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Really, he's evil. He puposefully wrote stupidly depressing and confusing poems for me to write about when he could have been shooting some Germans instead.
I used to think the same about Shakespeare but now I can understand his plays and the strories are pretty good. Also, writing an essay on a play is quite easy. Writing an essay a small poem is far, far more difficult.
Shakespeare entertained people with his work. If Owen read his stuff out in the trenches it would hardly be a morale booster, would it? His plan must have been to make us lose the war, and then have people right across the globe studying his poems because they were such a vital part of history. As it turned out, we won, and so only the English end up reading his work and crying because it makes no sense.
So, in short, does anybody know of any websites that have some poetry analysis on them?
I used to think the same about Shakespeare but now I can understand his plays and the strories are pretty good. Also, writing an essay on a play is quite easy. Writing an essay a small poem is far, far more difficult.
Shakespeare entertained people with his work. If Owen read his stuff out in the trenches it would hardly be a morale booster, would it? His plan must have been to make us lose the war, and then have people right across the globe studying his poems because they were such a vital part of history. As it turned out, we won, and so only the English end up reading his work and crying because it makes no sense.
So, in short, does anybody know of any websites that have some poetry analysis on them?
Basically
Romanticism met death
Romanticism met death
I did some analysis of Owen's work in some work I did at Uni, feel free to use some of it/get some ideas off of it (it's double-spaced and I can't be bothered to re-format it):
The poets of the First World War grew out of a native poetic tradition, but were faced with a
totally new kind of warfare. In what ways did their poetry change to cope with this? You should answer on
two of the poets you have studied.
To analyze how the poets of the First World War changed their poetry to cope with the ‘new kind
of warfare’ it is important to analyze the poetry that has come before and look for similarities and
differences. I shall be noting the changes and similarities to show what did and did not change. The poets I
will be answering on will be Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen. Other poets will briefly be mentioned to
compare and contrast with the styles of Thomas and Owen, although this should not be confused with
going outside of the question limit of two poets. They are also mentioned to demonstrate further reading
and are not over used so as to constitute answering on a third or fourth poet. I have chosen to compare and
contrast the First World War poets against the poets of the Victorian Era as these are only separated from
the First World War poets by fourteen years and I have studied the Victorian Era previously.
Edward Thomas’s approach in ‘Adlestrop’ and ‘The Owl’ is to dispense with unneeded
descriptive words and to keep to simple and direct words, for example ‘Knowing how hungry, cold, and
tired I was’. This is a contrast to the Victorian styles of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti that
favor lines with more abstract terms such as ‘Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time’ and ‘I am also
called No more, Too-late, Farewell’. Although all three poems from which I have quoted are similar in that
they rhyme, the Victorian styles of Morris and Rossetti are more prone to use elongated, Latinate words
whilst Thomas’s approach is to use simple, Anglo-Saxon words. This example points to a simplifying of
poetry during the First World War and could be said to constitute a change, with poems becoming more
factual with a clear aim rather than being abstract and open to interpretation.
However on closer analysis the change appears to be more gradual rather than sudden. The
‘Victorian’ poet and writer Matthew Arnold, writing between 1848 and 1885, the ‘Victorian’ poet A.E.
Housman, writing between 1892 and 1922, also have written poems in a simple style. For instance Arnold
uses ‘Is it to feel out strength-’ and Housman ‘In fields where roses fade’. But what separates the styles of
Housman and Arnold from Thomas’ is that their poetry still contains a great number of confusing or
abstract terms, for instance Arnold uses ‘and feel but half, and feebly, what we feel’ and Housman ‘It
sleeps well, the horned head’.
Another difference is that this simple style seems to be in a minority in the Victorian Era with
others such as Robert Browning, Emily Bronte and Arthur Hugh Clough preferring the complicated,
Latinate language. Whereas amongst the First World War poets the simple style appears to be used by the
majority, whilst the more complicated style appears to be used by a minority.
Within ‘Adlestrop’ and ‘Owl’ there is still Victorian poetic technique to be found within Edward
Thomas’s poems, the alliteration of ‘most melancholy’, ‘Strange solitude’ and ‘May morn’. Onomatopoeia
can be found within ‘express train’ and ‘hissed’ which are both used in close proximity to the word ‘steam’.
With the presence of onomatopoeia and alliteration Thomas’ poems could be said to have more detail than I
first thought, this subtle detail does not hinder the ease of which the two poems can be understood.
