18 War Poets: Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke

Dr. Milon Franz

Introduction

War poetry is set in contrast with Georgian poetry, the poetry that preceded it. While the Georgian poets presented war as a noble affair, celebrating ‘the happy warrior’ proud to give his life for his country, the war poets chose to represent the horror and ‘pity’ of war. War poetry was actually anti-war poetry, an indictment of the whole ideology of the nobleness of war. For war poets, war was an unnatural, meaningless, foolish and brutal enterprise in which there is nothing honourable, glorious, or decorous. It was a kind of modern poetry which is naturalistic and painfully realistic, with shocking images and language, intending to show what the war is really like. They tried to portray the common experience on the war front which constitutes mortality, nervous breakdown, constant fear and pressure. The war poetry is replete with the mud, the trenches, death, and the total havoc caused by war. Wilfred Owen wrote: ‘Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of war’.

1.  War Poetry

War poetry encompasses the poetry written during and about the First World War. It is also known as trench poetry in which testimony and poetry are yoked together, both registering new forms of violence, and the war-torn male body was the central subject. The felt reality of this body, which was set against the abstract language of heroism became the ground of protest. In fact, hundreds of ‘war poets’ wrote and published their verse between 1914 and 1918 and some of them were soldier–poets who died in the war front. But only a handful—largely those who wrote in protest—are read and admired today. The term, war poetry can be applied to poems by Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Isaac Rosenberg, Richard Aldington, Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves, Julian Grenfell, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Robert Nichols, Herbert Read, Charles Hamilton Sorley, and Edward Thomas., The Times supplement, War Poems, August, 1914–15, included contributions from established civilian poets such as Robert Bridges, Rudyard Kipling, Laurence Binyon, and Thomas Hardy. Catherine Reilly’s 1978 bibliography of English poetry of the First World War lists over 3000 works by 2225 poets. More than half of this war poetry was written by male civilian writers and a quarter by women. The works of women poets like Vera Brittain, Margaret Postgate Cole, Rose Macaulay, and Charlotte Mew have also significantly been included under war poetry by the critics.

War poetry, though included under the umbrella term, vary widely, with regard to its language, moods, emotions and rhythms from the ardent patriotism of Brooke and Grenfell to the angry sensuality of Sassoon and Owen; or from the pastoral poignancy of Blunden and Thomas to the modernist wit and irony of Rosenberg. It is also interesting to note that all the war poems were not published during the war. Sassoon’s The Old Huntsman and Other Poems, Gurney’s Severn and Somme, and Nichols’s Ardours and Endurances all appeared in 1917. But Owen and Rosenberg became famous posthumously. Two of the most celebrated war poems—Grenfell’s enthusiastic ‘Into Battle’ and Sorley’s angry protest ‘When You See Millions of the Mouthless Dead’—were also published posthumously. At the time of Owen’s death only five of his poems were in print. In 1920 Sassoon introduced and arranged Owen’s Poems while two years later Gordon Bottomley edited Rosenberg’s Poems from tattered, mud-stained manuscripts, with an introduction by Laurence Binyon. It was in the 1930s that the war poets, partly because of their advocacy by left-wing writers, became national icons, with Owen as the leader, prophet, and martyr.

Brooke was the pioneer of War poetry, who started off in the Georgian line. The next generation of poets actually went to the trenches and saw action and the reality appalled them. Owen, Sassoon, Graves, Gurney, and Jones were all either wounded or shell-shocked, or both. They wrote powerfully and poignantly about the horror of war and its effects on the bodies and minds of men. These poems have largely shaped the cultural and literary memory of the conflict, as the critic Paul Fussell argued in The Great War and Modern Memory. The soldier–poets were bound together by their first-hand experience of modern industrial warfare, its ‘superhuman inhumanities’ and ‘immemorial shames’, as evoked by Owen in ‘Spring Offensive’:

“But what say such as from existence’ brink

Ventured but drave too swift to sink,

The few who rushed in the body to enter hell”

1. Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)

Rupert Brooke established the cult of the soldier–poet in England, though the tone of his work differed markedly from writers who experienced later battles on the western front. Brooke’s striking good looks and five patriotic ‘war sonnets’ written in December 1914, coupled with his death in a troopship bound for Gallipoli, his burial at Skyros, and the glowing Times obituary over Winston Churchill’s initials, made him a symbol of a mythical pre-war golden age ended by conflict. He embodies the legends about the Great War that were subsequently made famous by historians and literary scholars like Robert Wohl, Paul Fussel, and Mondris Eksteins.  Handsome, charming, and talented, Brooke was a national hero even before his death at the age of 27 in 1915. His poetry, brimming with patriotism and a graceful lyricism, reflected the hopes and beliefs of a country that had yet to feel the full, devastating effects of the war.

