War Poetry Research Articles

Conceptualizing War via Cross-Domain Mapping in Julian Grenfell’s Poem Into Battle

Metaphor is known for most people as a device of the poetic imagination and a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. George Lakoff, (1992) claims that metaphor is fundamentally found in thoughts not in language. He defines metaphor as “a cross-domain mapping in the conceptual system”, while the metaphorical language is “a surface manifestation of conceptual metaphor”. This study deals with the war poem Into Battle of Jullian Grenfell as a sample of war poetry flourished during the First World War. The results show that the application of Lackoff’s cross-domain mapping theory of metaphor functions as a way of a vital presentation of the images of war. By these metaphorical images, the war actions become easily comprehended by the readers who do not have a chance to live in or to participate in wars.

Try To Be As Brave: Cross-Continental Comparisons of Great War Poetry

Try To Be As Brave: Cross-Continental Comparisons of Great War Poetry

전봉건의 전쟁참여시와 전후시의 특성

전봉건의 전쟁참여시와 전후시의 특성

Masculinities: Tracing the Trajectories of Gender Performance in Afghanistan War Poetry

This paper critically examines the war songs and poems of men who fought in the post 9/11 Afghanistan war. The study locates the analysis within the socio-cultural influences that left an impact on the ‘manly’ soldiers, allowing a 'micro mapping' of masculinity to be revealed in these men’s writings. Using thematic analysis techniques, fifty war songs and poemsfrom the years 2007 and 2008 are analyzed through the lens of masculinity and its performance. The critical investigation of the war songs and poems found that the performative dimension of masculinities in war spread around the themes of youth warriors; weapons; arms and war machinery; state of politics and need for an Islamic government; the motif of red color; and glorification of death. The religion Islam, their homeland Afghanistan and its traditional culture constantly act as a fuel to evoke overpowering emotions for the soldiers and their passion for fighting. It is furthermore found that the locally constructed masculinities informed the context ofthe Afghanistan War. This has implications for the way we understand masculinities especially in war poetry. As the paper demonstrates, the multiple ways in which the notion of masculinity is manifested in war poems point to the need to break free from the stereotypical understandings of warriors from conservative religious backgrounds.

Muriel Rukeyser’s experimental feminine poetics of war

ABSTRACTThis essay puts forward Muriel Rukeyser’s Life of Poetry as the site of articulation of a radical and still urgently relevant experimental feminine poetics of war. The power of this poetics is rooted not in proximity to combat experience, but in the interweaving of public and political fact, personal exploration, and imaginative experiment in an era of constant and pervasive conflict. In her contribution to the 1945 anthology The War Poets, Rukeyser admits, ‘For myself, war has been in my writing since I began.’ If poetry, as she describes it, allows people to feel ‘the meeting of their consciousness and the world,’ then twentieth- and twenty-first-century poetry must be war poetry; not so much a ‘genre’ as a mode of encounter. Rukeyser’s experimental feminine poetics of war provides a way to counter dichotomies between the poetry of inner selves and outer experience, between personal and political writing, and between all of the previous and formally innovative writing, indeed, between war and peace. In addition to engaging Walter Benjamin’s concept of history and Susan Schweik and Elaine Scarry’s writings on war and the imagination, this essay draws upon conceptions of the feminine in work by Alice Notley, Audre Lorde, and Joan Retallack.

“Bullets for Hands”Witter Bynner, Arthur Davison Ficke, and the Spectra Poems of World War I

Witter Bynner (as Emanuel Morgan) and Arthur Davison Ficke (as Anne Knish) published the anthology Spectra: A Book of Poetic Experiments in 1916. Although conceived of as a hoax, it constituted a quite striking body of poetry. Despite its parodic origins, Spectra included some of the most resonant poetic responses to World War I. Recent criticism of Spectrism understandably tends to emphasize the hoax aspects of this fascinating episode in modernist history, focusing for example on the performance of identity. Yet Bynner himself stated his genuine affirmation of the anthology's work beyond the satiric circumstances of its creation, and the experience of this ostensibly mockalternative avant-garde ended up having long-term effects on both his and Ficke's careers. This essay argues that engaging with Spectra beyond its existence as a hoax allows us to explore its wider aesthetic and sociopolitical relevance to the period and sheds further light on contemporary perceptions of Imagism and Vorticism, particularly in the context of the poetry of the Great War.

