A Comparative Analysis of the Concepts of War in the Poetry of Thomas Hardy and Abdullah Pashew

Abstract

Twentieth century witnessed marvelous uprisings and revolutions, besides the two world wars. This continuous unrest led some British poets to portray the real scenes and what they really observed and felt toward wars and they started questioning, protesting and, sometimes, celebrating the nature and purpose of the conflicts. Both of Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) and Abdulla Pashew (b.1946-present) expressed the struggle between human beings and they ennoble wars for their legitimate impulsions, and at the same time, they deprecate the spurious pretexts to provoke wars. Hardy, due to the First World War, tried to depict the reality of the war that either glorifies or ruins the mankind in most of the times, while Pashew shows glorification of wars against the dictatorship as a defense for his homeland (Kurdistan) in one side, and he also condemns it when the blameworthy civil war happened during nineties among his nation in the other side. So, both denounce and venerate wars depending on certain reasons and vindications. The study aims at examining the poems in a comparative way to show the differences and the similarities between the two nations understandings about the case of dealing with wars long ago and even the recent times. The paper is divided into two main parts each to show the concepts of war first with the British poet Thomas Hardy in his selected poems(“The man He killed”, “Christmas 1924” , “The Drummer Hodge” , “A wife in London”) . The other main part is to show the concept of war with the Kurdish poet and his selected poems (“The Lost Solider”, “The Unseen”, “I do not Understand”, “Two Faced or Sided”), then the paper ends up with the conclusions that are the findings of the study to illustrate more precisely on the major outcomes been found during the study.