War Poets Research Articles

Des tranchées à la mangrove : Généalogies poétiques de la Grande Guerre à la "guerre du Biafra"

The Nigerian Civil war broke out in 1967 a few years after independence. It lasted up to January 1970. It inspired many soldiers, whether students or confirmed writers. They fought on both sides or like Wole Soyinka, tried to find a third way to solve the conflict. The violence they met inspired poems which may be linked to the War Poets of 1914-1918. The influence of the British poets on Nigerian writers takes its roots in history, Nigeria being a British colony until 1960. But this inheritance has not only to do with similar degree courses in universities. It is also related to the nature of both conflicts of unprecedented violence with soldiers facing terrifying scenes leading them to disenchantment. Unsurprisingly, their poetry expresses common themes and images, springing from the intense feeling of the uselessness of so many massacre.

The Great War and All That in A Hundred Doors by Michael Longley

Who can bring peace to people who are not civilised? All of these people, alive or dead, are civilised. (Michael Longley, The Weather in Japan) In an interview granted in 2011, on occasion of publication of A Hundred Doors, Michael Longley expressed wish that work would ultimately look like four really long poems, a very long love poem, a very long meditation on and death, a very long nature poem and a playful poem on art of Using plant image, he wanted the strands both to entwine with each other, and every now and again to emerge as separate (Moore). Indeed, if nature, love and life are major aspects which intertwine sometimes inextricably so, in a kind of Noah's ark (Brown 2002: 92), violence and have also pervaded poetry since he began writing. As he himself acknowledged, the two World Wars were part of [his] family's history before they became part of [his] imaginative landscape (Brown: 94). approach is underlined by fact that everything is interconnected and this, to quote Elmer Kennedy-Andrews, is what characterizes Longley's aesthetic expressed through his use of metaphor, techniques of fusion, juxtaposition and parallelism, fluid handling of time, place and identity, self-conscious intertextuality (Kennedy-Andrews 2000: 74-75). The collection published under title A Hundred in 2011, is composed of sixtysix poems ranging from two lines up to fortyfour. The title of book refers to Our Lady of a Hundred Doors on island of Paros, considered to be oldest Byzantine Church in Greece, which poet had visited during sojourns in that part of Aegean Sea, and which he calls muse (15) in an eponymous poem contained in collection. This paper aims at showing that while A Hundred contains most of characteristics of earlier poetry it evinces a somewhat lighter utterance. If tone has become simpler and maybe insouciant, there is still a deep awareness of fragility of nature and life. My analysis will follow three main themes that in fact are interlinked and echo each other: and particularly First World War, then life and its corollary death in shape of poet's human environment and finally context of nature which poet has found in west of Ireland. I. The No Man's Land of War Michael father is a recurring figure in poetry and many of son's poems celebrate courage in trenches during First World War. These poems are often associated with evocations of poets such as Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, Robert Graves, so-called war poets, who fought in Northern France and some of whom died in action there. Moreover, two World Wars and reading of poets framed view of Troubles in native country, in so far as they have given him a perspective on violence which generally pervades poetry. In 2013, Longley edited a selection of poems by Robert Graves. The phrase included in title of this article (and all that) partly refers to Graves's autobiography, Good-Bye to All That, published in 1929. In this work, its author relates memories of World War I, precisely battle of Loos and Battle of Somme in which he took part as an officer in Royal Welsh Fusiliers, and during which he had mistakenly been declared as killed in action. As a matter of fact, Graves, more than was case with other poets, did not make an indictment of but, to quote Longley, professed an open-faced, almost naive regimental loyalty. Graves's poetry has been an important source of inspiration and a model, confining to veneration as Longley recalled in same introduction: Graves lays down law majestically [...]. Yet line is flexible, at times improvisatory, jazzy even. Michael Longley acknowledges importance of Graves's prose work previously mentioned on own evolution and also fact that Graves's portrayal of the psychic quagmire of trenches echoed what he remembered of father's infrequent recollections. …