하디와 토마스의 전쟁시

Thomas Hardy was a non-combatant, but Edward Thomas was a soldier poet, both of whom wrote poetry on the First World War. Critics say that the two poets’ “war poetry” is lacking in reality and insufficient to convey the horrors of the battlefield. However, it would not be enough to repeatedly portray the terrible truth because poetry is not a newspaper article or reportage, or even war chronicles either. Rather, it is the essential responsibility of the poet to embody in literature the limitations and compassion of the universal humanity impaired by such a devastation and inevitability of the warfare. Both Hardy and Thomas have successfully avoided the publicly recognized patriotic language and instead focused on mentioning the beauty of the countryside, the love and affection of the people, the history of England, and the literary tradition of the past. Their lyricism and meditation is an important factor protecting their poetry from the weaknesses of other Georgian war poems, which were most of them ideological or idealistically patriotic attempt, or cynical accusation or anti-war instigation at best.

From Baghdad to Sarajevo to Beeston: The War Poetry of Tony Harrison

ABSTRACTMuch has been written about Tony Harrison’s representation of the social and political class “wars” that have shaped British society. However, this critical depiction ignores his occupation of other war zones. In his role as a correspondent for The Guardian and The Observer during the Gulf and Bosnian Wars for instance, Harrison produced poems that directly responded to international events, even travelling to sites of conflict to produce poetic dispatches from the front line. A new reading of these poems, combined with a consideration of the poet’s archived notebooks, prompts a critical re-examination of the poet’s position as an international war writer. By examining Harrison’s poetry and archived documentation a new image of the poet emerges—one that confirms his place as a war poet for the twentieth century and which sheds new light on the moral, formal and aesthetic considerations that characterise his front-line poetics.

‘We are the Dead’: rhetoric, community and the making of John McCrae’s iconic war poem

This essay explores the ways in which John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’ sought to rhetorically build community, how it became the poem of both the army and of the civilians at home, and how it solicited responses from across the boundaries of combatants and non-combatants, male and female, and young and old. By engaging with wartime and post-war responses, including L. M. Montgomery’s home front novel Rilla of Ingleside (1921), this discussion suggests that the practices of recitation and the composition of derivative or responsive works constitute a performative collaboration that the poem itself invites, which allows the poem to be reimagined and repurposed to new ends in new eras. By drawing on rhetorical theories, and by closely considering the poem’s composition and publication history, a new understanding of this poem emerges, one that draws attention to the function of war poetry as a social text that both emanates from and shapes its culture, with the capacity to mobilize readers and audiences across boundaries of gender, age and nation. Ultimately, this essay recognizes the rhetorical function of poetry in changing individual and collective consciousness, highlighting the way that rhetoric and poetry are entwined in acts of response and collaboration.

Russia Triumphant: War Poetry in the Eighteenth Century

This paper deals with a variety of lyric poetry that was widely cultivated under Catherine II — the poetry of war. This poetry was written almost always as oc- casional court poetry; it flourished in the general context of festivities organized in celebration of the Russian successes in the numerous wars of the period. The analysis takes into account not only the main poets, but also the minor poets in order to receive a fuller picture of the period’s mentality. Presenting themselves as loyal subjects, the poets dedicated their texts mostly to Catherine II, congratulating her on her victories and praising her multifarious virtues. This panegyric element sheds a light on the cult of the empress and the specifics of her contemporary image. But the poets addressed their works not only to Catherine, but also to her victorious generals and in some cases also to the armed forces. In practicing this kind of poetry, the authors not only showed their patriotism, but also their poetic virtuosity and their erudition: their poetic task was to translate the well-known military facts into the solemn “language” of the “high style”. Writing a victory ode was a celebratory act sui generis: according to a venerable tradition of classical antiquity, the poetic word was able to transcend time, ensuring eternal glory. Remaining close to official doctrine, the poets were nevertheless able to express their own patriotic view on the ongoing wars. This patriotism came in two kinds; each one represented a certain attitude to war. The first was a radical patriotism that advocated the pursuit of national glory by the ruthless use of military power in foreign politics. The second kind was a moderate patriotism that saw war as a necessary evil; it obsessively strove to reconcile Catherine’s bellicose politics with the traditional ideal of а “just war”. The article closes with a discussion of war poetry in its relation to the peace-loving ideals of European Enlightenment.

