2010/2011
RSS / FIRST WORLD WAR POETRY| Mr Morton
Contents
IntroductionBrief Overview of World War One
Wilfred Owen: The soldiers' poet
An article by Jeremy Paxman on the lifeand death of the visionary war poet
Seigfried Sassoon
Poetry from The Oxford Book of War Poetry
SECONDARY INFORMATION/READING
Reading List
How to structure an essay
Tips on analysing poetry
ASSESSMENT OBJECTIVES
SAMPLE QUESTIONS / Page 3
Page 4 – 5
Page 6 – 10
Page 11 – 13
Page 14 – 121
Page 122 – 137
Page 138 -139
Page 140
Page 141
Introduction
This booklet is a study aid and a source of information on WW1 literature. It contains almost all of the poetry in the collection. Due to the fact that candidates are unable to annotate their bought copies of The Oxford Book of War Poetry , it is advisable that you use this booklet to annotate the poetry. Make sure that you have this booklet with you for every lesson as it contains material which may be covered. The autobiographical detail included is to help in contextual classroom discussion and is by no means exhaustive.
Towards the end of the booklet there is a concentration of practical support in writing about war poetry and differing perspectives/contexts of war literature. It is important when looking at this poetry that you consider the Assessment Objectives. These are markers that aim to ensure you have a complete understanding of the poetry.
Brief Overview of World War One
1914
Ø Germany invades Belgium.
Ø Britain declares war on Germany.
Ø Japan joins the Allied forces: Ottoman Empire soon joins the Central Powers.
Ø War spreads to the seas.
1915
Ø Women take up men's jobs.
Ø Stalemate continues on the Western Front.
Ø The Lusitania passenger liner is sunk, with 1,200 lives lost.
Ø London attacked from the air by German Zeppelins.
1916
Ø Conscription for men aged between 18 and 41.
Ø A million casualties in ten months: Germany aims to 'bleed France white'.
Ø At sea the Battle of Jutland takes place.
Ø Armed uprisings in Dublin: the Irish Republic is proclaimed.
1917
Ø German Army retreats to the Hindenburg Line.
Ø United States joins the war and assists the Allies.
Ø Tank, submarine and gas warfare intensifies.
Ø Royal family change their surname to Windsor to appear more British.
1918
Ø Germany launches major offensive on the Western Front.
Ø Allies launch successful counter-offensives at the Marne and Amiens.
Ø Armistice signed on November 11, ending the war at 11am.
Ø In Britain, a coalition government is elected and women over 30 succeed in gaining the vote.
WW1 Started
June 28, 1914
Causes of WW1
Strong feelings of nationalism throughout Europe prior to The Great War created an atmosphere in Europe which made war a likelihood. The spark which ignited the flame and transformed these underlying problems into a frenzy of hostilities happened on June 28, 1914, when Archduke Francis Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated by a Serbian student, Gavrilo Princip, while visiting Sarajevo, Bosnia. Many historians consider this to be the spark that started WW1.
Austro-Hungary presented an ultimatum of thirty demands to Serbia and 48 hours were allotted for their answering. Serbia agreed to all but one: Austrian investigation of the assassination plot.
As a result, Austro-Hungary declared war on Serbia, Germany declared war on Russia (who had allied with Serbia). Two days later, Germany declared war on France and swept its armies through Belgium, violating its neutrality. Because of this, Great Britain (England, Scotland, Wales & Northern Ireland) declared war on Germany. Austro-Hungary declared war on England. And thus started WWI.
