War Poetry Research Articles

Cognitive Poetics and Readers’ Experientiality in Contemporary Palestinian War Poetry

Cognitive Poetics and Readers’ Experientiality in Contemporary Palestinian War Poetry

The Case for Reading War Poetry as Ephemera

The First World War blurred the lines between “ordinary” and “literary” writing practices. Many sources corroborate this: necrologies written about poets who died in the act of writing not a poem but rather a letter, or introductions to poetry collections where bereaved families and friends admit they had no knowledge of their loved one’s writing practices until they found a journal full of poems after the author’s death, which they only published as a posthumous tribute. This article uses examples of French poetry of the Great War to explore this permeability between what is considered war poetry and what is considered war ephemera. The main question it addresses is what changes when we look at the war poems that were initially ephemera or ordinary writing. Whose stories get told when poetry is studied not as literature to be judged as accomplished or failed art but as a way of writing to make sense of the world? It argues that when we choose to read poems as ephemera and from the point of view of a larger anthropology of writing practices, diverse histories emerge and communities who write poetry not only as an artistic pursuit but also as a means of organizing experience and leaving traces behind reclaim ownership over their own narratives. This can challenge the false equivalence between the cultural history of warfare and an intellectual history of the elites at war and includes poetry within paradigmatic shifts that place objects at the centre of mediations of the experience of war.

Wilfred Owen’s Anger Over the Loss of Young Soldiers' Lives in the Poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth”

The study highlights Wilfred Owen’s anger over the Loss of Young Soldiers' Lives in the Poem “Anthem for Doomed Youth”. The objectives of the study are to show the anger of Wilfred Owen over the loss of young soldiers' lives, to show the physical and psychological state of the soldiers after the war, and to highlight the language of war poetry emphasizes some topics, such as suffering and death, violence, terror by the army, and hopelessness presented by the poet. The paper used a descriptive and analytical methodology to comprehend Owen's message about his refusal to funeral young soldiers in war. According to the study's conclusion, greater consideration must be given to those who defend their country, and their sacrifice when they pass away in war has to be recognized and appreciated. Consideration must be taken of the psychological state of those soldiers.

‘On the Perimeter and Fringe of War’: Norman Nicholson, Rural Modernity and Wartime

The author Norman Nicholson is an exemplary writer of rural modernity, acutely conscious of the need for rural areas to remain ‘living and organic communities’, as he puts it in his topographic book Greater Lakeland (1969). Here I argue that his position in his lifetime home of Millom, an industrial town on the periphery of the tourist Lake District, gives his writing a unique, revisionary perspective on both modern/ist and war poetry: he is a non-combatant rural poet who focuses not on contested ground overseas, but on the rural and wartime industry on the north-western English coast. Born in 1914, his life was profoundly shaped by war, and while not often considered in these terms, he was inspired by modernist poetry, particularly that of his editor at Faber & Faber, T. S. Eliot. Reading Nicholson’s early writings ‘on the perimeter and fringe of war’ (‘Waiting for Spring, 1943’) during the Second World War, engaging with his editing, periodical contributions, and early poetry up to and including his debut collection Five Rivers (1944), enables us to see the multiple ways that the traces of war in his poetry have previously gone unrecognised, displaced, by the widely-theorised struggle of both combatants and civilians to articulate the experience of war, into dates, locations, events and depictions of the body. I conclude by examining Nicholson’s response to war after the Second World War, and commenting on the implications for more general theories of wartime.

War Poetry of the Angolan/Namibian Border War: Re-membering Poetic Bodies through Textual Limbs

This article argues for a conceptualisation of war poetry as a corporeal re-membering that encapsulates trauma as literary theme through the ‘poetic bodies’ construct. The ‘poetic bodies’ concept implies that literary language, the physical and psychological body, and the environment interact to create ontological meaning through poetry. Therefore, the discussion takes place within a ‘poetic bodies’ epistemological framework, as it resonates with a South African Defence Force soldier’s (Dawid) poetry of the Angolan/Namibian Border War (1966–1989) within the larger body of Border War poetry. The article also indicates how Dawid’s biographical memory, as captured in a life story is manifested in his poetic expression of psychological re-membering and ‘sense-making’ of wartime experience. Therefore, it reveals how his poems or ‘poetic bodies’ re-member war through word-traces and symbols of physical and psychological trauma, which was triggered by environmental stressors during the Angolan/Namibian Border War.