The Conceptual War Machine: Agonism and the Avant-Garde

The Conceptual War Machine:Agonism and the Avant-Garde Seth Perlow (bio) When the machine takes control, we passively—and happily—acquiesce. —Kenneth Goldsmith, “Introduction to Flarf vs. Conceptual Writing” (2009)1 Descriptions of conceptual writing often refer to its celebration of the boring and uncreative. Kenneth Goldsmith, the movement’s most prominent exponent, argues that “writing should be as effortless as washing the dishes; and as interesting.”2 Indeed, many of his books seem dull as dishwater—a transcription of one day’s traffic bulletins from the radio, for instance, or one year’s weather reports. There are good reasons for this strategy to bore. The embrace of ordinariness sets conceptualists in the company of Georges Perec, Andy Warhol, Samuel Beckett, even Christopher Smart. It also makes available a familiar stable of aesthetico-political claims about defamiliarization and the critique of daily life. But if conceptualists reject the dramatics of literary invention, favoring the mundane and uncreative, then why does so much conceptual writing mediate the grim spectacles of war, genocide, and other violence? Conceptual approaches to violence vary widely, from Charles Reznikoff’s verse collage of the Nuremberg Trial transcripts in Holocaust (1975) to Fiona Banner’s shot-by-shot descriptions of Vietnam War films in The Nam (1997).3 Even Goldsmith, having said he is “getting out of the boredom business,” offers Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013), which transcribes news coverage of assassinations, mass shootings, and the like.4 Such books do not simply underscore the banality of evil, the dailiness of disaster. Rather, conceptual treatments of war and other violence set up a tension between the writer’s cool, uncreative procedures and topics so grim that they dare the reader not to respond viscerally. [End Page 659] The recourse to violence highlights another major precept of conceptual writing: its disavowal of individual expression. Much as a transcript of weather forecasts conveys a supraindividual sense of the natural and technological systems in which we live, so conceptual war poetry eschews the personal frameworks through which we commonly respond to violence. Such work renders violence at a scale beyond that of lived experience. The conceptual war poet’s words often are not her own. She reworks existing discourse, operating within a social machine that produces texts as traces of the violence it does. Her writing calls attention to its own mechanicity and materiality; it figures the disciplinary character of our social systems and challenges the view of language as a vehicle for personal expression.5 My title thus refers to conceptualism as a “war machine” in part because it privileges mechanistic impersonality over the lived experience of war and other violence. Secondarily, conceptual writing operates as a war machine in a sense that calls up the latent militancy of the term avant-garde. The movement emerged after a remarkable period of slackening among American experimental writers, when the good feelings of pluralism masked a growing sense of stagnation. As suggested in the title of the best-known conceptualist anthology, Against Expression (2011), the conceptualists position their work against conventional writing. Their oppositional rhetoric has increased agonism among contemporary poets. Drawing analogies between conceptualists’ war on other styles and their thematic interest in violence, this essay begins by reading the rhetoric of agonism as it has informed conceptualism’s place in recent literary history. I faithlessly borrow war machine from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. The term underscores the importance of technology and history in an account of conceptual writing’s agonism. For Deleuze and Guattari, the war machine is not a national military but a nomadic assemblage “exterior to the State apparatus,” which seeks to appropriate its violence.6 It opposes State authority more decisively than the conceptualists do, but conceptual writing powerfully affirms the proposition that “a book itself is a little machine.”7 Deleuze and Guattari position “the war machine-book against the State apparatus-book,” and they find it “opposed in every way to the classical or romantic book constituted by the interiority of a substance or subject”—precisely the antiexpressive stance of the conceptualists.8 The conceptual war machine agonizes its relation not to the State but to other avant-garde writing...

