Understanding War through Poetry

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I am not protesting against the conduct of the war, but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed.

~Siegfried Loraine Sassoon

          After reading the above quote one can conjecture Sassoon's view on War and what kind of poems he has written. So through this paper we will be looking into the reasons for war, its affects on soldiers, people living during this era, and will further look into what the other writers had to say about it and the two variants of War Poetry.

          War literature is a work about war. It is a literary work, who's primary action takes place on a battlefield, or in a civilian setting (or home front), where the characters are preoccupied with the preparations for, suffering the effects of, or recovering from war.  The  First World War of 1914-18 left its fierce and it's permanent influence on English literature. Here accounts of the First World War were written by British soldiers who not only experienced and witnessed traumatic events in battle but also depicted them in poetry and prose. During 1914 hundreds of soldiers began 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 , Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Edward Thomas, 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.

Here we have two types of War Poetry and poets, first the Early War Poets,  soldier poets who wrote poems during the early days of the War expressed a willingness to die for their country, they had faith in the justice of the cause for which they were fighting, they exulted in the strength and courage which enabled them to meet the challenge and harbored no bitterness against the enemy. Rupert Brooke was the best known of these early war poets.


Later War Poets  are  soldier poets who had firsthand experience of the War, who could see the horror and reality, of war wrote verse which showed , sense of the horrors of the War,  tenderness toward doomed youth tricked by false idealism, and  a sense of the closeness of the friendships formed on the battlefield,  the purpose of making clear to future generations the truth about warfare. Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen were the major poets of this phase of war poetry.


Siegfriedd Sassoon was born in 1886 and educated at Cambridge.' During the First World War he served in the Royal Welsh Fusiliers with the rank of Captain and received the Military cross.  He was among the few important war poets, and has continued to publish volumes of both poetry and prose throughout the "armistice" years. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches and satirised the patriotic pretensions. 


         Now latest understand War through Sassoon's poetry. So here our first poem is 

The Death Bed, which was written while Sassoon was serving in the First World War. With this context in mind, one is able to make a few assumptions about the events that occur within the text. The poem is about  an unnamed soldier who is dying on his hospital bed, who was probably injured at the battle field on the Western Front, where Sassoon fought. The aim of writing such poems was to  show how war has taken lives of young men who had lot to do in their life, but are losing everything to war. By using rhetorical question he tries to question the injustice of the conflict and the stubbornness of those who have the power to end it.

Similarly in the second poem Lamentations,  the narrator describes an encounter with a desperate soldier, emotionally tortured man  who has lost his brother in war and the other  soldiers have become dehumanised that they have no sympathy left for an emotional soldier instead they consider him to be coward and are saying that the person is not periotic enough. Through this Sassoon tries to draw our attention to the absurdity of this expectations one has from Soldiers.

 In my belief Such men have lost all patriotic feeling.

This line are threatening and effective, conveying society’s numbness to the pain and plight of the soldiers through a nationalistic perspective. Society, therefore, isn’t just blindly ignorant. It’s callously, unforgivably dumb.




Conclusion

 Siegfried Sassoon rejected the idea of blind patriotism and focused on portraying the war in real, modern terms. Siegfried Sassoon, like Wilfred Owen, saw the war from the point of view of the common soldier. The poetry of Sassoon exhibits his representation of the War from the point of view of the soldier. His early acceptance without question about the soldier’s duty to fight for his country. His feelings of resentment because people did not understand the horror of modern warfare. His conception that World War was a crime against the youth of his generation. Further Sassoon expressed his anti-jingoistic approach implicating that war is not something to beproud of, but something that brings suffering, death, and the loss of human value.




Work Cited

  1. Bueno Queiroz Fontes, E., 2012. Irony in Siegfried Sassoon's War Poems by Eduardo de Olivei. [online] Faculdade de Letras da UFMG. Available at: <https://repositorio.ufmg.br/bitstream/1843/ECAP‐ 8UXJPN/1/every_war_is_ironic_because_every_war_is_worse_than_expected___dissertation__eduardo_fontes.pdf> [Accessed 21 May 2021].

  2. Scott, Mike. "What Is War Poetry? An Introduction By Paul O’Prey – The War Poets Association". Warpoets.Org, 2012, https://warpoets.org/2021/02/what-is-war-poetry-an-introduction-by-paul-oprey/#:~:text=Poets%20have%20written%20about%20the,poetry%20as%20a%20literary%20genre.&text=In%201914%20hundreds%20of%20young,the%20very%20edge%20of%20experience. Accessed 2021.

  3. "War Poets Genealogy Project". Geni_Family_Tree, 2020, https://www.geni.com/projects/War‐Poets/18763. Accessed 23 May 2021.

  4. "NEVER AGAIN: SUICIDE IN THE TRENCHES". Veterans For Peace UK, 2018, https://vfpuk.org/articles/never-again-1918-2018/never-again-suicide-in-the-trenches/. Accessed 18 May 2021.

  5. "Lamentations Poem By Siegfried Sassoon - Poem Hunter". Poem Hunter, 2003, https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/lamentations/. Accessed 21 May 2021.

  6. Ewane Ngide, George. A ‘War Poet’ Or A ‘Poet At War’: Wilfred Owen And The Pity Of War. International Journal Of Applied Linguistics And English Literature, vol 5, no. 1, 2015. Australian International Academic Centre, doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.5n.1p.170. Accessed 21 May 2021.

  7. Devery, Kim & Tieman, Jennifer & Rawlings, Deb & Damarell, Raechel. (2012). Deathbed visions and hard to explain phenomena: A systematic review. 

  8. Higonnet, Margaret. “The Great War and the Female Elegy: Female Lamentation and Silence in Global Contexts.” The Global South, vol. 1, no. 2, 2007, pp. 120–136. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/40339276. Accessed 22 May 2021.

  9. Denno, Deborah. (2006). Death bed. Fordham Law School Legal Studies Research Paper Series. 


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