Brooke’s early years were typical of a well-to-do childhood. He attended a prestigious boarding school at Rugby, where his father was a headmaster. He studied Latin and Greek and began to write poetry. He expressed an early enthusiasm for the English Decadent poets of the 1890s (Wilde, Dowson, and Swinburne) before turning to Baudelaire and the French Symbolists.In1906 he entered Cambridge and quickly established himself in English intellectual circles where he came in touch with Virginia Woolf, William Butler Yeats, Lytton Strachey, the economist John Maynard Keynes and his brother Geoffrey. His poetry during this period, which still emphasized the themes of love and nature, resembled that of most of the poets of his generation, including D.H. Lawrence, John Drinkwater and Walter de la Mare. One of his most popular poems titled “The Old Vicarage, Grantchester,” was published during this era in Georgian Poetry. It is after a small village near Cambridge where Brooke lived for a time after 1909. Mid-1912 was one of the most turbulent periods in Brooke’s life. Confused by homosexual impulses and frustrated by the rejection of a woman with whom he was in love, his sexual crisis culminated in a nervous breakdown. Brooke spent several months in rehabilitation, during which period he was not allowed to write poetry. By summer, though, he had recovered enough to travel to Germany, a trip that marked the beginning of almost three years of constant travel. In May of 1913, he went to the United States, where he spent four months before sailing to the South Pacific. Three of the seven months he remained in the Pacific were spent in Tahiti, where he wrote some of his best poems, including “Tiare Tahiti”and “The Great Lover.” In the spring of 1914, Brooke decided to return to England. Within a few months of his return, World War I began, and like most men of his social station, Brooke quickly volunteered for service. He joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve, whose first destination was Antwerp, Belgium, where it stayed through the beginning of 1915. The Reserve saw little fighting during this time, and it was a productive period for Brooke. He produced his best known poetry, the group of five ‘War Sonnets’ titled including ‘The soldier’ appeared in New Numbers in 1914 and then posthumously in 1914 and Other Poems(1915). His other poems include the ‘Tahiti Poems’, ‘The Old Vicarage’, ‘Grantchester’, ‘The Great Lover’ and ‘I Strayed about the Deck’. Letters from America came out in 1916 and The Letters of Robert Brooke appeared in 1968. The Collected Poems appeared in 1918.

“Peace” has long been one of the most popular of Rupert Brooke’s 1914 sonnets. Like much of Brooke’s poetry, “Peace” reveals Brooke’s rather romantic—some might even say sentimental— vision of the war, a vision unencumbered by much actual experience. The poem celebrates the discovery of a cause and the eager anticipation of the regeneration of “a world grown old, cold and weary”. The third and fourth sonnets in the 1914 series were begun as, one after another, reports came of Brooke’s school friends, killed or missing. “In “The Dead” (I), Brooke continues to preach his message of the transforming power of death in battle. In it he shows how the ultimate sacrifice required by one’s country—pouring out “the red / Sweet wine of youth”—leads to immortality. “The Soldier” is perhaps Rupert Brooke’s best-known and loved work and may be the most famous single poem of the war. Easter Sunday 1915, Dean Inge, preaching in St. Paul’s, read “The Soldier” to his congregation and announced that, “the enthusiasm of a pure and elevated patriotism had never found a nobler expression.” Of all the war sonnets, “The Soldier” is the only one containing the first person singular. Thus in spite of the self-effacement implied in the first lines—“If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is forever England”—Brooke here is dramatizing the tragedy of his own possible death.

