Poetry Of World War Research Articles

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.

A warring style: A corpus stylistic analysis of the First World War poetry

The poetry of the First World War bears poignant testimony to the unprecedented tragedies of human destructiveness. It has been the subject of numerous studies that looked at it from diverse perspectives, drawing from various contemporary psychological, historical, and literary theories. The present study can be regarded as yet another contribution to the existing picture of this rich and enduring field where literature and history are explored alongside. Informed by the emerging field of digital literary studies, this article aims to revisit the war experience through a computational analysis of the poetry of the Great War and explore how soldier-poets conveyed their emotions in the face of traumatic war experience. We adopted a top-down corpus-driven approach that moved from key semantic domains to lexical items and then to their collocates. First, we detected the key semantic domains of the genre through a corpus tool, Wmatrix. ‘Anatomy and physiology’, ‘religion and the supernatural’, and ‘senses’ were identified as the key semantic domains in our corpus. The unusual abundance of binaries led us to group and treat these lexical items as a separate category: ‘binary oppositions’. In the second phase of the research, we analysed these key semantic domains to foreground the frequent lexical items under each domain and explored the surrounding context of those items through their collocational networks exploiting another corpus tool, Lancsbox. Finally, we further investigated the frequent items and corresponding concordance lines to identify the common stylistic features in the Great War Poetry.

Over there: rethinking American First World War literature and culture – Introduction

ABSTRACT This Special Issue of First World War Studies considers the specifically American literary and cultural production of the First World War and what distinguishes it from other national war literatures and cultures. Together the articles seek to assess how we should characterize, theorize and categorize American First World War cultural production. Despite the many memorials and memory sites to American participation, and the impact of the recent centenary, public memory of the conflict in the US remains minimal, overshadowed by the Civil War on one side and the Second World War and the Vietnam War on the other. The Eurocentric focus of the key works of First World War cultural criticism – by Paul Fussell, Samuel Hynes, Modris Eksteins and Jay Winter – is perhaps due to what Hazel Hutchison notes as the strange place of the war in American cultural memory, as a war which ‘has never quite captured the public imagination’ (The War That Used Up Words: American Writers and the First World War, 2015). Instead it is usually focused through the ‘lost generation’ writers of the 1920s: Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald, et al. Bringing together a range of scholars and drawing predominantly on literature and film by male and female non-combatants as well as participants, the case studies here consider American First World War novels, poetry, political papers, film, and screenplays. Interdisciplinary readings allow the contributors to find generic tropes and connections across different media. In this way we seek to contribute to an ongoing conversation about American First World War cultural production, and a critical field that is very much still in the process of formation and consolidation.

‘We Are the Dead’: The War Poets, metal music and chaos control

During the course of the First World War, the generation of British authors known collectively as the War Poets revolutionized the popular culture of their time. Due to their changing attitudes towards armed conflict, their portrayal of war chaos included realist descriptions of life in the trenches, unusual choices of subject matter and an eventual challenge to the political and religious establishment of their time. Metal music, a genre with an inherent lyrical and musical concern about chaos and control, has crafted several songs inspired on the First World War poetry. This specific relationship has not been studied before. Based on Weinstein’s and Walser’s insights on chaos and control in metal music, the aim of this article is to evaluate the ability of metal music to either transmit or refute the War Poets’ discourse on chaos, and to study the textual and musical resources metal bands use to relay and control said discourse. For this purpose, I perform a comparative analysis of nine metal music adaptations and appropriations of six different First World War poems they are based on. A chronological path of the evolution of the First World War poetry is followed. The study concludes that, besides effectively transmitting or contesting the War Poets’ discourse on chaos, metal music exerts chaos control through its use of musical resources, especially in the case of extreme metal subgenres.

HOME THOUGHTS, FROM ABROAD: THE FANTASY OF “BLIGHTY,” THE REALITY OF HOME

This paper examines the frequent use of the word ‘blighty’ in First World War poetry and prose to signify from the frontline trenches the longedfor world of home. A word of Anglo-Indian origin, the product of folk etymology, as unlettered soldiers convert ‘bilayati’ meaning ‘foreign’ into something that sounds more familiar in English, it retains its association with the speech of the common soldier in First World War poetry. It modulates in meaning, as the war gets increasingly desperate, and starts in poetry and elsewhere to refer to a relatively minor wound that will get you back home and out of the war. I examine this shift in a number of poets, notably Owen, Sassoon, and Gurney. I also examine the experience of ‘blighty’ from the other end of the telescope, so to speak. That is to say, from the perspective of women writers receiving their men at home and bidding them farewell for the last time. I illustrate such writing in the distinguished novel World Without End by Helen Thomas, the widow of the war poet Edward Thomas.