The degree of simplicity and clarity within the poems makes them understandable today regardless
of how the English language has progressed over the last eighty years. The comprehension of many poems
from the late Victorian Era cannot be said to be as easy; Arnold uses ‘convolvulus’, ‘lindens’ and
‘earthen’s cruse’, Browning uses ‘Urbinate’, ‘scudi’ and ‘Meted’ and Housman uses ‘brisker’, ‘victuals’
and ‘betimes’. Apart from the possibility of ‘Myriads’ no word within one of Thomas’ poems requires the
use of a dictionary in-order to understand its meaning. But were all the meanings so easily understandable
when they were written? In the case of Thomas’ poetry I believe they were but in contrast Sassoon’s and
Rosenburg's may not have been. It is easy to assume that poems that are fully understandable today must
have been translatable to the masses nearer the time they were written, but this is not necessarily true. On
average people today have larger vocabularies than eighty years ago. Perhaps words such as ‘syphilitic’
‘complacent’ and ‘solitude’, as found in Sassoon’s poetry, were not in everyday use. Perhaps words such as
‘Urbinate, ‘scudi’ and ‘Meted’ were in everyday use at the time, although I doubt they were.
On an additional note to the comments on the clarity of Thomas’ poems ‘Bob’s Lane’ is a striking
example of the longevity of the language Thomas used. The entire poem from ‘Women he liked, did shovel
bearded Bob’ to ‘And gloom, the name alone survives, Bob’s lane’ reads as if it was written yesterday. This
is a prime example of how the ease of comprehension associated with Thomas’s poems distances them
from those from the Victorian Era.
Some poems from the Victorian Era are escapist, for instance Goblin Market has been suggested
to be escapist, the poems of The First World War are distanced and seen to be a change from these because
of the simple fact that they are generally considered to be non-escapist. However the poets must have
achieved a level of escapism whilst writing them and some readers of First World War poetry must read
them to escape or to imagine, these concerns could be applied to most if not all poems and so could define
all poems as escapist.
Wilfred Owen’s poems also seem to have a simple style to them, they are more abstract than
Thomas’, ‘I, too, saw God through mud,-‘, and are not as easily understandable. They also seem to be more
graphic than Thomas’ poems, ‘a blood-smear down his leg’, and more obvious in their pre-occupation with
death ‘By his dead smile I knew we stood in hell’. Owen’s poetry is depicting warfare in an honest and
open way. There is evidence of Owen wrestling with his Christian beliefs and the reality of warfare, in
‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’ Owens writes ‘I, too, saw God through mud,-‘, whilst in ‘Anthem for a
doomed youth’ he writes ‘What passing bells for these who die as cattle?’ and ‘What candles may be held
to speed them all?’, in ‘Futility’ he writes ‘-O what made fatuous sunbeams toil/To break earth’s sleep at
all?’ and finally in Disabled he writes ‘Only a solem man who brought him fruits/Thanked him; and then
enquired about his soul’. This is a good indication that a change between style of Victorian poets and the
poets of the First World War was the open questioning of Christianity’s validity and the existence of the
Christian god within poetry. Although Darwin, Huxley and Spencer may have openly started the process in
literature I can find no-other questioning of religious values, in poetry, other than the poems of Thomas
Hardy and Wilfred Owen. Hardy’s poems contains lines such as ‘If but some vengeful god would call to
me/From up the sky, and laugh: ”Thou suffering thing/Know that thou sorrow is my ecstacy’ and ‘That
faiths by which my comrades stand/Seem fantasies to me’. Hardy seems to have made up his mind that god
does not exist, the questioning does not enter into the poetry, only the admissions that god does not exist to
him. However these admissions could be seen as questioning the existence of god rather than statements. I
have to conclude that, like the simple style of the poets of the First World War, the questioning of the
existence of god seems to have gradually entered into poetry since Hardy’s poems, and was merely
accentuated further by the First World War. However since Hardy began writing poetry in 1898, I would
not classify him as a Victorian poet, furthermore the main bulk of his poetry was written in the twentieth
century and so I would classify him as a twentieth century poet (as does the Norton Anthology). This
makes the statement made above concerning a difference between Victorian poets and the poets of the First
World War being the questioning of god by the latter entirely valid. Owen seems to have considered
himself to be a philosopher, at the beginning of an ‘effervescent’ he wrote ‘For the first time in life, I feel I
could fill volumes; if I once started to write. It would turn out a Philosophical Work, of course. Oh the
irony of my old title of Philosopher [A family nickname]!. I have become one without knowing it. It is a
far, far different thing from what I imagined of yore . . . My treatise on Philosophy would be a succession
of interrogations from beginning to end.’
