War Poets: Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen

​​In a nutshell

War Poets was the name given to the generation of poets that participated actively in WWI and rendered those experiences through poetry. Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen are both icons of war poetry.

War Poets

The 20th century was a period full of experimentation and creativity which is reflected in poetry. The work produced after WWI was divided into two categories: the avant-garde and the Georgian poets. Georgian poetry was based on the conventions of diction, English elements were praised, and the theme of revolution was almost ignored. On the other hand, the 'War Poets' experimented with unconventional and anti-rhetorical poetry to deal with the horrors of modern warfare. 

Note: Avant-garde poets were characterized by experimentation with new ideas and elements. Georgian poets were influenced by Victorian and Romantic traditions.

When WWI broke out young men who volunteered perceived the conflict as an opportunity to serve their Nation, however, after the slaughter of many British soldiers on the 'Western Front', that feeling was replaced by doubt and disillusionment. There was a group of poets that experienced the terrible effects of the fighting, and most of them lost their lives in the conflict. However, they gave a voice to the realistic context of warfare to awaken the conscience of the readers of the horrors of the war.

MODERN POETRY

Imagism was the movement that gave rise to modern poetry between 1912 and 1917. Imagists employed clear and precise images and rhythm that lacked metrical regularity. In addition, their poems were generally short and did not contain moral comments.

Symbolism was another feature of modern poetry; it originated in France with Charles Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du Mal (1857). Some attributes of symbolism were indirect statements, allusive language, multiple associations of words, importance to the 'sound' of words to depict the 'music of ideas', use of quotations from other literatures, free verse, and the chance for the reader to give meaning to the poem. 

Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke was born in 1887 in the heart of a wealthy family, he attended King's College, Cambridge, and became familiar with literature and politics before the war. Even though Brooke is a symbol of War Poetry, he did not participate in combat for so long because he contracted blood poisoning and died in 1915.  He became popular for his sonnets published in 1914, in which he developed the idea that war is clean and cleansing. 

The following text is an extract from 1914 and Other Poems (1915):

This stanza refers to what happened to soldiers who died while abroad since the bodies were not brought back to their homeland. So, Brooke depicts the idea of the burial of a soldier in foreign territory as a piece of land that will forever be England.

Wilfred Owen

Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918) enlisted in the war in 1915 and later in 1917, he was sent to the hospital due to shell shock where he was encouraged to continue writing poetry by Siegfried Sassoon. In 1918, he returned to the front and unfortunately was killed in a German machine gun attack just seven days before Armistice. Owen's poems deal with the effects of war on men's physical and mental health, he used assonance and alliteration to give moral force to the topic of death and suffering. 

The following text is an extract from The Poems of Wilfred Owen (1920):

In this stanza, Owen describes with the use of imagery the experience of being in the front. He intends to communicate and show the pity of war for the next generations.