What is war poetry?

1. What is war poetry?

2. The power of war poetry Jon Stallworthy edited an anthology of war poetry and describes the emotive force of the poems : 'POETRY', Wordsworth reminds us, 'is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings', and there can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war: hope and fear; exhilaration and humiliation; hatred - not only for the enemy, but also for generals, politicians, and war-profiteers; love - for fellow soldiers, for women and children left behind, for country (often) and cause (occasionally).

4. What is war poetry? War Poetry could be described as being: • Poems which concentrate on the subject of war • Poems which are written during a war that seems to have a noticeable influence on the poet. Of these two, 'a' would be widely accepted by most as a standard definition of the genre.

5. Why write poetry about WW1? The First World War has been described as Britain's 'Vietnam', where the true horror of War touched everyone and everything in the country, breaking through the class barrier and irreversibly altering the social structure of the nation.

6. The poetry represents an overwhelming feeling of futility, in that so many lives were wasted for such little gain. Unlike the Second World War, which more easily falls into the 'just war' definition of right versus wrong, the First World War appears as a conflict with aims that were quickly lost, degenerating to a war of attrition in unbelievable conditions.

7. Depicting the horror of war The War was dehumanising. It brought home how quickly and easily mankind could be reduced to a state lower than animals. Pat Barker, in her novel Regeneration (1992), reflects on the War's terrible reversal of expectations: The Great Adventure. They'd been mobilized into holes in the ground so constricted they could hardly move. And the Great Adventure (the real life equivalent of all the adventure stories they'd devoured as boys) consisted of crouching in a dugout, waiting to be killed. The war that had promised so much in the way of 'manly' activity had actually delivered 'feminine' passivity, and on a scale that their mothers and sisters had scarcely known.

8. It is the vision of some of the war's poets that has dominated the popular image of what WW1 meant to those who fought in it and lived through it.