Northrop Frye and Edmund Blunden

Edmund Blunden (1896 to 1974) was Frye's tutor at Merton College, Oxford University, during the two separate academic years Frye studied there, 1936-37 and 1938-39. Blunden was poet, teacher, and critic, survivor of two years in the trenches at Ypres, Somme, and Passchaendaele in World War I, and close friend of Siegfrid Sassoon, another of the so-called war poets, who, like Blunden, was decorated for bravery. He was professor of English at the University of Tokyo (1924 to 1927), and on returning to England he had brief career as literary journalist, writing for the Nation and the Times Literary Supplement before taking up the position as Fellow and Tutor in English at Merton College in 1931. Blunden was extraordinarily prolific as poet, prose writer, and journalist. Brownlee Jean Kirkpatrick's bibliography of Blunden contains 3,988 entries, including more than three thousand contributions to periodicals and newspapers. Even so, Ms Kirkpatrick confesses that her bibliography is far from complete (xiii). In 1956 he succeeded Robert Graves as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, crowning achievement of life devoted to literature. Blunden was polymath, as Frye would turn out to be, and much, perhaps most, of his critical writing centred on the nineteenth-century poets and essayists. He wrote books and monographs, which we would characterize today as largely historical and biographical, on Clare, Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge, the Shelleys (Percy and Mary), Byron, and Lamb. In this respect, with Frye's obsessive attention to Blake, Blunden and Frye were congenial spirits who viewed the Romantic revolution as central turning point in European culture. (1) Blunden was small man. The editor and publisher Sir Rupert Hart-Davis recalls that when he first met Blunden in 1932 he was struck by the aptness of Robert Graves's description of Blunden as a cross between Julius Caesar and bird. Hart-Davis goes on to say that Blunden's tiny frame, his shyness, his quick-darting eyes and gestures, had all the grace and agility of wren, which his noble nose suggested the dominance of the Latin poets he read and loved (Rothkopf 4-5) The relationship between Frye and his Oxford tutor was, like most human relations, complex. Frye's attitudes toward Blunden emerge from his correspondence with Helen Kemp (she became Helen Frye in 1937). This correspondence (CW 1-2) is our primary source. As for Blunden's view of Frye, this is more difficult to untangle. Other than Frye's statements about Blunden in the Frye-Kemp letters from 1936 to 1939, Frye makes only half dozen or so references to his tutor in his other writing, (2) all of which are inconsequential for understanding the Frye-Blunden relationship. In addition to the Frye-Kemp correspondence, our sources are limited to an interview, few letters from Blunden to Frye, and Barry Webb's excellent biography of Blunden. After Frye had completed his ba studies at Victoria College in 1932, he set out to complete second bachelor's degree, this one in theology from Emmanuel College, Victoria's sister institution at the University of Toronto. Following three years of study there, he received $1,500 scholarship from the Royal Society of Canada to spend year at Oxford studying the symbolism of Blake's prophetic works. This meant that Frye would enrol in program leading to still another bachelor's degree. (3) Pelham Edgar, Frye's mentor at Victoria, who saw Frye as potential colleague at Victoria, was the motivating force that pushed Frye's successful application for the Royal Society scholarship. After year at Merton College, Frye spent the academic year 1937-38 teaching at Victoria and then returned to Oxford for second year. His relationship with Blunden begins, then, in the fall of 1936. The present essay explores that relationship. Nazi sentiments? Frye set sail for England in early September 1936 to begin his Oxford studies, arriving in London on 15 September. …

Closing Ranks and Crossing Lines: loyalty and truth in the poems of Wilfred Owen

One of the best-known poets of the First World War, Wilfred Owen was tormented by an inner conflict which, I suggest, can be traced in several of his poems. I propose to study four such poems to show how Owen’s art is essentially shaped by two inseparable and sometimes conflicting aims, making known an otherwise untold truth while remaining loyal to the men to whom that truth belonged.

Семантика и поэтика автобиографизма в лирике окопных поэтов

The paper deals withautobiographismin a lyrical poemseen as the realization of the personified point of view on the world, on him/herself and on his/her place in the world. This problem in lyrics is complex as it affects the core of its subject structure. It does not add up to autopsychologism but reveals the complex interaction of “empiric” author, lyrical “self” and persona, their “inseparability – non-fusion”, when persona appears not as an image-character but as an image-personality (M. Bakhtin). The paradigmatic changes of autobiographism manifestation in the lyrics of S. Sassoon, W. Owen and A. Rosenberg are in the focus of the research. The Great War was not the only the central event of their life but also the principal theme of their poetry. But autobiographism is actualized in their lyrics in rather different ways. Sassoon shows the rational mastering of the new reality conveying the idea of invalidity of old conceptions of heroic deed, faith, patriotism. In Owen’s lyrics the ethical and ideological angles are not dominating aesthetical and personality ones. Thestrengthoffraternalfriendship,of faith andthe sincerity of grief – that is what the lyrical hero should find over and over again to win the right of hope versus pessimism and despair. Rosenberg’s lyrical hero is interested in the transitory linked with the eternal, the patriotic – with the cosmopolitan, the attractive – with the ugly, the strong – with the weak, subjective – with the universal. All these are united in a man, poet, lyrical “self”. Exactly the man, not the war veteran: Rosenberg does not want to play the role of the doomed, that “key role” practiced by some war poets who thought they are demanded the revelation either of proper words or of shocking details. The metamorphoses insemantics and poetics of autobiographism are radically manifested in the changes of the very subject structure of lyrics of the war poets. The Sassoon’s role hero transforms into the lyrical persona of Owen and Rosenberg which is directed at “the other” and at the same time sees himself as “the other”.

