Sign Up Now
Get instant access to over 1 million+ study documents
OR
Already registered? click here to login
By creating your account, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and student honor code.
¶ … British and German trench poetry side by side
Teaching British and German trench war poetry side-by-side
One of the difficulties in teaching World War I is that the memory of World War II is often much sharper in the minds of students. The more ambiguous causes of the First World War, and the complex feelings of both German and British soldiers can be lost if there is too much focus on the British War Poets alone. Examining both nationalities' poetic response to war enables a compassionate cross-comparison of both traditions. It enables students to identify both similarities and differences in the responses of German and British war poets, who were responding to the same experience of bloodshed, albeit from different sides of the front lines. It also shows the importance of literature and poetry in the culture of both nations to respond to national crisis, in a way that may be surprising to students today.
The author makes an interesting point that viewing 'the war' as a kind of common aesthetic culture may be a more fair way to evaluate poets such as Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, than comparing them with their fellow Britons writing at home. These young men were not immersed in the high modernist traditions of Virginia Woolf and T.S. Eliot: rather, they were immersed in the experience of war and their own visceral response to the horrors they witnessed.
Thus a multifaceted, rather than strictly comparative approach might be the most illuminating way to study this period of history and literature. Cross-cultural, comparative literary analysis is always imperfect, particularly given the linguistic challenges presented by evaluating German poetry in relation to its British counterparts. Contextualizing the British war poets requires a certain level of understanding how the war was seen by the other side, and by alien eyes. More is likely to be gained than lost by reading the German war poets in translation. Yet reading the German poets in translation allows the reader to appreciate the influence of symbolism and expressionism in their work that was not present even in the harsh visions of Wilfred Owen: attempting to explain why the homeland had more influence upon the German poets, versus the British archaic diction and pastoralist idealism can only be answered through cross-comparison of different cultural aesthetic norms.
Dead Body in War Poetry Analysis of Poets War Poetry War is a brutal reality on the face of history. Thousands of lives have been wasted in the name of battles and millions of people were affected by it. Poet is a rather sensitive part of our society and feels the brutality of war more than a normal individual. During World War I, the world went through havoc during which millions of
"Red fangs have torn His face. / God's blood is shed." In contrast, the German soldier August Stramm presents words in rapid-fire succession in his poem "War grave." The poem's list is designed to hit the reader like a round of gunfire. Instead of the crafted image of the snow that begins Rosenberg's poem, Stramm merely says: "Flowers impudent/Dust shyly./Flare/Water/Glast/Forgotten." The impudent flowers mock the sacrifice of the men who
Anti-War Sentiments Vonnegut and Sassoon -- Anti-War Sentiments in Writing Kurt Vonnegut and Sigfried Sassoon are both war veterans turned writers who have writings that can be expressed as anti-war. With both men, their experiences in war left them very much opposed to it and with a sense of its futility. They chose to express these feelings in writing, but did so in very different ways. Vonnegut expressed his anti-war sentiments in
As Yu Tsun himself describes the glum setting of his train trip: There was hardly a soul on the platform. I went through the coaches; I remember a few farmers, a woman dressed in mourning, a young boy who was reading with fervor the Annals of Tacitus, a wounded and happy soldier. The coaches jerked forward at last. A man whom I recognized ran in vain to the end of the
Sentiments of the "Lost Generation" Sentiments of "Lost Generation" Before the beginning of the Great War Era an optimistic attitude championing technological and educational progress was pervasive on a global scale. However, with the commencement of World War I, destruction was visited upon the world on a scale never before seen. In its wake, came a cultural realization that the progress made was not entirely for the good. This new sentiment is
Tolkien and the Canon Is J.R.R. Tolkien a canonical writer? This depends, of course, on how we define canonical status -- or indeed who we acknowledge as our arbiter of canonicity. I will begin by noting the whiff of sanctimony in the very idea of a "canon." The idea of a "canon" is, in itself, originally a term derived from religion: as the Christian religion underwent a centuries-long process of defining