War Poetry

Starting in the early 1960s, Tony Harrison’s career seemed, by the end of the 1980s, to reach a highpoint with  V. Intertwining private and public within what he once likened to “a shared intimacy” , Harrison had until then written extensively about his family, the breach between his working-class upbringing and his education which gave him a sense of estrangement.
  Then in March 1991, Harrison addressed the First Gulf War with “Initial Illumination” and “A Cold Coming”, published on the front pages of The Guardian. Harrison’s focus shifts towards a distant reality. Harrison finds words, thanks partly to a re-semanticisation of the Eliot intertext (“a cold coming”), to articulate “some of the speechless events of our worst century” . This paper thus offers to investigate to what extent they are a renewal of Harrison’s poetic--a demonstration of his re-birth as a war poet, through a turning-away from the personal and the local, poeticising crucial events taking place in the wider world.

The horrors of the World War 1 found their expression through many of the poems written by poets during that time. Two such poets were Isaac Rosenberg and Siegfried Sassoon. They dealt with varying issues related to the war and its effects, and not just the death and misery accompanying it. This paper takes an analytic approach in breaking down the symbolism and interpretation in their poems.

This text deals with the problem of the reception of the poetry by Dorta Jagić, a contemporary Croatian poet, in relation to the category of a literary generation. The text provides a short panorama of Croatian poetry in the nineties – a decade of crucial historical changes that had a great impact on the poetics of writers who like Dorta Jagić, debuted in that time. In the nineties, the poetry was predominantly focused on the topics conected with Yugoslav civil wars and the reality of life in Croatia after the breakup of Yugoslavia. The most common model is a so-called stvarnosno pjesništvo, primarily mimetic and neo-existential. Dorta Jagić's poems are noticeably distinct from that mainstream poetics what entails the poet's specific position in her generation, but basing on the criticism and rewievs her poetry can be classified as distinctive rather than marginal.

Eliot's reading and bereavements during the Great War were to haunt him for much of his life and are still evident in "Four Quartets".  Some images recur, partly because they were saturated, as he put it, with feelings too obscure for him even to know quite what they were.

Whilst Bakhtin’s core chapter from The Dialogic Imagination concerns itself with an exploration of the distinctive development of the novel, the 1938 essay ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’ also offers us abundant means of clearing space for a fresh look at other areas of literature; as he himself points out: “the chronotope is developed in different ways in the various genres”. My article, therefore, examines concepts of the “artistic chronotope” in the trench lyric and examines representations of temporality within the unique site-specific artwork of the Great War canon. Central to this discussion is Bakhtin’s own definition:
“In the literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one carefully thought-out, concrete whole. Time, as it were, thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history.”
The paper engages with this notion and Bakhtin’s wider descriptions of chronotopic form in terms of the poetry of Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon; as well as some of the lesser-known poets of the time, like Eleanor Farjeon. I attempt to set this discussion within the critical, historical and theoretical contexts of the period in order to present the Great War canon as one engaged with unique forms of temporal-spatial articulation.

Complete lecture for this paper - https://youtu.be/iBjHaBHO_qU

In India during the Post-Independence Era; a period of colossal chaos, Sahir struggled to align his stance and literary point of view. Interestingly, rather than going to extremes, Sahir chose the middle path. He kept himself aloof from becoming a complete advocate of revolution or love and chose to express the anguish of both; the personal and the political.

One of the most surprising connections of the American Revolutionary era emerged at the very beginning of the war between the African American poet Phillis Wheatley and the commander in chief of the American forces, George Washington. Wheatley's impact on Washington, though subtle, may well have contributed to one of the most important changes in his life.