The Browning Society in US Public Literary Culture

Robert Browning had a powerful following in the United States among readers who came of age during and after the Civil War, but caricatures of the Browning Society have obscured the terms on which he was admired. For many of those readers, a taste for Browning marked a generational divide. The difficulty and startling effects of Browning’s poetry distinguished him from poets whose reputations had been made before the war—poets admired by the parents and teachers of these readers. Although he was valued specifically for being his readers’ contemporary, interpreting the difficulties of modern life to modern readers, admiration for Browning was modeled on admiration for Shakespeare, which combined philological caretaking with idealizing investments. Browning’s poetry, because of its syntactical difficulty and dense allusions, in similar fashion merited patient study, and it attracted readers who believed that it offered fuel for social transformation.

Of Heroes, Ghosts, and Witnesses: The Construction of Masculine Identity in the War Poets' Narratives

Drawing on some of the autobiographical narratives written by the war poets, this article focuses on the ghost not only as the clearest expression of the myth of the Great War but also as a counter-model undermining traditionally heroic patterns and unmasking certain narratives and identities that had been marginalized, excluded, or repressed. By assessing the ghost as a shadow of the hero, the ghost as a vehicle between life and death and the ghost as haunting memory, it will be possible to contextualize and explore the meanings and experiences of the hero in relation to the antihero, cross over the boundaries between the two and enable a more complex analysis of the real Great War soldier. The article will also study how the memory of war and of war heroisms is rethought and worked over by the veteran as witness and what writing as remembering might entail in terms of the expression of the self in relation to the dominant war myths. Bearing in mind that memory speaks through the texts, sometimes against the writer's will, particular attention will be given to how the reworking of the past shaped heroic masculine identity and to what extent the veteran's identity was determined by what of the war experience he incorporated into the text.

Richard Lisle Bennett

Richard Lisle Bennett was a passionate and skilled general practitioner, whose particular clinical interests were the welfare of the most vulnerable and marginalised people in society. He was a man...

‘A music of grief’: classical music and the First World War

The First World War involved composers just as it involved writers. We rarely hear, however, about the classical music that was written during the war, or after it, while for generations now the war has been remembered through the literature of the war poets and the memoirs of the late 1920s (Vera Brittain's Testament of youth, or Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an infantry officer, for instance). This article aims to put composers alongside their literary counterparts, to present a fuller picture of cultural responses to the conflict. It looks at works by Edward Elgar, Ivor Gurney, Herbert Howells, Patrick Hadley, Gerald Finzi, John Foulds, Frank Bridge and in particular at Arthur Bliss's symphony on war, Morning heroes. It charts the changing responses of music to the war from the first patriotic statements to the requiems of the postwar years. It looks at compositions by civilians, and by composers who served abroad, to examine how classical music is uniquely placed to commemorate, inspire and mourn.

Isaac Rosenberg the War Poet

Isaac Rosenberg the War Poet

Among the Nightmare Fighters: Americans Poets of World War II by Diederik Oostdijk