WW1 Ended
11:00 November 11, 1918
Duration of WW1
4 years, 3 months and 14 days
Casualties in WW1
Germany / 1,800,000Soviet Union / 1,700,000
France / 1,385,000
Austria / 1,200,000
Great Britain / 947,000
Japan / 800,000
Romania / 750,000
Serbia / 708,000
Italy / 460,000
Turkey / 325,000
Belgium / 267,000
Greece / 230,000
USA / 137,000
Portugal / 100,000
Canada / 69,000
Bulgaria / 88,000
Montenegro / 50,000
TOTAL / 11,016,000
Total Approx Cost
£ 96 million [circa 1914]
Wilfred Owen: The soldiers' poet
Jeremy Paxman on the extraordinary achievement of Wilfred Owen, who abominated war yet died a great warriorFor me, he is the greatest of all the war poets. But there is nothing original in my enthusiasm.
Owen developed intense respect for the soldier
I don't suppose there's a thoughtful student in the land who is unaware of Wilfred Owen's best-known poem, "Dulce et Decorum Est".
Indeed, it tells us something about our pervading cynicism that Horace's words are now taken more readily as sarcasm than at face value.
It is often assumed – as a student, I made the mistake myself – that the poem's author was some sort of bitter, jaundiced pacifist. But the enigma of Wilfred Owen is that he was anything but that. The fascination of his life is his embodiment of contradictions.
It is true that he was not among the first to answer the call to bash the Boche. Indeed, he seems to have been a rather fey and precious young man, first as a vicar's assistant in Berkshire, and then as an English teacher in France.
When he finally decided to join the Army (through the Artists' Rifles, to fit with his own idea of himself as a poet, despite the fact that he was unpublished, and, frankly, not very good, either) he was repulsed by the coarseness of the men among whom he found himself.
But his letters to his mother – our main source of information about his life – show how much he changed. Initial distaste at the vulgarity of the sweaty, noisy men among whom he was obliged to live became a genuine love.
By the end of the First World War, he had become not only their advocate but a true military hero himself.
The vital event was the horrific experience of having to take shelter from German artillery fire on the side of a railway embankment. Owen was trapped there for days, lying amid the remains of a popular fellow officer. It triggered shell-shock.
Early victims of the condition had had to put up with the boneheaded prejudice of generals who considered it be merely the mental equivalent of Malingerer's Back. Some of the early casualties had even been "treated" with electric shocks, on the theory that, if the pain was bad enough, they might decide that the terror of the trenches was preferable.
Owen was initially repulsed by the coarseness of the Army
Owen was luckier, and, at Craiglockhart War Hospital, near Edinburgh, came under the care of a regime that believed in a form of occupational therapy. By chance, a fellow officer and poet, Siegfried Sassoon, was also a patient there, having been sent to Craiglockhart for having the temerity to publish a letter criticising the conduct of the war.
The manuscripts of the surviving Owen poems, kept in a vault at the British Library, show Sassoon's handwriting on Owen's poems, evidence of the vital role the relationship would have in the refining of his poetry.
The most remarkable aspect of Owen's stay at the hospital, though, is the fact that he emerged not merely as the author of some of the most stunning poetry of the 20th century – and the voice of a generation – but that he was also determined to return to the front line.
Sassoon begged him not to go, and even threatened, at one point, to stab him in the leg to prevent him doing so.
But Owen would not be deterred, and the man who returned to France was a superb soldier. In one attack, in which he captured a German machine post and scores of prisoners almost single-handed, he writes to his mother with the extraordinary expression that he "fought like an angel". The events earned him a Military Cross.
The last letter home, written at the end of October 1918, describes how he is sheltering with his men in the cellar of a forester's cottage in northern France, before an attempt to cross the canal that marked the front line.
Crammed into the smoky fug – he says he can hardly see by the light of a candle only 12 inches away – the men are laughing, sleeping, smoking or peeling potatoes. "It is a great life," he writes joyfully, and goes on, "you could not be visited by a band of friends half so fine as surround me here."
Utterly wrong, then, to think of him as some sanctimonious hand-wringer. The paradox of Owen – that he had become a first-rate warrior while abominating war – is what gives his poems their unique strength.