The Ural Wartime Poetry: Features of Vision

This article displays the Great Patriotic War (1941–1945) poetry of the Urals. The researched material is limited by this time interval, which is being considered from two perspectives. Firstly, in relation to the general poetic patterns of that time literature it is shown that the regional poetry is united with the all-Union poetry both from the point of view of genre painting and stylistic features (the coexistence of romantic heroic and realistic writing). Secondly, the article analyses the art of the poets who appeared to be the representatives of the three different angles of the war — the frontline — the rear — the camp. The dimension / the place taken by the individual at the state of the war affects directly the originality of the poetic perception of the war in a direct way, that is clearly proved by that period artworks of M. Lvov, L. Tatianicheva and B. Ruchiev.

Echoes of War: Exploring War poets and their Continued Resonance

War poetry offers a very deep and personal perspective on the cruelty and destruction of war. Despite technological advancements in modern warfare since the World Wars, the fundamental miseries of armed conflict still exist. This essay examines the relevance of classic war poets like Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Rupert Brooke in the modern context post WW I. Their evocative and authentic portrayal of life and death in the trenches and battlefields of WW I emphasize the necessity of peace and offer long lasting insights into the real consequences of conflict. Even though the vivid experiences of these poets were chronicled decades ago, their writings are still very relevant even today.

“They turned my wishes to death”: Strategies of Legitimization through Spatial Proximization in War Poetry of Afghanistan

“They turned my wishes to death”: Strategies of Legitimization through Spatial Proximization in War Poetry of Afghanistan

Albanian Poetry Emerging from the Aftermath of the 1999 Kosovo War: Memory, Trauma, Revolt

This article explores the memory of war, trauma, and revolt in Albanian poetry emerging from the aftermath of the 1998–99 Kosovo War. It focuses on constructing Kosovo Albanian post-war poetry and asks about the avenues of literary representation of war. It examines the work of Xhevdet Bajraj, Arben Idrizi and Halil Matoshi, focusing on the subjects’ positions – exile and national victimhood in the case of Bajraj; critique of violence in the case of Idrizi; disillusion and trauma in the case of Matoshi. The article also finds that Kosovo's post-war literature stands in a broader framework of the literature from ex- Yugoslav republics, providing a geographical and cultural background to war poetry. The view and interpretation of the literary response to the Kosovo War aims to highlight poetry that keeps memory about the war alive, as well and explores the impact of war, to protest against violence and domination.