The Poetics of Disclosure Narrating the Six-Day War in the Poetry of Nizar Qabbani

Within defined political and aesthetic contexts, the 1967 war poetry was an attempt to re-describe and re-constitute projections of the war in Arab media and popular culture. Repudiating war and its diabolical motives, several Arab poets question and subvert a complex pattern of nationalist myths that gave rise to the 1967 war and sustained it. In this context, the paper explores the provocative war poetry of the great Arab poet, Nizar Qabbani , written in the aftermath of the 1967 war between Israel and three Arab armies. In his denial of the process that aims to obscure the war and bury its atrocities beneath cultural amnesia, Qabbanireveals narratives of trauma and pain demystifying a phenomenon that centuries of history have glorified. Within the parameters of contemporary critical theory, the central argument, in the paper, aims to interrogate the war narratives purveyed by Arab politicians and official state media and their destructive impact on collective Arab memory. The poems, investigated in the paper, aim to engage the politics and the language of war questioning the myths and the monolithic political discourse that triggered the war and paved the way for the defeat.

The Erotic Wounds of War

The Erotic Wounds of War Paisley Rekdal (bio) This loneliness for you is like the wound That keeps the soldier patient in his bed . . . —Dunstan Thompson, "This Loneliness for You Is Like the Wound" Ifirst saw the Dying Gaul when I was eight. The statue, a plaster cast of the original, was tucked away under a back staircase in the Burke Gilman Museum. The Burke Gilman was my favorite place: my mother, who was studying at the University of Washington, took me there frequently, even leaving me (once I got older) on my own while she retrieved books from the library. She must have been trailing behind me the day I found the Dying Gaul, because I know I was too young to have seen, or understood, the statue on my own. I stood for minutes, stunned, at chest height to this life-sized naked man slumped on his marble shield, a sword tossed by his thigh, a trumpet like a whip of sea kelp coiled beneath his propped leg. His head was bowed, his hair wild in tuft-like peaks that looked like waves breaking against shore. His large hand clasped his inner thigh. The day I saw him, sun glowed through the glass windows, turning his flesh a paste of creamy white, as if it had been mashed with milk and paper, not composed of plaster and stone. I moved closer. The broad moustachioed face, contorted in pain. The whorls of his pubic hair like the intricate lines etched on a clamshell. His heavy sex, and the slight slit at his right side that traced the crease of skin under his breast, blood chiseled down his ribs in droplets. I stared. He was massive and yet, folded in upon himself with pain, surprisingly intimate in emotional scale. The white light made him seem alive. I could imagine him bleeding; I could practically feel him dying before me. I stared at the wound, wanting to touch it, knowing that touching art was forbidden. But wasn't looking at a man like this also forbidden? I put my finger to the wound, drawing it across the lips of his peeled-back flesh, the way I'd felt (and imagined) my own self peeled back when, once, I touched myself between the legs. I didn't think the fact he was a soldier was what made this dying so electric, so powerful. I ignored the sword, the shield, focused on his wound. He was real because of this wound. I could look at him, could touch him because of it. And yet I must have understood, instinctively, the statue's connection with violence and sex. I was supposed to pity the Gaul for his beauty and his injury; I [End Page 177] could picture the horror of the battle he'd fought by being moved by its mortal outcome. Reading the poetry of war, I understand that the Dying Gaul is a common elegiac trope: I have come to recognize the complex roles that sex, physical beauty, and the erotic play in our literary imagination of soldiers and war. I understand that the sexualization of the dying soldier is in many ways a natural extension of the poetic elegy itself, in which the charge of death becomes an erotic charge, death and Eros twinned in our imaginations of men who died young. Here is Milton's "Lycidas," an elegy for Milton's drowned childhood friend, Edward King: So Lycidas sunk low, but mounted highThrough the dear might of him that walk'd the waves;Where, other groves and other streams along,With nectar pure his oozy locks he laves,And hears the unexpressive nuptial song,In the blest kingdoms meek of joy and love. And here is Shelley, writing of Keats, in "Adonaïs": But now, thy youngest, dearest one, has perish'd, The nursling of thy widowhood, who grew, Like a pale flower by some sad maiden cherish'd, And fed with true-love tears, instead of dew; Most musical of mourners, weep anew! Thy extreme hope, the loveliest and the last, The bloom, whose petals nipp'd before they blew Died on the promise of...

