Writers in their century

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Wartime has inspired writers who tried to understand meaning of war. Many of them took part in the war effort and used their experience on the battlefield to write essays, novels, or poems. They either expressed their strong patriotic feelings or their disillusionment. As long as there has been war, there have been writers trying to understand it, turning battlefield horrors into narrative, trying to make something useful out of chaos. Poetry is a genre of literature who really helps expressing feelings, poets are really talented by passing emotions and explaining with harmony and evidence. So how did poets face the First World War? Here are three poems to illustrate this notion: The Soldier by Rupert Brooke, Dulce Et Decorum Est from Wilfred Owen, and 1915 by Robert Graves.

This first one, written at the beginning of the war, can be regarded as patriotic poetry aiming at encouraging people to join the conflict and enroll in the army. The poem by Rupert Brooke is a sonnet. Indeed the soldier in the poem thinks that England is the best country whose soil is superior to that of the other nations, that is why he believes that the soil of a foreign nation will be made better if he dies abroad. He will add a “richer dust” to the earth. England is viewed as a kind of fertilizer which would improve the quality of the foreign land. The soldier is extremely thankful for everything that England has given him and he’s ready to give his life for England. In the poem, the poet evokes harmony with the nature by laying the emphasis on elements such as the air, the rivers, and the sun which refer to the notion of universality as a consequence he also expresses feelings of happiness and bliss in the last lines of the poem even comparing England to heaven.

Wilfred Owen was an English poet and soldier known for his realistic war poems about World War I, insisting on the cruelty and horror of the war (unlike Rupert Brooke’s idealistic war poems). In England Wilfred Owen is considered as the greatest First World War poet. The following poem, written at the end of the war, mentions all the atrocities of the war and views the war in a more pessimistic light. It is probably the best-known World War I poem. So the poet blames the reader for lying by depicting war in an idealistic, romantic way which is different from reality, and finally he resents the encouragement given to innocent children that is to say naive young men that are talked into fighting by the promess of glory.

Here's a poem called 1915 that was written  by Robert Graves, one of the foremost poets of World War I. Indeed in 1914, Graves interrupts his studies to engage himself in the British army. He became a captain in a regiment. In 1916 he takes part of the battle of the Somme. Seriously wounded by a fragment of shell (lung perforation), he is by mistake declared dead while he was in fact recovering in England. The main themes of 1915 are time, love, nature, This poem is written in the past. Graves tells us how he watched time passing slowly during the war, probably here in 1915 where he was fighting between La Bassée & Béthune, which are two French towns in the North of the country. Robert Graves precisely evokes the four seasons, how he perceived them from line 3 to line 6. Love invites itself in the middle of the poem. The poem seems to be an open letter to the author’s lover: his everything that he most lacked. He misses his lover but also his country. He finds comfort in what he calls his English wood which are pictures, books, music probably from England. He finally speaks very little of the horrors of the war. The “green & black ocean” can be related to the gas attacks or can be seen as an antithesis. It is not the first image that comes to our mind when we think about ocean and sea. It is an image almost glaucous with dark feelings. We can detect another surprising antithesis when Robert Graves concludes his poem by “and peace and all that’s good”. Even in the war the soldier succeeds to find peace.

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