While filming Wilfred Owen: A Remembrance Tale for the BBC, we talked to Justin Featherstone, a young major who won the Military Cross in Iraq. I had imagined that he would prefer Rupert Brooke's vision of "The Soldier":
If I should die, think only this of me
That there is some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.
Not a bit of it, he said. Owen is the soldier's poet, because he understands what soldiering is really like, the horror and fear, alongside the dry throated heroism. Brooke's sonnet may be the one for military funerals. Owen is the poet for the living.
And yet Owen did not live to see peace himself. After sheltering in the cellar, he and his men were deployed to the banks of the canal, at Ors. In the early morning of November 4, 1918, they were given the order to storm the canal, in the face of withering German machine-gun fire. Owen never reached the other side.
Seven days later, as his mother stood listening to the church bells peeling for the end of the war, she received the dreadful telegram with the news that her precious son was dead.
Owen's letters to his mother are our main source of information about his life
Is it because he never lived to versify about the mundane pleasures of peace that Owen is the greatest war poet? It's part of it, of course: his own life is a perfect example of the loss of illusions and innocence that the war brought to our entire civilisation.
Most of all, though, Owen's poetry, like his life, scorns easy attitudinising. Of course, "Dulce et Decorum Est" was written to rebut the jingoistic bilge of "poets" such as Jessie Pope who produced doggerel in the Daily Mail ("A gun, a gun to shoot the Hun," etc.)
But it is Owen's intense respect for the soldier that makes his poetry so powerful. Those who did not return have their meticulously maintained stone memorials on the fields of Flanders. But their memorial in our minds is largely built by Wilfred Owen.
Monday, February 2, 1998
War records of Sassoon, Lawrence released
Service records from the First World War are a record of the heroism and horror of life in the trenches
Papers on the war poet Siegfried Sassoon and desert hero TE Lawrence were released on Monday alongside thousands of service records of soldiers who fought in World War I. The files include detailed information on enlistment, promotions, active service and injuries. They have remained confidential for almost 80 years. But 18 months ago, the process of releasing information began, when around 750,000 files were made public. Now, details of a further 200,000 soldiers are also to be made available.
Poetic justice
The army questioned Siegfried Sassoon's mental stateWhen Sassoon appealed for an end to the suffering of the troops on the Western Front, the army questioned his mental state and attempted to show that he had suffered a nervous breakdown.
Though they committed him to a mental home, he later returned to the fighting.
However the then deputy director of military intelligence, Brigadier-General George Cockerill, after reading his poem "I Stood with the Dead", said it showed he was still unfit to command.
The contents of Sassoon's folder include a copy of his anti-war manifesto, which was passed to the War Office after being left accidentally on a train.
A senior commander's reaction to SassoonIn it he referred to England's war aims as "evil and unjust" and wrote: "I believe that the war is being deliberately prolonged by those who have the power to end it." A later memo referring to the manifesto said: "Siegfried Sassoon was undoubtedly the author, but when it was written, he was a lunatic."
Lawrence of Arabia lied about his past
Lawrence of Arabia's war records have revealed that his claim to have run away from home to serve in the artillery was false. Captain B H Liddell Hart said Captain Lawrence told him he joined up in around 1906 or 1907, but a search of the records show no trace of this early service. He was considered for a Victoria Cross, Britain's highest military honour, but his files reveal that General Francis Wingate, the High Commissioner in Cairo in 1917, effectively kept it from him.
"This officer is down for a DSO (Distinguished Service Order) in the Honours List", he wrote. "He is now recommended for a Victoria Cross. Do you consider that he is deserving of the latter honour? I do not think so myself."
His fame posed a problem for the Air Ministry when he moved to the RAF from the Army in 1929. Normally an officer relinquishes his rank when he changes from one service to another. However, civil servants feared a storm if Lawrence were deprived of his rank of Lieutenant Colonel.
They wrote: "The Air Council consider that the withdrawal of his commissioned rank at this date would only make for greater publicity and press comment and they trust that the Army Council will agree to take no further action in the matter."