ТРІАДА ВІРА —НАДІЯ —ЛЮБОВЯК СИМВОЛУ ЛІРИЦІ ШІСТДЕСЯТНИКІВ Б. ОКУДЖАВИ ТА Є. СВЕРСТЮКА

The inquiry is focused on two poems of the Sixties Poets: “Three Sisters” by B. Okudzhava and “Faith — Hope — Love” by Ye. Sverstiuk. They are united by the symbolic image of a triad of Christian martyrs. The aim of the study is an interpretation of texts, associated with a common cultural tradition, as well as an indication of differences in the development of national cultures of the former USSR, that cause further divergence in the modern mentality of citizens in the country that had divided. The research adheres to comparative hermeneutic methodology. Problem Statement. Personalized images of Faith, Hope, Love in the poem by B. Okudzhava appear before the lyrical hero as the most important principle of his personal existence at the time of ordeal. They express the ethical foundations of life; their faithfulness justifies the poet, who feels indebted to life and his contemporaries. The poem by Ye. Sverstiuk “Faith — Hope — Love” reveals a profound social and historical connotation in the light of memoir evidence about the tragic fates of Ukrainian dissidents of the 60s. The motif of the tragic inevitability of choice on the Via Dolorosa is the main one in its figurative and semantic structure. The results of the study. In comparison with Okudzhava’s song, the symbolic parabolic plane in Ye. Sverstiuk’s verse is more tangible and more clearly connected with the religious tradition. Lyrical voice of the Ukrainian dissident is woven from echoes of no everyday cultural text in Soviet Ukraine — from hagiography, from the persecuted and the underground church life, from the insurgent poetry of World War II, from banned journalism fighters for national revival. Ukrainian dissidents saw their mission differently than their contemporaries in Russia, hence there is the deep meaning of the sacred images of martyrs of the triad, and prayerful spirit, and tragic pathos in the poems by Sverstiuk which are devoted to the dissidents.

Vale: A Potential Latin Pun in First World War Poetry

Vale: A Potential Latin Pun in First World War Poetry

Modernism and Second World War Poetry of Eliot, H.D., Pound

Modernism and Second World War Poetry of Eliot, H.D., Pound

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;

‘The Poet Slanders’: Stevie Smith’s War Poetry

War poetry is commonly understood as combat poetry from a male witness. This article examines the poet Stevie Smith and her authoritative witness of the Second World War, from a female, non-combatant perspective. It begins by outlining critical responses to Second World War poetry, before offering detailed analysis of selected Smith works alongside their critical reception, and parsing Smith’s subversive tactics with reference to socio-historical as well as literary context. By analysing a handful of her poems in close readings, it becomes clear that Smith used a number of poetic devices to expose the artifice of literary responses to war. Smith's use of euphemism, rhyme schemes, illustrations, poetic self-reflexivity, and intertextual allusions to propaganda and poetry, affirms the importance and innovation of her voice in questioning the codification of ‘war poetry'. She slips between subjectivities, voices, and perceptions to emphasize and bourgeon her poetic self-fashioning. Her language is purposefully variable, ambivalent, sometimes contradictory, seeking always to undermine the concept of a single authoritative response to war.

‘Literally, for this’: Edward Thomas’s ecocentric war poetry

ABSTRACTWhilst the majority of First–World War poetry is associated with trench warfare and the human cost of conflict, Edward Thomas’s war poetry is notable for its lack of explicit commentary on the war or the experience of fighting. Instead, Thomas’s work centres on the environmental impact of the conflict on the British countryside and the ways in which it disrupts rural communities. This article argues that this alternative perspective on the Great War results in the creation of a new, ecocentric form of war poetry that emphasises the deep interconnections between the human and non-human world by linking the effects of violence abroad to its impact on the environment and ways of life at home. It also suggests that Thomas’s earth-centred war poetry proves the ability of nature writing to go beyond the small scale or local to confront global issues in a way that continues to speak to current anxieties in the age of the Anthropocene.