In February of 1915, Brooke was ordered to sail to the Dardanelles—a strait between Europe and Turkey—for the Gallipoli campaign that would begin that spring. During the journey, however, Brooke contracted blood poisoning. He died on April 23 on a ship in the Aegean Sea and was buried in an olive grove on the Greek island of Skyros. Many during this early stage of the war believed him to represent the ideal of patriotic and noble sacrifice. A more realistic poetry emerged out of the shock of the trenches, replacing Brooke’s poetry as the most important literary expression of the war. Poets such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Isaac Rosenberg captured the terror and tragedy of modern warfare; next to their poetry, Brooke’s war sonnets seemed highly romantic and unrealistic. By contrast, the “effete pastoralism” that characterized much Georgian poetry represented an attempt to escape from the realities of modern urban industrial life. Despite such extreme and varying opinions, however, most critics agree that Brooke’s poetry remains important as a reflection of the pre-war mood in England.

1. Wilfred Owen(1893-1918) 

Wilfred Owen, who died as a martyr of war at the age of 25, is the best known of the war poets. His poems are marked by his bleak realism, his energy and indignation, his compassion, and his high technical skills. He was born in Oswestry on March 18, 1893, into a comfortable, middle-class family. He was the eldest of the four children of Tom Owen, a railway official, and his wife Susan. In 1906 the family moved to Shrewsbury, where Wilfred was educated at the Technical School. In 1911, Owen accepted an appointment as assistant to the Vicar of Dunsden, near Reading. Soon he went to France and started teaching English part-time at the Berlitz School. On August 4, 1914, Germany invaded Belgium and war was declared. Owen’s response to the outbreak of war was initially ambivalent. Though he had his conflicts, Owen eventually enlisted in the Artists’ Rifles on October 21, 1915. He was commissioned into the Manchester Regiment and went back to France. In the second week of January 1917 he led his platoon into the battle of the Somme. During his service in the battlefield, Owen happened to fall through a shell-hole into a cellar and was trapped there for three days. This experience is assumed to have contributed to the dark images of an underworld seen in many of his later poems. After Owen was rescued, he was sick enough that he was allowed a brief rest before he rejoined his battalion and once again found himself in the thick of intense fighting. Although he escaped serious injuries, the experience was taking its toll. On May 1, his commanding officer thought he was behaving strangely. Owen was eventually diagnosed as suffering from neurasthenia (shellshock) and sent to the Craig Lockhart War Hospital on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Scotland. Under the guidance of his Doctor, he started contributing to—and eventually editing—the hospital magazine, The Hydra. The Hydra printed two of Owen’s poems and four by his fellow patient Siegfried Sassoon. There he had the beginning of a long lasting relationship ad association with Sassoon. Wilfred Owen was profoundly impressed by Sassoon’s “trench sketches”in his just- published book, The Old Huntsman and Other Poems. Sassoon, helped Wilfred channel his memories of battle into poems and raised the young man’s confidence. Sassoon’s poetry about the war possessed an unflinching, direct language and style that profoundly influenced the young Owen, whose work up to this point had displayed the romantic flourishes and lush imagery one would expect from someone who idealized Keats and Shelley. During this time he came in touch with writers like Robert Graves, Robert Ross, Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells. Returning to France, Owen was able to develop and express his own distinctive vision of the war. In 1918 five of his poems were published—the only five he was to see in print. That autumn he returned to the front. In October, he won the Military Cross. One week before the Armistice, on the morning of November 4, 1918, while attempting to move his company of the 2nd Manchesters across the Oise and Sambre Canal near Ors, Wilfred Owen was shot and killed.

Owen, so personally familiar with the experience of war, captures in his poems the tragedy of war. Most of his poems allude to the loss of innocence that is concomitant of war. The soldiers were enlisteded at a young age, when they hardly knew and thought about the ideology of war. They were taught to dream only of glory. Owen’s poems also depict the deep bonds of friendship and understanding that develop between soldiers. Cut off from their familial connections, these young men have only each other to rely on. Owen suggests that this brotherly love is even more powerful than erotic love. Roses, red lips and soft voices are no match for the coarse sounds and images of war, for those sounds are more authentic, constituting the brutal context in which soldiers develop camaraderie. He makes his reader confront the atrocities on the battlefield and the indignities of life back home. He presents before his readers, soldiers who have lost their limbs and been victims of poison gas; young men mourning their dead comrades; ghastly battlefield dreamscapes; a cacophony of sounds terrifying in their unceasing monotony; and nature’s wrath. He shows how the war affects the young men who fight both physically and psychologically. The men who survive become inured to brutality. There is little glory and heroism about them, just scared or desensitized young men fighting for a cause they do not quite understand.