Owen’s poetry contains terms which fall within the semantic field of warfare. This is especially
true of the poem ‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’ which includes the military terms ‘rifle-thong’, ‘duty’ ,
’barrage’, ‘platoon’, ‘shell-storms’ and ‘flare’. This indicates a change between Victorian poetry and the
poetry of the First World War, the integration and adaptation of World War One terms into poetry by the
poets of that time. This is similar to Victorian poetry in that Victorian poets also integrated and adapted
new technology, and for that matter old (by our standards) and natural objects, into their poetry. For
example: the fruits in Goblin Market being adapted by Christina Rossetti into symbols of potent sexuality.
C. Day Lewis is critical of Owen’s earlier work stating that it is ‘vague, vaporous, subjective,
highly ‘poetic’ in a pseudo-Keatsian way, with Tennysonian and Ninety-ish echoes here and there: the
verse of a youth in love with the idea of poetry-and in love with Love’. Aside from being highly critical of
Owen’s earlier work Lewis is also comparing it to John Keats and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. This is clearly a
link to the Victorian Era, rather than a move away from it. Lewis also goes onto say that Owen’s poetry
‘came home deepest to my own generation, so that we could never again think of war as anything but a
vile, if necessary, evil. Here Lewis is claiming Owen’s poetry to be a warning about the dangers and
horrors of warfare. This shows a change between the Victorian poets and the poets of the First World War
as the function of poetry changes. Unlike Victorian poetry which consists mainly of poetry concerned with
art, romance, concepts and politics the First World War poetry removes the romanticism from war, exposes
its irony and then shows the true nature of war, ‘the death of a generation’, as it had become in the
twentieth century. Owen puts this well in a letter to his brother: ‘One poor devil had his shin-bone crushed
by a gun carriage wheel, and the doctor had to twist it about and push it like a piston to get out the pus. . . I
deliberately tell you all this to educate you in the actualities of war.’
The poets of the First World War grew out of a native poetic tradition, but were faced with a
totally new kind of warfare. In what ways did their poetry change to cope with this? You should answer on
two of the poets you have studied.
To analyze how the poets of the First World War changed their poetry to cope with the ‘new kind
of warfare’ it is important to analyze the poetry that has come before and look for similarities and
differences. I shall be noting the changes and similarities to show what did and did not change. The poets I
will be answering on will be Edward Thomas and Wilfred Owen. Other poets will briefly be mentioned to
compare and contrast with the styles of Thomas and Owen, although this should not be confused with
going outside of the question limit of two poets. They are also mentioned to demonstrate further reading
and are not over used so as to constitute answering on a third or fourth poet. I have chosen to compare and
contrast the First World War poets against the poets of the Victorian Era as these are only separated from
the First World War poets by fourteen years and I have studied the Victorian Era previously.
Edward Thomas’s approach in ‘Adlestrop’ and ‘The Owl’ is to dispense with unneeded
descriptive words and to keep to simple and direct words, for example ‘Knowing how hungry, cold, and
tired I was’. This is a contrast to the Victorian styles of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti that
favor lines with more abstract terms such as ‘Dreamer of dreams, born out of my due time’ and ‘I am also
called No more, Too-late, Farewell’. Although all three poems from which I have quoted are similar in that
they rhyme, the Victorian styles of Morris and Rossetti are more prone to use elongated, Latinate words
whilst Thomas’s approach is to use simple, Anglo-Saxon words. This example points to a simplifying of
poetry during the First World War and could be said to constitute a change, with poems becoming more
factual with a clear aim rather than being abstract and open to interpretation.
However on closer analysis the change appears to be more gradual rather than sudden. The
‘Victorian’ poet and writer Matthew Arnold, writing between 1848 and 1885, the ‘Victorian’ poet A.E.
Housman, writing between 1892 and 1922, also have written poems in a simple style. For instance Arnold
uses ‘Is it to feel out strength-’ and Housman ‘In fields where roses fade’. But what separates the styles of
Housman and Arnold from Thomas’ is that their poetry still contains a great number of confusing or
abstract terms, for instance Arnold uses ‘and feel but half, and feebly, what we feel’ and Housman ‘It
sleeps well, the horned head’.
Another difference is that this simple style seems to be in a minority in the Victorian Era with
others such as Robert Browning, Emily Bronte and Arthur Hugh Clough preferring the complicated,
Latinate language. Whereas amongst the First World War poets the simple style appears to be used by the
majority, whilst the more complicated style appears to be used by a minority.