Atlantic Triangle: Stevens, Yeats, Eliot in Time of War Ireland

Atlantic Triangle:Stevens, Yeats, Eliot in Time of War Ireland Lee M. Jenkins IN HIS REVIEW of the Faber and Faber Selected Poems, Donald Davie described Wallace Stevens as "a poet to be mentioned in the same breath as Eliot and Yeats and Pound. That is his place, and that is the company he must keep" (373).1 Since Davie, however, Stevens has seldom kept company with Eliot and Yeats, or with Pound. Frank Lentricchia has placed Stevens in a modernist quartet with Eliot, Pound, and Frost, yet comparative analyses of Stevens and Eliot, as of Stevens and Yeats, remain rare.2 It is rarer still to compose the three poets into a modernist trio: Stevens and Eliot, like Stevens and Yeats, may make an odd couple, but if two's company, then three's a crowd. And yet, this essay suggests, a three-way comparison of Stevens, Yeats, and Eliot collapses binaries that too often obtain between these major figures of poetic modernism, enabling us to identify common concerns, brought into sharp relief by "the violent reality of war," with the relationship between poetry and public events, politics, and belief (CPP 251). One triangulation point between Stevens, Yeats, and Eliot is triggered in the letters and literary criticism of the Irish poet Thomas McGreevy.3 A close acquaintance of Yeats's family and author of the first monograph on Eliot, T. S. Eliot: A Study (1931), McGreevy would also become, between 1948 and 1955, "the best of all [Stevens's] correspondents" (Stevens, Letter, 17 Apr. 1953). His letter of September 28, 1948, on the subject of Yeats's funeral, prompted Stevens, in his reply, to consider the "contributions" of poetry to "the national spirit," and to reflect, late in his life and not without anxiety as to his own posthumous reputation, on mortality and posterity, and on the poet as public figure (L 617).4 Stevens's attenuated reception across the Atlantic at this date—Eliot's Faber and Faber would belatedly bring out the Selected Poems, reviewed by Davie, in 1953—could hardly have convinced Stevens that he would attain Yeats's "world-wide fame" or that on his death, he would receive "homage of a public character" of the kind accorded to Yeats (L 617). As Bart Eeckhout has remarked, the "difference in fame" between Stevens and Nobel Laureates Yeats and Eliot "is substantial" (176). Stevens himself acknowledged as much in relation to Eliot in his "Homage to T. S. Eliot" (1938): "I don't know what [End Page 17] there is (any longer) to say about Eliot. His prodigious reputation is a great difficulty" (CPP 801). In his comparative study of late Stevens and late Yeats, Edward Clarke contends that "neither poet seemed especially important to the other" (8). "Contrary Theses (I)" may be the exception that proves Clarke's rule, in Stevens's case at least. Antedating the letter to McGreevy but addressing, again by way of Yeats, comparable concerns about the relationship between poetry and the public sphere, "Contrary Theses (I)" appears in Parts of a World, the 1942 volume to which Stevens appended an untitled statement on poetry and war. If Stevens's title invokes Yeatsian antinomies, the scenario of the poem itself—the intrusion of the soldier upon the poet's domain—restages, in abbreviated form, that of "The Road at My Door" and "The Stare's Nest by My Window," parts V and VI of Yeats's "Meditations in Time of Civil War."5 "Contrary Theses (I)" is "An abstraction blooded," a fleshing out of Stevens's statement, in the note on poetry and war, that "The immense poetry of war and the poetry of a work of the imagination are two different things" (CPP 333, 251). In the poem, these different poetries or contrary theses are embodied in the juxtaposed figures of the first-person speaker and the soldier, whose presence blights the poet's bower: "grapes are plush upon the vines" and "The hives are heavy with the combs" but "Blood smears the oaks." The redness of the Connecticut oak leaves in the fall is, in the "Now" of 1942—the first calendar year of the United States' engagement...