Though a Christian, Owen had experienced profound disillusionment with organized religion and that is often reflected in his poems. He criticizes the alliance between church and state and their attempts in stoking the fires of war. His poems expose his view that the war is absurd and incomprehensible. The soldiers do not seem to know what they are fighting for, possessing no lofty goals and expressing no sentiment regarding why they are there. The rulers of Europe, as evinced by Abram in “Parable of the Old Man and the Young”, seem concerned with their nation’s pride above all else. The battles depicted in the poems are unconnected to each other, existing in a vacuum with seemingly no larger purpose. The horrors of war are not explained away or justified by a noble cause. No doubt drawing from personal experience, Owen is very sympathetic to the ways in which soldiers attempted to make sense of their peculiar and terrible situation on the front and back at home. He understands that many want to deaden and dull themselves to their thoughts and feelings in order to stave off the anguish over what they have done and seen. They are drained of vitality, able to laugh in the face of death. Owen wrestles with his thoughts on this, for while he understands this psychological response, he does not necessarily think excising all emotion is good, for it severs one’s connection to humanity. A man must still be part of the fabric of life, no matter how difficult it may be. Nature enters as a strong theme in several of Owen’s poems. Nature can be a peaceful, calm, supportive and comforting anchorage to man in their perplexities and complexities. The sun, as a symbol of Nature herself, is viewed as a life-giving force that sustains men. However, Owen is convinced that war is a violation of Nature in its fury, carnage, and disruption of the innate cycle of life and death. Thus, when fighting breaks out, Nature also reflects the turmoil. In “Spring Offensive”, most memorably, when the fighting begins, “the whole sky burned / With fury against them”. Nature can no longer save the men.

Owen’s poems were chosen by Benjamin Britten for his War Requiem (1961). The Complete Poems and Fragments was published in 1983 and Collected Letters in 1967. Drafted in October 1917 while the poet was recovering from shellshock at Craiglockhart Hospital, “Dulce et Decorum Est,” is one of Wilfred Owen’s most popular World War I poems. Much of the movement and development in “Dulce et Decorum Est” stems from the tension that Owen establishes between the united suffering as a group, on the one hand, and on the other hand, the isolated, subjective experience of the individual when he is most alone—namely, at his own violent death. In March 1918 he was transferred to Ripon in Yorkshire where he wrote or revised some of his finest poems, including ‘Strange Meeting’, ‘Exposure’, and ‘Futility’.

“Strange Meeting” is told from the point of view of the narrator who attempts to escape the death and thumping guns by going down into the trenches. Once there, however, he finds that he has descended into Hell, where he is confronted with a man he himself has killed. Unlike the hatred and violence exploding above ground, this underground encounter between the two soldiers from opposing armies and nations is infused with an elegiac sense of reconciliation and regret. There, in the silence of the trench / underworld, the soldier and the stranger can reflect on the larger meaning of the war and the toll it is taking on the young men of Europe. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” was written at Craiglockhart in September and October 1917. Sassoon helped with the revision of the poem—there were at least seven drafts—and, according to a letter Owen wrote to his mother, supplied a title as well. “Anthem for Doomed Youth” was most likely inspired by a prefatory note to an anthology of modern poetry that mentions “the passing-bells of Death.” The differences between the first draft and the last show how Owen began to reconcile his lyrical style with his opinions about the war. The poem works through a series of contrasts to suggest that the realities of war negate the values of ordinary, peaceful life; in particular, war negates Christianity. Owen wrote “Futility” sometime in May 1918, and it first appeared on June 15, 1918 in The Nation, along with the poem “Hospital Barge”. In Owen’s lists of poems for publication, these two poems are placed next to each other, and the descriptive subheading for both poems is “Grief.” In “Futility” he literally dissects the aftermath of war, turning to an actual piece of the human wreckage. The poem stays away from any overt mention of the war, focusing rather on the response to death and the attempt to understand its meaning.