"Men Who March Away (Song of the Soldiers)" was written by Thomas Hardy, a poet who had never experienced the war first-hand. Alongside other famous authors of the age, he was asked by the British Government to contribute to the work of the War Propaganda Bureau by writing patriotic poems celebrating the British soldier, and at a meeting held in Wellington House in London, Hardy along with other British poets became attached to the British propaganda. “Men Who March Away (Song of the Soldiers)” was published on 9th September, just a week after the authors’ meeting at Wellington House. The poem that has two titles which are “Men Who March Away” and “Song of the Soldiers” and two intentions, presents us with the perspective of a soldier and an onlooker simultaneously. If one reads the speaker as a soldier, the writing becomes a manipulative propagandist poem; by contrast, understanding the speaker as an onlooker changes the style and reproduces the poem as an example of anti-war writing. In this article, I will apply Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of “double voiced discourse” to highlight the simultaneously contrasting messages of the poem.

Πολλοί αξιόλογοι έλληνες ποιητές-μεταφραστές και μελετητές ασχολήθηκαν με τον Χαίλντερλιν καθ’ οιονδήποτε τρόπο (μεταφράσεις ποιημάτων, μελετήματα, σχολιασμοί, μεταφράσεις έργων που αναφέρονται στον ποιητή, ποιήματα εμπνευσμένα από την προσωπικότητά του κ.λπ.), επιπλέον μεγάλα ποιητικά έργα στην ελληνική γλώσσα εμφανίζουν επιδράσεις από τον μεγάλο γερμανό ποιητή. Η παρούσα εισήγηση στοχεύει στο να αναπαραστήσει τον Χαίλντερλιν των ελλήνων ποιητών-μεταφραστών στη διάρκεια της Γερμανικής Κατοχής ή αργότερα με αναφορά σε αυτήν.

Cantos 72-73 were written and partly published in Italian in 1944-45 and not included in The Cantos during Pound's lifetime on account of their incendiary character. This paper (1991) offers an English translation of both cantos  with detailed annotations. It also includes translations of Italian drafts for futher Italian cantos, tentatively numbered 74-75 but abandoned by Pound, who retrieved some of these notes (from memory) in the Pisan cantos. A discussion of the background and genesis of the Italian cantos and drafts contextualizes Pound's remarkable foray into writing verse in Italian. A revised and  updated version of the translation of, and notes for, Cantos 72-73 is included in my book Ezra Pound, Italy, and The Cantos (Clemson U.P.,, 2020), pp. 168-95.

This study examines Wilfred Owen’s The Parable of the Old Man and the Young in light of its relation
to Quran and Bible. Encircled by devastating atmospehere of World War I, Owen compares the old
parable of prophet Abraham’s sacrifying his own son and the current affair of European people slaying
each other in the war. Even though Prophet Abraham does not cut his son’s throat at the end, descendants
of Isaac are now slaughtering themselves in Owen’s poetry. Yet this comparison is problematic because
the sacrified one is Isaac while Islam recognizes him as Ishmael who is the ancestor of Muslims
according to Judaism and Christianity. In Bible, the covenant given to Jews by God will be carried out
for the descendants of Isaac and Ishmael becomes the Gentiles. By comparing the same parable in both
Quran and Bible, this study offers one of the original causes behind wars which is still spilling blood
between Jews-Muslims and presents a new ethical reading to Owen’s poetry.
Key Words: World War I, Owen, Abraham, Isaac, Ishmael, Sacrifice, Israel, Palestine.

Siegfried Sassoon demonstrates a stark difference in his approach to war
in his poetry. In this regard, his poetry can be divided into two: his poetry before
the war and his poetry after the war. Sassoon experienced a radical transformation
from a patriotic stance into an anti-war discourse in his attitude toward the war
under the strong influence of his personal experiences of the war. In this context,
this study will seek to analyze Sassoon’s pre-war poetry and his poetry reflecting
trench warfare, in particular his poems, ‚Absolution,‛ ‚The Effect,‛ ‚Suicide in the
Trenches,‛ and ‚The Dug-Out‛ in the light of Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse. This analysis will ultimately reveal how a nationalistic discourse may easily turn into an anti-nationalistic discourse contingent on first-hand experience as in
the case of Siegfried Sassoon.