POÉSIE DE LA GUERRE MODERNE : TENDANCES DE DÉVELOPPEMENT À LA LUMIÈRE DU GENRE POETIQUE ET DE LA SPÉCIFICITÉ THÉMATIQUE

Background. From the first day of the war, on February 24, 2022, Ukrainian poetry gained a new impetus for development. The actualization of this type of creativity isdriven, on the one hand, by the experience of the tragic moment because such poetry often emerges in the immediate aftermath of war events, and on the other hand, by the expected therapeutic effect of poetic words. Social media platforms played a significant role in the dissemination of amateur and professional poets' verses, providing people with moral support and the opportunity to uplift one another. It is worth conducting a comprehensive literary analysis of the representative poetics of contemporary Ukrainian literature to understand the conceptual changes in Ukrainian society's consciousness, experienced by current war.
 Purpose. The aim of the study is to explore the poetic specificity of contemporary network poetry about the war unleashed by Russia against Ukraine.
 Methods. The article predominantly employs the method of mapping, supplemented by structural-analytical, descriptive, and typological techniques.
 Results. In the article, the poetic features of network (mostly amateur) poetry about the realities of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine are mapping. Nearly 90% of the poems are written in Ukrainian, while other languages used by amateur poets include Russian, English, French, and Spanish. At first glance, the verses of contemporary amateurs may appear somewhat primitive in the literary sense, but they exhibit sincerity, honesty, and poetic exploration, with attempts to construct their own rhymes and rhythmic patterns, often flavored with a sense of "folkness" (colloquial language). The gender specificity of the poems is predetermined by the dominance of works by female authors, as the specificity of wartime often positions women as observers and emotionally involved parties through their familial or professional connections with men on the front lines. The gender aspect of amateur military poetry reveals a predominance of prayer-like verses in various forms, such as prayers for peace, prayers for loved ones, prayers for Ukraine, prayers for the fallen, prayers for children, and prayers of despair. Additionally, the analyzed layer of poetry includes genres such as meditation, chronicle-like poems, lullabies, and satirical verses. The military lyrics, predominantly created by male soldiers, exhibit severity and depict the harshness of trench life, abound with images of relentless death, celebrate friendship and brotherhood, and often convey psychological and physical aversion to acts of violence. Some of these poems take the form of messages addressed to mothers or loved ones. The collection of amateur military poetry written during the spring of 2022 revolves around the chronotope of the Ukrainian wartime, depicting cities and towns ravaged by the war. At times, it narrows down to the space of a native home, either intact or ruined and abandoned, emphasizing the motif of displacement and the image of refugees. Many poems express emotional negativity towards the enemy/enemies, namely Russians, "Russian nationalists," or "orcs." In terms of form and style, the analyzed works combine subjective forms of inner monologue with folkloric clichés and intertextual references to the works of Taras Shevchenko. In terms of versification, the dominant forms are quatrains with alternating rhymes or rhymed couplets (which aligns this poetic tradition with folk songs), with the number of stanzas ranging from two to five or six. Occasionally, free verse or futuristic stanzas with monosyllabic exclamatory sentences are encountered.
 Discussion. War poems have become a social phenomenon through their dissemination on social media and internet resources. They serve the function of societal and personal therapy and meditation, psychological relief, and evoke an atmosphere of prayer, akin to both Christian and pagan prayers, particularly to Orphism with its closeness to peasantry and belief in soul purification. They embody a belief that the power of art, poetic words, and music contributes to peace. The layer of war poetry becomes stronger and more diverse every day, thus requiring its curator and researcher.

Reporting the Iraq War: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Stylistic Analysis of Selected English Translations of Iraq War Poetry

Reporting the Iraq War: A Corpus-Assisted Critical Stylistic Analysis of Selected English Translations of Iraq War Poetry

Beyond “for ever England”: Contemporary British Women’s War Poetry and the First World War Canon

Turning to the First World War patriotic narrative of “for ever England,” epito- mised by Rupert Brooke and his writing as the point of departure, this paper investigates 21st century commemorative women’s poetry written during the First World War centenary years and its subversive interaction with this traditional war narrative. This article argues that while the public discourse on war memory often turned to the idea of a “shared past” between the UK and former colonies, thus “sanitising” the history of colonial violence (as argued by Santanu Das), poems by Yrsa Daley-Ward, Malika Booker, Imtiaz Dharker, and Jenny Lewis written for commemorative anthologies effectively de-colonise the nar- rative(s) of the First World War by opening up the space for new voices and construing the image of England beyond “for ever England” in its relation to other spaces and other wars.

Konstruktionen av militär manlighet i Snoilskys Svenska bilder

The Construction of Military Masculinity in Snoilsky’s Svenska bilder: The paper presents an analysis of the construction of military masculinity in Carl Snoilsky’s Svenska bilder (Swedish Pictures). The construction of military masculinity is discussed as an important element of the cultural memory formulated in this Swedish canonical cycle of historical poetry. Taking Jan and Aleida Assman’s theory of cultural memory as a theoretical starting point, the article juxtaposes it with literary studies of masculinity to reflect on the meaning of military masculinity. War poetry and military poetry is identified as the dominant type of the poetic form of the cycle, and gendered patterns of cultural memory are discussed as reproducing the patriarchal principles of the nineteenth-century historiography. The dominant model of masculinity in Svenska bilder is presented as marked by militaristic values combined with the ethos of bourgeois masculinity. As the cycle assigns different military roles to the different stages of a man’s life, the dynamics of the meanings of masculinity is shown through the category of age. Chivalrous boyhood is presented as a stage preceding youth subordinated to the norm of homosocial military socialisation. The image of the adult man fighting at war is discussed as an amalgam of heroising and deheroising strategies. The presence of war veterans and the concept of the citizen-soldier in Svenska bilder is seen in the article as the confirmation of the hegemonic military model in the cycle.

