Use sample letters and ideas from the BBC's Children of World War 2 Evacuee's letters webpage, to get started. Students can use the Letter Generator to type and print the final draft of their letters. Have students explore the Imperial War Museum website to learn more about the Children of World War 2. This interactive website offers games.
Ross characterised the English 'war poets' as a subgroup of the Georgian Poetry writers. Many poems by British war poets were published in newspapers and then collected into anthologies. Several of these early anthologies were published during the war and were very popular, though the tone of the poetry changed as the war progressed. Articles about War and War Poetry. 100 Years of Poetry: The Magazine and War. Abigail Deutsch. A historical look at the role of poetry in wartime. American Service.
War Poetryhibs English Dub
War has an everlasting effect on the entire world, but the one group of people that have the worst experience are those that are on the frontline – the soldiers. They are often glorified and portrayed to be patriots for their country, which is frequently conveyed through poetry. I disagree with this view, and the following three poems written by past soldiers support my view on war.
Siegfried Sassoon is a renowned World War 1 poet who was in service from 1914 to 1917, when he then took a stand against the conduct of war. When Sassoon first began writing his poetry, he did so with an air of romance and sweetness. After becoming horrified by the reality of war, his writing then became…show more content…
He believes it is dark, evil and depressing, and while the soldiers are sent to hell, some remain there whilst others bring pieces of it back home with them. He wants those in the crowd to pray they’ll never know what he and many others have lived, and died, through.
Sgt. James Lenihan served in the Second World War in the 104th infantry division, where he toured Europe fighting. He was wounded in action and received a purple heart, though he never spoke about his experiences in the war with his family. After his passing in 2007, his family found a poem that he wrote where he describes his experience in killing a man in action.
The poem is titled Murder: Most Foul, which is borrowed from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It has six 4-lined stanzas and a final 5-lined stanza, with each having different rhyming patterns. The first two stanzas have the pattern ABCDEBCD, stanzas three through six have the pattern ABCB, and the 5-line stanza has the pattern ABCDB. The poem utilizes multiple techniques including repetition, rhyme, imagery and metaphor.
Lenihan uses the terms ‘surprise’ and ‘strangest’ to convey the rarity and unusualness of what was happening. He began to cry for he killed fellow man in cold blood. This was unusual as he was going to war to fight, but when he shot a man he regained his conscience, only too late.
‘So young’ holds more power than referring to the soldier as just young, and this is repeated again with the addition of
What is War Poetry? An introduction by Paul O’Prey.
Poets have written about the experience of war since the Greeks, but the young soldier poets of the First World War established war poetry as a literary genre. Their combined voice has become one of the defining texts of Twentieth Century Europe.
War Poetryhibs English Subtitles
In 1914 hundreds of young men in uniform took to writing poetry as a way of striving to express extreme emotion at the very edge of experience. The work of a handful of these, such as Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon, has endured to become what Andrew Motion has called ‘a sacred national text’.
Although ‘war poet’ tends traditionally to refer to active combatants, war poetry has been written by many ‘civilians’ caught up in conflict in other ways: Cesar Vallejo and WH Auden in the Spanish Civil War, Margaret Postgate Cole and Rose Macaulay in the First World War, James Fenton in Cambodia.
In the global, ‘total war’ of 1939-45, that saw the holocaust, the blitz and Hiroshima, virtually no poet was untouched by the experience of war. The same was true for the civil conflicts and revolutions in Spain and Eastern Europe. That does not mean, however, that every poet responded to war by writing directly about it. For some, the proper response of a poet was one of consciously (conscientiously) keeping silent.
War poetry is not necessarily ‘anti-war’. It is, however, about the very large questions of life: identity, innocence, guilt, loyalty, courage, compassion, humanity, duty, desire, death. Its response to these questions, and its relation of immediate personal experience to moments of national and international crisis, gives war poetry an extra-literary importance. Owen wrote that even Shakespeare seems ‘vapid’ after Sassoon: ‘not of course because Sassoon is a greater artist, but because of the subjects’.
War poetry is currently studied in every school in Britain. It has become part of the mythology of nationhood, and an expression of both historical consciousness and political conscience. The way we read – and perhaps revere – war poetry, says something about what we are, and what we want to be, as a nation.
Please click on the name of a poet listed on the right to read a biography written for this website by an expert on that poet. Many of the biographies also contain links to other information on the web about a poet. More biographies are being added to the website regularly. Biographies are listed by by war or conflict. To read a summary about the war poetry of a particular war or conflict, click on one of the conflict headings on the right of this page. These summaries are also written by experts and for this website. Other biographies or information on war poets not listed on this page may be available — use the ‘Search here’ box on the top right hand corner of this page left to specify what you want and press ‘Go’. To search outside this web site, use Google. If you would like to suggest a biography be written for this website about a particular poet, or to write an expert biography yourself to be added to these pages, please contact editor@warpoets.org.
Suggested Reading:
The Oxford Book of War Poetry, edited by Jon Stallworthy (Oxford University Press, 1988)
Poetry and War: An Introductory Reader, by Simon Featherstone (Routledge, 1994)