Among Nightmare Fighters: Americans Poets of World War II. Diederik Oostdijk. Columbia, SC: U South Carolina P, 2011. 304 pp. $49.95 (hardcover).Among Nightmare Fighters offers an illuminating if partial survey of World War II's importance history of American poetry and poetics. Oost- dijk argues that, despite their stereotype of belonging to generation, mid-twentieth-century poets who experienced war either first-hand or on home front did fact speak out, albeit often in quiet and undemonstrative way and sometimes years afterward (3). Their reticence, he explains, stemmed partly from having witnessed events [ . . . ] too devastating to capture words but also from belief that the history of World War II was already fixed American imagination and that their personal musings would have no major im- pact (2-3). To illustrate value of what soldiers, veterans, and conscientious objectors did manage to write, he focuses on single tight-knit circle of poets, a generation of white, male, so-called academic poets who published their po- ems Kenyon Review, New Yorker, and Partisan Review and who came to prominence 1940s and 1950s (5). These writers-including John Ciardi, James Dickey, Anthony Hecht, Randall Jarrell, Lincoln Kirstein, Robert Lowell, Howard Nemerov, Karl Shapiro, and William Stafford-collectively [ . . . ] show that effects of war are ultimately shattering to all individuals caught it, es- pecially any simple equation of war and masculinity (5).The book is carefully organized. Its parts each take up one of four fixa- tions works and lives of poets of World War II that are distinct but inter- related (13): literary traditions that intertextually haunted them, namely, example of the English poets of World War I, Anglo-American high mod- ernists, New Critics, and W. H. Auden (70); preoccupation with self that resulted many autobiographically tinged (75); rejection of the soldier as masculine ideal and redefinition of manliness as founded intel- lectual curiosity, broadmindedness, and [ . . . ] independence from social pres- sure (176); and uncertainty whether to write or remain silent about their traumatic experiences during war years (234). Each of book's parts is further subdivided into chapters, some of which are wide-ranging and oth- ers of which delve an extended manner into particular writers and bodies of work. Throughout, Oostdijk blends careful close reading and historical recon- struction. He makes particularly good use of archival material, and is able to rein- troduce familiar lyrics, such as Lowell's Christmas Eve under Hooker's Statue, as well as to bring to light war-themed poems that his favored authors wrote but, for whatever reason, chose not to publish, such as Ciardi's Sarko, which he speaks as and for Holocaust survivor (118).In some cases, Oostdijk's narrative revisits well-trod terrain. It is no surprise, for instance, to hear that Jarrell aimed to create type of democratic poetry that re- flected reality of people's daily lives, mostly as victims of forces they could neither change nor fully understand, written language that was immediately accessible (111), nor is it jolting to hear that Lowell, despite his erratic and per- haps opportunistic flip-flopping between support of and opposition to war, nonetheless consistently channeled his confusion about his identity and place world into strong public stands on politics and religion (108). More impressive, as well as admirably balanced, are his retelling of other, trickier stories, such as Shapiro's flirtation with Catholicism and Dickey's occasional, insufferable bouts of hypermasculinity. Among Nightmare Fighters truly comes into its own, though, at moments when its author's enthusiasm for subject at hand becomes palpa- ble. …