“He’d seen it in the words of Owen and Brooke”: The Influence of Great War Poetry on Post-Millennium Soldier Poets

To this day, the term “soldier poetry” is still predominantly associated in popu- lar perception with the 1914–1918 trench poets, such as Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, or Isaac Rosenberg. And yet, the dawn of the new millennium, marked by the rise of the global War on Terror, saw a significant revival of the genre in Britain. One of the most noteworthy indicators of this is John Jeffcock’s anthology Heroes (2011), which has col- lected a hundred poems written by British soldiers who fought in recent conflicts – Iraq and Afghanistan in particular. While these poems are framed within the shifting military, socio-demographical, and political dimensions of war in our time, they simultaneously exhibit strong roots within the context of a specific literary tradition that originated in the First World War. This article sets out to analyse a selection of poems from Heroes, focus- ing on the way these poets construct a network of intertextual citations, borrowings, and allusions to connect their texts – quite deliberately – with the much acclaimed generation of poets form the Great War. The article argues that, by doing so, the poets facilitate the transposition of a set of broader myths and emotions that are typically associated with the Great War onto the new (con)text, thereby adding new literary, cultural, and social meanings to the texts.

Wanderers – Pilgrims – Soldiers – Emigrants

The main purpose of the article is to review imageries and experiences of a specific group of poets organized within the frame of the Second Polish Corps during World War II, and to analyze its most characteristic motifs within a deeper historical context of Polish romanticism, as “replayed” in the paths and roles of the Corps poets-soldiers. The study is based on the extensive use of all available books of verses and other literary publications of the Corps, which were produced on the long way from the Soviet Union, where the bulk of Corps was formed in 1941–1942, through the Middle East, Italy, to the final exile station, London in most cases. This material is analyzed within the reference framework of the Polish poetry of World War II studies, as well as comparative studies on the Polish romantic literary tradition, especially that of the Great Emigration. This comparative point of view and method of analysis is used in all parts of the chronologically organized text. From a short presentation of the history of the Corps variegated cultural life which accompanied its development from 1941 to 1945, it proceeds to similarly succinct picture of the group of more than 80 active poets publishing in the Corps. The study centers its analysis on the main theme forming the time-perception of the world presented in soldier poetry: the motif of the road or path. It reveals a phenomenon of uniting very different poetic “schools” and styles (from extreme avant-gardist and futurist, through neoromanticism, to cabaret texts) under the pressure of the war and exile experiences, as well as the strength of the great romantic tradition of Polish poetry formed along a very similar path: from Russia, Siberia, through the Middle East, to Italy, where Polish soldiers had fought under Napoleon, to London and Paris, centers of the Great Emigration. Topoi of martyrdom, strengthened through Siberia and the Holy Land connections, homelessness, martial experiences in Italy, a “treason” of Western allies (Teheran and Yalta conferences) are effectively “refreshed” in this comparative approach.

Strategies of Legitimization through Axiological Proximization in War Poetry

Despite an increased interest in war studies and militant discourse in recent years, proximization and legitimization perspectives remain scarce. This paper investigates such perspectives in war poetry by proposing a framework of axiological proximization. In this paper, we have focused upon axiological proximization that is a forced construal of a mounting ideological conflict between the political speaker and his/her enemy. This paper focuses on rhetoric of war poetry from Afghanistan and Kashmir concerning legitimization strategies. The study is qualitative in nature and lays emphasis upon the ways war poetry as a critical language embarks upon proximization and legitimization strategies especially via axiological proximization. The movement from ideological clash to the physical conflict is an essential part of axiological conflict. Axiological proximization marks the “self” with positive home-values and the “other” with alien values. This leads to antagonism between the ‘home values’ of the political speaker and ‘alien values’ of the enemy. The mechanism of axiological proximization is a salient feature of rhetoric of war poetry from Afghanistan and Kashmir where the two antagonistic ideologies are contrasted: freedom of the East versus negative values of the West.