Victorian poets were well aware of the modern condition, the impossibility of returning to the traditions of the past. However, this did not prevent these poets from looking critically at history and weaving the past into poems; in fact, many Victorian poets used historical events as the framework for their poems. By creating historical vignettes, Victorians enter moments in history to create their own versions of epic-style poetry. Bishop terms these "spots of time" as "single events" in personal or national history, but this paper argues that Wordsworth's contemporaries and the poets that came after him refer to singular events in history. The importance of such spots of time allow readers to, in a sense, insert themselves into a moment in time that has been preserved in poems that mythologize spots of time, that create epics from the authors' own time. These mini-epics represent an attempted return to Homeric poetry that tells a story about a momentous event in time, very often a war or postwar scene from the distant past or the more recent past. Felicia Hemans's "The Wife of Asdrubal," Emily Pfeiffer's "The Fight at Rorke's Drift," and Alfred Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade" are three such mini-epics; Hemans shows a glimpse of the aftermath of the fall of Carthage to the Roman Empire while Pfeiffer and Tennyson provide insights into two hard-fought British battles against the Zulu and in the Crimea, respectively. Though the poems are remarkably different moments, their authors' use of history and the mini-epic show a distinctly Victorian preoccupation with the history and culture of war and the forms used to express such preoccupation.

Abstract in English: The article explores, from a both philosopical and philological point of view, some major European sources of Foscolo's masterpiece "Dei Sepolcri": Haller's "Die Ewigkeit", Blair's "The Grave", Gray's "Elegy", Hervey's "Meditations among the tombs", Delille's "Jardins". It also reconstructs Foscolo's implementation in the poem of his interpretation of reality as "duality of being" and "dissonant harmony"

"...phrases such as ‘hurly-burly’ (toto properari), ‘year in, year out’ (quotannis) and my favourite, ‘breathing room’ (requiem spatiumque), all of which sound commonplace to us, but which haven’t before appeared in a major translation (though Fitzgerald has ‘a breathing space’ for the latter)..."

In the earlier stages, the war culture is predicated on patriotism and the glory of dying in the battle. British poets Rupert Brooke and Rudyard Kipling employed their unique voice in their poetry as an instrument of war propaganda to manipulate the society. The poem "The Soldier" (1914) by Brooke carries the idea of how divine it is to fight for the motherland or how people will be rewarded after they die in the war. Similarly, Rudyard Kipling calls soldiers to fight, focuses on the de-structiveness of the enemy and create the sense of that England need to protect itself from this devastating enemy in his poem "For All We Have and Are"(1914). This study aims to analyse how both poets employ war propaganda in disguise of fighting for the nation, while they hide the dark consequences of the war in the background of their poetry.

המאמר בוחן את כתיבתו הענפה יחסית של יהודה עמיחי על מפקדו חיים לקסברגר (דיקי) שנפל בקרבות בנגב במלחמת השחרור. מוות זה שעמיחי החל לכתוב עליו בשנות החמישים והתייחס אליו אף בספרו האחרון "פתוח סגור פתוח", הוא זיכרון טראומטי שעמיחי עיבד באופנים שונים בשירה ובפרוזה. בעוד השירים על דיקי מבטאים עמדה מאופקת ושקולה, הסיפור 'מותו של דיקי' -- שפורסם בקובץ סיפורים ."ברוח הנוראה הזאת", נותן ביטוי לטראומה באמצעות הצפה מטאפורית

Resum: Durant el setge borbònic de Barcelona de l'any 1706, es produí una contraofensiva dels barcelonins per recuperar la fortalesa de Montjuïc en la qual les dones de la ciutat tingueren un paper molt destacat. Aquesta participació va ser lloada en una relació en vers que va circular a través un plec solt intitulat Proeses que les barceloneses dones han ostentat en este siti de l'any 1706. L'obra és coneguda dins l'àmbit de la historiografia, però fins ara no disposàvem de cap acostament al text que proporcionés al lector una edició filològicament fiable, actualitzada i comentada del poema complet, de manera que aquest és l'objectiu del present treball. Per assolir-lo, l'article s'estructura en tres parts: 1) l'enquadrament del text dins el seu context històric i cultural; 2) la seva descripció i interpretació a la llum de les eines metodològiques i conceptuals de la teoria literària i de la comparatística; i 3) l'establiment del text a partir de l'acarament crític de tots els testimonis disponibles i la seva edició, amb l'adaptació ortogràfica i els aparats crítics corresponents.