Muddy Poetics: First World War poems by Helen Saunders and Mary Borden

In its appearances in English literary history, mud is associated with dirt and disgustingness, but also with vitality, insurgence and creativity. Mud in First World War poetry, however, has been most often read as figuring ontological and epistemological crisis: the taboo and the abject. Two poems about mud written by women during the First World War permit a different interpretation. In Helen Saunders’ ‘A Vision of Mud’ (1915) and Mary Borden's ‘The Song of the Mud’ (1917), mud is as fascinating as it is repellent. Blurring the boundaries between combatant and non-combatant, it serves as the inspiration for and the stuff of female creativity. It also reveals the possibilities of a critical thinking with muddiness which productively resists reductive dichotomies.

‘Cadets, Vets and War Poets’

For ‘Cadets, Vets and War Poets’, I produced a gala event of First World War poetry with armed forces cadets and veterans, civic dignitaries and university creative writing students. We workshopped a range of famous and unfamiliar poems and performed them, with drills and bugle calls, at a local theatre for the centenary in 2014. Highlights included the Lord Lieutenant's reading of ‘The Soldier’, the air cadets’ group performance of Woodbine Willie's ‘The Spirit’, and my women undergraduates giving voice to the war poems written by mothers, wives and sisters. Then I accompanied air cadets and vets on a tour of the war graves of Belgium where their commemorations included poetry performances at key sites around Ypres and Flanders. As scribe on this trip I collected their verbatim reactions, and collated these with my research and reading of WWI literature, to compile a piece of poetry, a war poem of my own. The project is part of Ink:Well, a study of the beneficial effects of creative writing, to consider the therepeutic possiblities of poetic form and mythic structure.

The First World War Poetry Digital Archive: A conversation with Stuart Lee

The First World War Poetry Digital Archive: A conversation with Stuart Lee

Women’s Poetry and the First World War (1914–1918) by Argha Banerjee (review)

Reviewed by: Women’s Poetry and the First World War (1914–1918) by Argha Banerjee Stacy Gillis Women’s Poetry and the First World War (1914–1918). Argha Banerjee. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers, 2014. Pp. xii + 524. $68.00 (cloth). The First World War is positioned preeminently amongst wars in the British literary landscape. Strategically occurring after the publishing and educational expansions of the late nineteenth century and the cinema explosion in the first decade of the twentieth century, the war was ideally located as an operative site of simultaneous national pride and traumatic loss. Its influential position in the canons of war writing, of twentieth-century writing, and of twentieth-century poetry, as well as more broadly in the popular consciousness, can be attested to by the thousands of publications (popular and academic), radio and television programs, films, and websites about the war that have proliferated since August 1914. Courtesy of the scholarly consciousness-raising of second-wave feminism, a more recent addition to this corpus of interest has been the field of women’s First World War writing. Catherine Reilly, publishing her anthology of women’s First World War poetry in 1981, began to map female responses to the war, and this work has been [End Page 210] thoroughly and carefully expanded upon by such scholars as Margaret Higonnet, Nosheen Khan, Sharon Ouditt, Susan Rayzel, and Angela Smith, amongst others. The poetry of such writers as Margaret Postgate Cole, May Sinclair, May Cannan, and Jessie Pope is now (fairly) firmly positioned within the canonical traditions of First World War writing. Just as this canon of war writing has expanded from previous considerations of (primarily male) poetry to permitting the inclusion of women poets, so too has Argha Banerjee moved on from his earlier study, Poetry of the First World War: A Critical Evaluation (2011), to now more fully consider the female poet of war in Women’s Poetry and the First World War (2014). Like the earlier book, this latter project is published by Atlantic Publishers, who cannot be commended for the slipshod and slapdash production. A lack of careful proofreading, combined with sophomoric typesetting (not to mention shoddy bookbinding, which would not stand up to regular library use), precludes this text from being recommended to students as an example of literary scholarship. Banerjee would be well advised to avoid this publisher for his future work. Women’s Poetry and the First World War is roughly divided into two parts. In the first five chapters, Banerjee considers the critical models of loss and mourning, politics and propaganda, female work, myths and folklore, and the natural world. There is no doubt that Banerjee has read a great deal of criticism, and he enjoys providing a synthesis of this scholarship, in addition to occasionally reading the work of a wide range of female poets against the same. This first part of the book is where the project makes its most helpful contributions as it discusses the work of lesser-known figures, like Katharine Furse, and considers songs (such as the “Land Army Song”: “Come out of the towns / And on to the downs / Where a girl gets brown and strong”) alongside lyrics published in local papers. In the following example, the lyric is concerned with female shift workers’ attempt to beat the production record of another shift: The stampers gazed with eager eyes upon the weigher staid.Oh beat that other shift, they cried, who have a record made.We don’t care what becomes of us if we can just surpassThe 1506 a total grand! the other shift did pass.The time is four, the work is hit, the sweat is running fast.1303 the total now. Ye gods! can they be passed?1 This archival excavation by Banerjee should be the basis of more work that would flesh out the varied experiences of the war. The second part of the project, peculiarly titled “Appendix,” consists of six sections (really, these are chapters), which focus on the war poems of individual poets, and it is in this appendix that the work of Cannan, Cole, Pope, and Sinclair is considered, as well as that of Charlotte New and Carola...