Лексико-семантичне поле «відповідальність»в українському поетичному дискурсі періоду війни

Introduction. The reality of a full-scale war caused drastic changes in the language and language consciousness of Ukrainians. The modern poetic dictionary demonstrably reflects these changes and makes it possible to establish the time marking of the texts, to differentiate them chronologically as those created "before" and "after" February 24, 2022. Purpose. The purpose of the article is to characterize the lexical-semantic field of «responsibility» in the Ukrainian poetic discourse of the war period. Results. A cognitive-textual analysis of poetry written during the Russian-Ukrainian war records an intensive renewal of the corpus of key concepts for modern language thinking. Significant recent trends were observed in the lexical-semantic development of the concept of «responsibility». It was established that its component content, directions of textual and associative branching correlate with the methodologically important concepts of memory and history. Іn particular, when comparing the present and the future (as components of history) in connection with the social, collective need to condemn and punish the perpetrators of the war, the motif of the historical and personal responsibility of the Russian aggressors for the war crime against Ukraine and the Ukrainian people was fully expressed. One of the most important segments of the Ukrainian linguistic and poetic picture of the world during the war is the lexical-semantic field «responsibility». In addition to the name of the field, the core zone of LSF «responsibility» is formed by the nominations forgiveness / non- forgiveness, punishment, trial, sentence, revenge, retribution. It also includes precedent expressions blood for blood, death for death, symbolic proper names Nuremberg, The Hague. Conclusion. The lexical-semantic field «responsibility» is one of the determining for Ukrainian war poetry. The рerspective of continuing this scientific direction is connected with the need for in-depth linguistic knowledge and description of poetry of the war period and about the war, in particular with the need to systematically stratify a poetic dictionary updated in accordance with modern conditions, which demonstrably records the changes in the linguistic thinking of modern Ukrainians.

Image of Ivan Terrible in European Propaganda during Livonian War (Poetic Works of S. Wolf and J. Kokhanovsky)

The image of Ivan the Terrible in the propagandic European poetry of the Livonian War is considered. On the example of two poetic works “An elegiac poem about the campaign of His Majesty Stephen the First, the King of Poland and the Grand Duke of Lithuania against Ivan Vasilyevich, the Grand Duke of Moscow” by the German author Samuil Wolf (1582) and “The Song of the Capture of Polotsk” by the Polish poet Jan Kokhanovsky (1580) the conclusion is made about the great interest of the European reader in the personality of the Moscow tsar. The analysis of these texts shows the grotesque image of Ivan the Terrible, formed under the influence of the “political order” coming from the Polish King Stefan Batory. It is also concluded that European propaganda played a negative role, contributed to the loss of the Muscovite state in the Livonian War. The indifference of the tsar himself to what was published about him in the West is also noted, this was the reason that Ivan the Terrible did not want to carry out reciprocal propaganda campaigns and limited himself in this regard to exculpatory and accusatory letters to S. Batory, A. M. Kurbsky and some European monarchs. “The Song of the Capture of Polotsk” was first translated into Russian by the author of the article and is published here in full.

The Argonauts of the Western Front – Poets as Ethnographers of the Culture de Guerre in the First World War

For over a century, historians and literary critics appear to have been at odds regarding the poetry of the First World War. This schism owes itself to processes of canonization which restrict (in Britain) or completely ignore (in France) the full extent and diversity of wartime poetic practices. Investigating a new corpus of French poets of the First World War, and considering poetry as a social and cultural category and as a wartime practice whose functions go beyond literary value, this article argues that war poets can be read as ethnographers of wartime culture. In proposing this analogy, it aims to present the ethnographic conventions as a common ground where History and Poetics can establish a dialogue. For scholars aiming to investigate how cultural production shapes experiences of armed conflict, this ensures poets are seen as the producers of interpretive knowledge of war and poems as more than either transparent documents or hermetic lyrical creations.

Haunting Voices: Thomas Hardy's Boer War Poetry

Haunting Voices: Thomas Hardy's Boer War Poetry