Fall 2009 to Fall 2014 William Carlos Williams Bibliography

Fall 2009 to Fall 2014 William Carlos Williams Bibliography Todd Giles The Williams Review welcomes your assistance in keeping the bibliography comprehensive and up-to-date. Please send recommendations to todd.giles@mwsu.edu. 2014 Books Knewitz, Simone. Modernist Authenticities: The Material Body and the Poetics of Amy Lowell and William Carlos Williams. Heidelberg, Germany: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2014. Articles/Book Chapters Barnstone, Tony. “Ivory Towers and War Machines: William Carlos Williams and the Humanities under Fire.” William Carlos Williams Review 31.1 (2014): 33–52. Bryant, Marsha. “Epic Encounters: The Modernist Long Poem Goes to the Movies.” Journal of Modern Literature 37.4 (2014): 70–90. Burt, Stephen. “‘Like’: A Speculative Essay about Poetry, Simile, Artificial Intelligence, Mourning, Sex, Rock and Roll, Grammar, Romantic Love, William Shakespeare, Alan Turing, Rae Armantrout, Nick Hornby, Walt Whitman, William Carlos Williams, Lia Purpura, and Claire Danes.” American Poetry Review 43.1 (2014): 17–21. Cappucci, Paul R. “‘Trying to Build on their Elders’ Work’: The Correspondence of Donald Allen and William Carlos Williams.” The New American Poetry: Fifty Years Later. Ed. and intro. John R. Woznicki. Afterword by Carla Billitteri. Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh UP, 2014. 15–28. Duran, Angelica. “Walter Raleigh, through John Milton, according to William Carlos Williams.” William Carlos Williams Review 31.1 (2014): 15–31. Eastman, Andrew. “‘Breaking the Pentameter’: Speech Rhythms, Stress Clash, and Authenticity in Modern English-Language Poetry.” Ranam: Recherches Anglaises Et NordAméricaines 47 (2014): 159–171, 276–277. [End Page 193] Fest, Bradley J. “Isn’t it a Beautiful Day? An Interview with J. Hillis Miller.” Boundary 2: An International Journal of Literature and Culture 41 (2014): 123–158. Giorcelli, Cristina. “William Carlos Williams’s Objectivism.” New Objectivists/Nouveaux objectivistes/Nuovi oggettivisti. Ed. and intro. Cristina Giorcelli. Ed. Luigi Magno. Naples, Italy: Loffredo, 2014. 105–120. Mariani, Paul L. “Remembering William Carlos Williams: Hugo Rodríguez Alcalá (1917– 2007).” William Carlos Williams Review 31.1 (2014): 1–14. Masters, Greg. “Distorting Command: William Carlos Williams’ Use of Marcia Nardi’s Letters in Paterson.” For the Artists: Critical Writing, Vol. 2. New York: Crony Books, 2014. 138–153. Steven, Mark. “The Flame’s Lover: The Modernist Mind of William Carlos Williams.” Mindful Aesthetics: Literature and the Science of Mind. Ed. and intro. Chris Danta and Helen Groth. Afterword Paul Giles. New York, NY: Bloomsbury, 2014. 123–138. Westover, Jeffrey W. “Media, Mimesis, and the Figure of the Orphan in William Carlos Williams’s Life Along the Passaic River.” William Carlos Williams Review 31.1 (2014): 53–77. Dissertations Malburne-Wade, Meredith M. “Revision as Resistance in Twentieth-Century American Drama.” Diss. U of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 2013. DAI 75 (Oct. 2014). Book Reviews Cappucci, Paul R. Rev. of Transatlantic Avant-Gardes: Little Magazines and Localist Modernism, by Eric White. William Carlos Williams Review 31.1 (2014): 84–88. Lowney, John. Rev. of The Ethics of William Carlos Williams’s Poetry, by Ian D. Copestake. William Carlos Williams Review 31.1 (2014): 95–98. Marsh, Alec. Rev. of The Verse Revolutionaries: Ezra Pound, H.D. and the Imagists, by Helen Carr. William Carlos Williams Review 31.1 (2014): 98–103. McDermott, Elizabeth. Rev. of Visiting Dr. Williams: Poems Inspired by the Life and Work of William Carlos Williams, ed. Shelia Coghill and Thom Tammaro. William Carlos Williams Review 31.1 (2014): 92–95. Newmann Holmes, Alba. Rev. of The Ethics of William Carlos Williams’s Poetry, by Ian D. Copestake. English Studies 95.2 (2014): 224–225. Oliphant, Dave. Rev. of La invención necesari. William Carlos Williams. Ensayos, cartas, poemas, selección, traducción, prólogo y notas de Juan Antonio Montiel. William Carlos Williams Review 31.1 (2014): 79–84. Reed, Brian. Rev. of Among the Nightmare Fighters: American Poets of World War II, by Diederik Oostdijk. William Carlos Williams Review 31.1 (2014): 88–92. Wald, Alan M. “The Pressure of the Contemporaneous.” Rev. of Beleaguered Poets and Leftist Critics: Stevens, Cummings, Frost, and Williams in the 1930S, by Milton Cohen, [End Page 194] and Poetic Community: Avant-Garde Activism and Cold War Culture, by Stephen Voyce. Modernism/modernity 21.2 (2014): 557–560. 2013 Articles/Book Chapters Cappucci, Paul R. “A...

The Great British Music Hall: Its Importance to British Culture and ‘The Trivial’

By 1960, Britain’s once-thriving Music Hall industry was virtually dead. Theatres with their faded notions of Empire gave way to Cinema and the threat of Television. Where thousands once linked arms singing popular songs, watch acrobatics, see feats of strength, and listen to risqué jokes, now the echoes of those acts lay as whispers amongst the stalls’ threadbare seats.
 The Halls flourished in the 19th Century, but had their origins in the taverns of the 16th and 17th Centuries. Minstrels plied their trade egged on by drunken crowds. As time passed, the notoriety of the Music Hall acts and camaraderie produced grew. Entrepreneurial businessman tapped into this commerciality and had purpose-built status symbol theatres to provide a ‘home’ for acts and punters. With names like The Apollo giving gravitas approaching Olympian ideals, so the owners basked in wealth and glory.
 The Music Hall became the mass populist entertainment for the population. Every town had one, where everyone could be entertained by variety acts showing off the performers’ skills. The acts varied from singers, joke-tellers, comics, acrobats, to dancers. They all aimed to entertain. They enabled audiences to share a symbiotic relationship with one another; became recruitment officers for the Army; inspired War Poets; showed short films; and they and the halls reflected both the ideals and foibles of their era.
 By using Raymond Williams’ structures of feeling as its cornerstone, the article will give a brief history of the halls, whilst providing analysis into how they grew into mass populist entertainment that represented British culture. Case studies of famous artistes are given, plus an insight into how Music Hall segued into radio, film and television.