The Living Child’s Place in Piatt’s Dead Child Poems

The Living Child’s Place in Piatt’s Dead Child Poems Jess Roberts (bio) Paula Bernat Bennett published her selected edition of Sarah Piatt’s poetry, Palace-Burner: The Selected Poems of Sarah Piatt (2001), over a century after Piatt’s last significant book publication, her two-volume Poems (1894). Recognizing the need to market Piatt in the twenty-first century, Bennett assembled poems whose aesthetic and political sensibilities would resonate with modern readers. The very qualities that rankled Piatt’s nineteenth-century contemporaries—her irony, ambiguity, and difficulty—are on full display in Palace-Burner and have animated and excited students of nineteenth-century women’s poetry.1 Despite her often adamant language, Bennett presents Palace-Burner’s version of Piatt as qualified. “It should be stressed,” she writes in the preface, “that this volume’s publication only marks the culmination of the first phase of Piatt’s recovery. Both the presentation of her life and the particular selection of poems should be viewed as provisional .… much still remains to be done before the full dimensions of her literary achievement and its significance can be assessed.”2 So even as she set Piatt before a new generation of readers, Bennett recognized that others needed to challenge and develop that initial vision in order to comprehend fully her work’s richness. [End Page 334] If Alexandra Socarides and Jennifer Putzi’s A History of Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Poetry (2017) or Alfred Bendixen and Stephen Burt’s The Cambridge History of American Poetry (2015) are any indication, how we comprehend Piatt, and consequently nineteenth-century American poetry, is expanding. With Piatt now a household name, something that twenty years ago seemed all but impossible, scholars in these collections situate Piatt’s writing in the context of realism (Elizabeth Renker), children’s poetry (Angela Sorby), Southern women’s poetry (Bennett), and Civil War poetry (Faith Barrett).3 Elsewhere, Matthew Giordano examines Piatt’s engagement with and place in periodical culture; Mary McCartin Wearn charts how her poems concerning loss and motherhood evolved over her writing life; and D. Zachary Finch discusses her “ethics of maternal melancholy.”4 This scholarship makes visible the range and versatility of Piatt’s poetry and helps fashion an increasingly nuanced picture of nineteenth-century poetic culture and a significant maker of poems. While this analysis has complicated our understanding of Piatt and the world of print in which her poems circulated, the terms of Bennett’s recovery of Piatt—a recovery that values irony, anger, and subversion—potentially limit how we study her poetry. Such is the case with the study of Piatt’s poems about child death. In the introduction to Palace-Burner, Bennett describes the poet as “turning elegy into confessional” and “send[ing] up howls of pain … not to be matched again in women’s poetry until Sylvia Plath.” Later, Bennett writes, in characteristically powerful language, “Piatt’s poems on child death … fall within nineteenth-century sentimentality’s discursive parameters, but hers is a sentimentality turned in on itself, devouring itself in rage.”5 As Wearn has similarly demonstrated, Piatt’s sometimes furious rejection of the terms of sentimental consolation represents an important part of her literary agenda. However, the focus on that rejection has obscured the range of emotion [End Page 335] and response that Piatt’s dead child poems represent.6 Furthermore, existing studies of those poems have focused overwhelmingly on poetry the scholars date after Piatt’s children had died. Piatt lost children early and often: her unnamed infant in August 1873, almost ten-year-old Victor in July 1874, ten-year-old Louis in 1884, and her adult son Donn in 1914 just before her own death. But the writer’s personal experience of child death neither inaugurated nor concluded her self-conscious critical engagement with the conventions governing child elegies. This essay aims to expand and sharpen our understanding of Piatt’s dead child poems by foregrounding poems she wrote before and after the death of her son Victor. First, it considers a group of poems that appeared in an anthology entitled Little Graves (1876), a collection that is representative of the sentimental tradition of child elegies...