2.  Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)

Siegfried Sassoon is best remembered for his angry and satirical poems of the First World War. Evoking the soul-wrenching terror and brutality of trench warfare, Sassoon vigorously denounced generals, politicians, and churchmen for their incompetence and blind support of the war. Although Sassoon continued to write after the war, his later poems, which were often concerned with religious themes, received less critical acclaim than his war poems. Sassoon was born into a wealthy Jewish family in Kent. He was educated at Marlborough College, Wiltshire and Clare College, Cambridge. He composed a protest statement in 1917 which was published in The Times newspaper and read aloud in Parliament. His early work, which was privately printed in several slim volumes between 1906 and 1916, is considered minor and imitative, heavily influenced by the poet John Masefield. His 1913 The Daffodil Murderer, a clever parody of Masefield’s realistic narratives, was his first success, albeit a minor one. Sassoon first saw action in late 1915, serving with the Royal Welsh Fusiliers; the same year, he received a Military Cross for bringing back a wounded soldier during heavy fire.

His bleak realism, his contempt for war leaders and patriotic cant and his compassion for his comrades found expression in verse that was unlikely to be admired by the wartime public. In 1917 he published his war poems in The Old Huntsman and in 1918 further poems in Counter- Attack. He achieved fame also as a prose writer. His semi-autobiographical trilogy was  published together as The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston in 1937. In this work he gave a thinly fictionalized account of his wartime experiences, with little changed except the names, contrasting these experiences with his nostalgic memories of country life before the war and recounting the growth of his pacifist feelings. The Old Century and Seven More Years, The Weald of Youth, Siegfried’s Journey and three volumes of diaries are also his contributions. Sassoon’s critical biography of Victorian novelist and poet George Meredith was also well received. In 1917 he was diagnosed as suffering from shell shock and hospitalised. A fellow patient was Wilfred Owen whose poems Sassoon collected and published in 1920. Later, he turned to religion and was influenced by the devotional verse of the seventeenth century metaphysical poets – especially Henry Vaughan (1622-1695) and George Herbert (1593-1633). In 1957 Sassoon became a convert to Catholicism; for some time before his conversion, religious themes had been the predominant subject of his writing. These later religious poems never achieved the same enthusiastic critical or popular reaction as those written between 1917 and 1920. Sassoon died in his sleep on September 1, 1967.

“Enemies “is one of Siegfried Sassoon’s earlier poems, dated January 6, 1917. He wrote it after a day’s hunting while he was on leave. Like Owen’s “Strange Meeting,” Enemies” confronts the question of the responsibility of killing in war. “Conscripts” was first published in the Spectator on February 17, 1917. It contains five stanzas that describe the drilling of young men at Litherland. In the first three stanzas of “Conscripts,” a drill-sergeant persona tries to drive out the individuality and frivolousness of his new soldiers. This narrator mocks the ideals and “attractive attitudes” of the soldiers, as he repeatedly scorns their romantic notions. “Conscripts “has been cited for revealing the relationship between Sassoon’s latent homosexual feelings and his help and care for his men. Sassoon composed “Attack” after witnessing the Hindenburg Line attack, which capped off a particularly grueling period of the war. In “Attack,” as in some of his other poems, Sassoon almost didactically insists on the facts and details of war as an attempt to force public acceptance of the stark realities of trench warfare. The essence of poetry with us in this age of stark and unlovely actualities is a stark directness, without a shadow of a life, or a shadow of deflection anywhere. Everything can go, but this stark, bare, rocky directness of statement, this alone makes poetry, to-day.

In his dogged and unswerving determination to make what he had witnessed and experienced at the front intelligible to the uninitiated reader, Sassoon created an unvarnished, almost documentary record of the war. Critics have since argued that in doing so, Sassoon sacrificed the complexity of his feelings about the war in a single-minded campaign to valorize the common soldier as he attacked the noncombatant population.

Reference

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