Метаморфозы героического в английской лирике начала ХХ века

The paper deals with the heroic artistic modus transformations in English lyrics of World War I. The purpose is to see war poetry not as a separate artistic phenomenon but as the striking evidence of the arterial development of literature in its turn to modernism.The focus of attention is in the metamorphosis of the heroic showed in W. Wordsworth’s “The Character of the Happy Warrior” as compared to Herbert Read’s “The Happy Warrior”. In Wordsworth’s poem the hero is made by the harmony of a soldier’s duty and moral standards, loyalty to the country and commitment to God. Imagist Read makes a hero out of a “function reflex” which turns a man into a weak-minded, circumscribed but effective cripple ready to kill, much the same as extermination machines around.Nation’s memory is selective, and the instrument of this selection is mythologizing of a case, a man, or a phenomenon. In the case of the Great War this process is both mighty and paradoxical: in contrast to ancient heroes, under new mythology the archaic and universal concept of heroic turns into national and modern, with war poets as emblem of new “English heroism”.Comprehension of the heroic as an exhausted and ambivalent modus in the global conflict of World War I and the denial of rhetoric as the background for “heroic” genres lay the foundation for creating both the new national myth (hero-victim) and the new poetics in the poetry of the soldier poets.

“Over Our Heads”: Charles Causley's LOSS OF AN OIL TANKER

Charles Causley is one of Britain's finest poets of World War II, in which he served as a coder in the Royal Navy. A significant number of his early poems are about the war, and one of them, “Soldi...

The Death of Patriotism: Wilfre Owen’s Dulce et Decorum Est as an Anti-War Manifesto

Being one of the biggest fluctuations in world history, humanity had never seen an event such World War I that so completely convulsed its existing ideals. Collapsing the existing ethos, the war soon showed its potencies in art and aesthetic. It would be unimaginable that poetry stood indifferent to the massive carnage. The poets who witnessed fighting on the front lines inscribed their experiences into their literary lives and used poetry as a medium of opposing war. They shaped their works to criticize threats directed to humanity. With these pecularities, war poetry, an important move towards modern poetry, stands for a geniune disengagement from the previous naturalistic poetry and signals a change in 20th century thinking. Among war poets, Wilfred Owen is an important figure whose works juxtapose the expected and the actual circumstances of war and his best known poem Dulce Et Decorum is probable to be read as an anti-war manifesto.

Not Consciously a War Poet

Ninety years on from the Battle of the Somme, the Great War—and the great war poets—remain endlessly fascinating. Isaac Rosenberg has always been ranked among the leading writers, but distinctive characteristics of his work have sometimes led him to be underrated or misunderstood. Rosenberg differs from contemporaries, such as Owen and Sassoon, not only in his Jewish, working-class background but also in his sensibility. The pre-war Roseitberg was part urban poet, part mystic and, in his Jewishness, above all a poet of exile. He suffered no disillusionment for he had few illusions to shed. It is by recognizing his distinctiveness, I want to argue here, that we can best appreciate his remarkable poetry.

Isaac Rosenberg among the Poets of World War One

Isaac Rosenberg among the Poets of World War One

ANTON SCHNACK (1892–1973): THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND THE FATE OF THE SELF

The poetry of Anton Schnack is not well known, even in Germany. While studying at Munich University in 1913, Schnack came into contact with avant-garde literary circles and contributed poems to numerous Expressionist journals. He spent four months on the Western Front in 1915–16 before being invalided home. Subsequently he produced three collections of Expressionist poetry and a volume of outstanding war poems, ‘Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier’. The sonnets of this long cycle place him in the front rank of war poets. They end not in poetic triumph or reconciliation, but in the dissolution of the self under the impact of modern warfare.