Abstract: During the Bourbon siege of 1706, the inhabitants of Barcelona launched a counter-offensive in order to recover the fortress of Montjuïc. The women of the city played a significant role in this actions and their participation was praised in an account of events written in verse that circulated through a libel entitled Proeses que les barceloneses dones han ostentat en este siti de l'any 1706 (Feats that Barcelona women have shown in this site of the year 1706). This work is well known in the field of historiography, but nonetheless, until this moment, no approach has been proposed providing the reader with a philologically reliable, updated and commented edition of the complete poem. Therefore this is the objective of the present work. To achieve this objective, the article is structured in three parts: 1) the framing of the text in its historical and cultural context; 2) its description and interpretation in the light of the methodological and conceptual tools of literary theory and comparative literature; and 3) the establishment of the text based on the critical comparison of all the available printed testimonials and its edition, with the spelling adaptation and the corresponding critical apparatus..

A short introduction to the poetry of the World War I "Soldier Poets" and how they departed from the patriotic themes of the previous century. In addition, an introduction to the intellectual roots of "Modernism" in such thinkers as Darwin, Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. Finally, an introduction to some of the aesthetic movements of literary modernism -- in particular how Modernism's exploration of the "fragmentation" of meaning and experience was connected with Cubism in the visual arts.

This study tries to evaluate Rupert Brooke's " The Soldier, " Edward Thomas' " Adlestrop " and Isaac Rosenberg's " Break of Day in the Trenches " by demonstrating the three poets' ideological stances during WWI. The difficulties of the trench life are apparent in their poems but what makes their poems different from each other is the ideology lying behind the poems. Brooke, Thomas, and Rosenberg represent three different perspectives on the popular patriotism and Englishness during the war period. While Brooke's poems function as a deliberate representation of the dominant government policies, the poems of Thomas and Rosenberg create an opponent voice by delineating the harsh conditions of the war period and hollowness of the policies about war.

" Wars have no memory, and nobody has the courage to understand them until there are no voices left to tell what happened, "-Carlos Ruiz Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind. The literature of war is a literature of paradoxes, the greatest of which is the fact that it comments continuously on its own failure. War writers often lament their incapacity to describe the realities of armed combat, the inexpressible nature of the subject matter, the inadequacy of language, and the inability of their audiences to understand. Tim O'Brien writes of the war he experienced in Vietnam: " There is no clarity. Everything swirls. The old rules are no longer binding, the old truths no longer true. Right spills over into wrong. Order blends into chaos, love into hate, ugliness into beauty, law into anarchy, civility into savagery. The vapors suck you in. You can't tell where you are, or why you're there, and the only certainty is overwhelming ambiguity. " From ancient Nordic ballads to Masai folk songs or Red Indian sagas, war has always been a predominate theme in literature. Zafon in The Shadow of the Wind portrays a war ravaged Barcelona and comments, " There's something about that period that's epic and tragic " for like the Old English Elegiac poetries, the Arthurian Romances, Gorky's Mother or Tolstoy's War and Peace, the literature of the Great Wars have altered human perception and the very fabrics of literature. However, we witness a distinct line between the literature of both world wars. The Second Great War threatened the humankind like never before. It was a manmade crisis which threw us to the brink of extinction, and thus displaying the futility of human existence. As humanity experienced the terror of the 'absurdity' of reality, the philosophy if 'nothing to be done' surfaced in their consciousness. This paper aims to evaluate the marked change in the form of poetry written in the two Great Wars and how far the Second World War was responsible for the advent of Modernism.