“Gorgeous Crime”: The Art of Violence in Women’s Civil War Poetry

“Gorgeous Crime”: The Art of Violence in Women’s Civil War Poetry

Revisiting the Sites of Trauma: The War Poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, and Richard Hugo

Revisiting the Sites of Trauma: The War Poetry of Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, and Richard Hugo

Czarny humor w twórczości Władysława Szlengla ze szczególnym uwzględnieniem wiersza „Mała stacja Treblinki”

Black humor in Władysław Szlengel works, with particular focus on Mała stacja Treblinki (A small station called Treblinki) Władysław Szlengel (1914–1943), was a Jewish poet writing in Polish. His works are the best example of the use of black humor in Polish poetry of World War II. War caused him to change his worldview, which is reflected in the change of humor in his works. The shift was so powerful that in fact Szlengel-commentator replaced Szlengel-satirist. He did not hesitate to use the sharpest irony both against his enemies and against other victims of the system. His poem A Small Station Called Treblinki is the most shocking instance of black humor.Key words: Władyslaw Szlengel; black humour; holocaust; humour; risus sardonicus;

A Thickness of Particulars: The Poetry of Anthony Hecht. Jonathan F. S. Post. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. viii+294.

<i>A Thickness of Particulars: The Poetry of Anthony Hecht</i>. Jonathan F. S. Post. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. viii+294.

구상 전쟁기의 시 · 에세이의 애도 양상

구상 전쟁기의 시 · 에세이의 애도 양상

Yelling into the Silence and its Echos. Czech Shoah Poetry Written till 1960s and its Reception

The literary reflection of the Shoah in Czech war and post-war poetry is very limited. Only a few non-Jewish poets have ever returned to thistheme (e.g. František Halas,Jiří Kolář,Jaroslav Seifert, Jan Skácel, Karel Křepelka, Radek Malý). Additionally, literary “testaments” of Jewish authors (Karel Fleischmann, Pavel Friedmann etc.) resulted in only two collections of poems entirely dedicated to the suffering of the Jews during the Nazi oppression (Ota Reich and Michal Flach). On the other hand, there are several books of poetry about Lidice and suffering of the Czech people during the World War II by Viktor Fischl, Karel Šiktanc, Libuše Hájková, Miloš Vacík and others. After the war there were only Jaroslav Seifert and Jiří Kolář among well-known poets who refered to the Shoah in a more significant way. Seifert created a figure of a Jewish girl, Hendele, in his collection of poems Koncert na ostrově (Concert on the Island), which develops the literary narration of the Shoah. Jiří Kolář referred to the Shoah repeatedly, however, he only had a limited chance to publish his work. As a result of this fact, the reception of Czech post-war poetry about the Shoah is almost absent. In my article, I concentrated on some reviewers’ remarks that have already been published since the war-time and other reflections of this kind such as editions of books by Jiří Orten, Hanuš Bonn, Jiří Daniel. A hypothetical reaction on the Shoah verses by Pick’s cabaret audience or Halas’s anonymous poetic obituary paying tribute to Jiří Orten are rather specific sorts of reception. The critical reflection of Kolář’s work in the context of the mass murder commited during the WW II is exceptional. However, the specific motifs of the Shoah were significantly focused on only in recent years by three foreign reviewers (Leszek Engelking, Hanna Marciniak and Anja Golebiowski). Czech Shoah poems printed or reprinted in Jewish periodicals (e.g. annual “Židovská ročenka”, published since 1954) represent a commemorative function, even though sometimes with informative commentaries. They miss any analytical aspect.