of the

war's poets that has dominated
the popular image of what WW1
meant to those who fought in it
and lived through it.

The war poets

documentary questions
- According to the commentator, what
contributed to the large numbers of
casualties and mortalities?
- Who was the stereotypical war poet
at the beginning of the 20th century?
What was there role in the war, what
background did they usually have?
- What do you think one commentator
means when he states that they
were not 20th century poets until
they stepped into battle and
experienced the bombardments and
mass slaughter of The Great War?

-https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=f3-qSV6zPDE