Within ‘Adlestrop’ and ‘Owl’ there is still Victorian poetic technique to be found within Edward
Thomas’s poems, the alliteration of ‘most melancholy’, ‘Strange solitude’ and ‘May morn’. Onomatopoeia
can be found within ‘express train’ and ‘hissed’ which are both used in close proximity to the word ‘steam’.
With the presence of onomatopoeia and alliteration Thomas’ poems could be said to have more detail than I
first thought, this subtle detail does not hinder the ease of which the two poems can be understood.
The degree of simplicity and clarity within the poems makes them understandable today regardless
of how the English language has progressed over the last eighty years. The comprehension of many poems
from the late Victorian Era cannot be said to be as easy; Arnold uses ‘convolvulus’, ‘lindens’ and
‘earthen’s cruse’, Browning uses ‘Urbinate’, ‘scudi’ and ‘Meted’ and Housman uses ‘brisker’, ‘victuals’
and ‘betimes’. Apart from the possibility of ‘Myriads’ no word within one of Thomas’ poems requires the
use of a dictionary in-order to understand its meaning. But were all the meanings so easily understandable
when they were written? In the case of Thomas’ poetry I believe they were but in contrast Sassoon’s and
Rosenburg's may not have been. It is easy to assume that poems that are fully understandable today must
have been translatable to the masses nearer the time they were written, but this is not necessarily true. On
average people today have larger vocabularies than eighty years ago. Perhaps words such as ‘syphilitic’
‘complacent’ and ‘solitude’, as found in Sassoon’s poetry, were not in everyday use. Perhaps words such as
‘Urbinate, ‘scudi’ and ‘Meted’ were in everyday use at the time, although I doubt they were.
On an additional note to the comments on the clarity of Thomas’ poems ‘Bob’s Lane’ is a striking
example of the longevity of the language Thomas used. The entire poem from ‘Women he liked, did shovel
bearded Bob’ to ‘And gloom, the name alone survives, Bob’s lane’ reads as if it was written yesterday. This
is a prime example of how the ease of comprehension associated with Thomas’s poems distances them
from those from the Victorian Era.
Some poems from the Victorian Era are escapist, for instance Goblin Market has been suggested
to be escapist, the poems of The First World War are distanced and seen to be a change from these because
of the simple fact that they are generally considered to be non-escapist. However the poets must have
achieved a level of escapism whilst writing them and some readers of First World War poetry must read
them to escape or to imagine, these concerns could be applied to most if not all poems and so could define
all poems as escapist.
Wilfred Owen’s poems also seem to have a simple style to them, they are more abstract than
Thomas’, ‘I, too, saw God through mud,-‘, and are not as easily understandable. They also seem to be more
graphic than Thomas’ poems, ‘a blood-smear down his leg’, and more obvious in their pre-occupation with
death ‘By his dead smile I knew we stood in hell’. Owen’s poetry is depicting warfare in an honest and
open way. There is evidence of Owen wrestling with his Christian beliefs and the reality of warfare, in
‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’ Owens writes ‘I, too, saw God through mud,-‘, whilst in ‘Anthem for a
doomed youth’ he writes ‘What passing bells for these who die as cattle?’ and ‘What candles may be held
to speed them all?’, in ‘Futility’ he writes ‘-O what made fatuous sunbeams toil/To break earth’s sleep at
all?’ and finally in Disabled he writes ‘Only a solem man who brought him fruits/Thanked him; and then
enquired about his soul’. This is a good indication that a change between style of Victorian poets and the
poets of the First World War was the open questioning of Christianity’s validity and the existence of the
Christian god within poetry. Although Darwin, Huxley and Spencer may have openly started the process in
literature I can find no-other questioning of religious values, in poetry, other than the poems of Thomas
Hardy and Wilfred Owen. Hardy’s poems contains lines such as ‘If but some vengeful god would call to
me/From up the sky, and laugh: ”Thou suffering thing/Know that thou sorrow is my ecstacy’ and ‘That
faiths by which my comrades stand/Seem fantasies to me’. Hardy seems to have made up his mind that god
does not exist, the questioning does not enter into the poetry, only the admissions that god does not exist to
him. However these admissions could be seen as questioning the existence of god rather than statements. I
have to conclude that, like the simple style of the poets of the First World War, the questioning of the
existence of god seems to have gradually entered into poetry since Hardy’s poems, and was merely
accentuated further by the First World War. However since Hardy began writing poetry in 1898, I would
not classify him as a Victorian poet, furthermore the main bulk of his poetry was written in the twentieth
century and so I would classify him as a twentieth century poet (as does the Norton Anthology). This
makes the statement made above concerning a difference between Victorian poets and the poets of the First
World War being the questioning of god by the latter entirely valid. Owen seems to have considered
himself to be a philosopher, at the beginning of an ‘effervescent’ he wrote ‘For the first time in life, I feel I
could fill volumes; if I once started to write. It would turn out a Philosophical Work, of course. Oh the
irony of my old title of Philosopher [A family nickname]!. I have become one without knowing it. It is a
far, far different thing from what I imagined of yore . . . My treatise on Philosophy would be a succession
of interrogations from beginning to end.’
Owen’s poetry contains terms which fall within the semantic field of warfare. This is especially
true of the poem ‘Apologia Pro Poemate Meo’ which includes the military terms ‘rifle-thong’, ‘duty’ ,
’barrage’, ‘platoon’, ‘shell-storms’ and ‘flare’. This indicates a change between Victorian poetry and the
poetry of the First World War, the integration and adaptation of World War One terms into poetry by the
poets of that time. This is similar to Victorian poetry in that Victorian poets also integrated and adapted
new technology, and for that matter old (by our standards) and natural objects, into their poetry. For
example: the fruits in Goblin Market being adapted by Christina Rossetti into symbols of potent sexuality.
C. Day Lewis is critical of Owen’s earlier work stating that it is ‘vague, vaporous, subjective,
highly ‘poetic’ in a pseudo-Keatsian way, with Tennysonian and Ninety-ish echoes here and there: the
verse of a youth in love with the idea of poetry-and in love with Love’. Aside from being highly critical of
Owen’s earlier work Lewis is also comparing it to John Keats and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. This is clearly a
link to the Victorian Era, rather than a move away from it. Lewis also goes onto say that Owen’s poetry
‘came home deepest to my own generation, so that we could never again think of war as anything but a
vile, if necessary, evil. Here Lewis is claiming Owen’s poetry to be a warning about the dangers and
horrors of warfare. This shows a change between the Victorian poets and the poets of the First World War
as the function of poetry changes. Unlike Victorian poetry which consists mainly of poetry concerned with
art, romance, concepts and politics the First World War poetry removes the romanticism from war, exposes
its irony and then shows the true nature of war, ‘the death of a generation’, as it had become in the
twentieth century. Owen puts this well in a letter to his brother: ‘One poor devil had his shin-bone crushed
by a gun carriage wheel, and the doctor had to twist it about and push it like a piston to get out the pus. . . I
deliberately tell you all this to educate you in the actualities of war.’
I enjoyed the coursework associated with Wilfred Owen, infact I still have my OCR Poetry book somewhere, and the opening worlds one.
GCSE's suck, glad I have finished with them.
GCSE's suck, glad I have finished with them.
Owen is awesome.
:-(
JFH wrote:
> Shakespeare entertained people with his work. If Owen read his stuff
> out in the trenches it would hardly be a morale booster, would it?
Ahahah.
'GAS! GAS! Quick boys!'
> Shakespeare entertained people with his work. If Owen read his stuff
> out in the trenches it would hardly be a morale booster, would it?
Ahahah.
'GAS! GAS! Quick boys!'
Really, he's evil. He puposefully wrote stupidly depressing and confusing poems for me to write about when he could have been shooting some Germans instead.
I used to think the same about Shakespeare but now I can understand his plays and the strories are pretty good. Also, writing an essay on a play is quite easy. Writing an essay a small poem is far, far more difficult.
Shakespeare entertained people with his work. If Owen read his stuff out in the trenches it would hardly be a morale booster, would it? His plan must have been to make us lose the war, and then have people right across the globe studying his poems because they were such a vital part of history. As it turned out, we won, and so only the English end up reading his work and crying because it makes no sense.
So, in short, does anybody know of any websites that have some poetry analysis on them?
I used to think the same about Shakespeare but now I can understand his plays and the strories are pretty good. Also, writing an essay on a play is quite easy. Writing an essay a small poem is far, far more difficult.
Shakespeare entertained people with his work. If Owen read his stuff out in the trenches it would hardly be a morale booster, would it? His plan must have been to make us lose the war, and then have people right across the globe studying his poems because they were such a vital part of history. As it turned out, we won, and so only the English end up reading his work and crying because it makes no sense.
So, in short, does anybody know of any websites that have some poetry analysis on them?