Poetry of the First World War: Dispelling the Myths

First World War poetry has become one of the defining factors of Britain's memory of the four-year conflict, providing an accessible path towards understanding the emotions and difficulties encountered during this time. Paul O'Prey examines and disputes some of the myths and misconceptions associated with the popular understanding of the vast body of work that arose during and about the Great War.

The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy: A Critical Reappraisal edited by Susan Schreibman (review)

Reviewed by: The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy: A Critical Reappraisaledited by Susan Schreibman Lee M. Jenkins The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy: A Critical Reappraisal. Ed. Susan Schreibman. London: Bloomsbury, 2013. The author of a single slim volume, Poems(1934), Thomas MacGreevy (1893–1967) is better known as the friend of poets than as a poet in his own right. Readers of the Wallace Stevens Journalwill be familiar with MacGreevy from the correspondence he initiated with Stevens in 1948, and from the poem prompted by that correspondence, “Our stars Come from Ireland”: the young Tom M[a]cGreevy appears in the poem’s first part, imaginatively relocated from his birthplace in Tarbert, County Kerry to Stevens’ native Pennsylvania. “Our stars Come from Ireland,” which ghosts lines from MacGreevy’s poem “Homage to Hieronymus Bosch,” is Stevens’ homage to the man he would call (in an unpublished letter) “the best of all my correspondents,” and to the haunting and fractured lyricism of MacGreevy’s own verse. MacGreevy’s oeuvre, modest as it was, instantiated an Irish mode of poetic modernism that one of its practitioners, Samuel Beckett, defined in contradistinction to the lingering Celtic Twilight antiquarianism of Irish poetry after Yeats. The publication in 1994 of Patricia Coughlan and Alex Davis’ important Modernism and Irelanddid much to redress what has been the longstanding scholarly neglect of this Other Tradition in Irish poetry. Susan Schreibman, who contributed to the Coughlan and Davis collection, has for more than two decades acted as the keeper of MacGreevy’s particular flame. The creator of the digital Thomas MacGreevy Archiveand the editor of an annotated Collected Poems of Thomas MacGreevy(1991), Schreibman is presently writing MacGreevy’s biography. Her aim, as the editor of The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevy: A Critical Reappraisal, is to recuperate MacGreevy from “the margins of modernist literary and art history” (xxv). [End Page 107] Notwithstanding a number of excellent individual chapters, however, the collection as a whole is uneven in its critical quality and in its coverage. The remit of the Bloomsbury Historicizing Modernismseries in which The Life and Work of Thomas MacGreevyappears may be responsible for the book’s major flaw, the disproportionate attention to the life at the expense of the work. Of the chapters that do engage with the work, or which imbricate the life with the work in generative ways, too many concern MacGreevy’s art criticism, too few his poetry and his literary criticism. Only three chapters out of twenty-one are exclusively devoted to MacGreevy’s verse, and curiously, given that MacGreevy was by no means a prolific poet, the lion’s share of critical attention is restricted to just a handful of the poems: “De Civitate Hominum,” “Homage to Hieronymus Bosch,” and “Aodh ruadh Ó Domhnaill.” Although several of the contributors allude to the decades of MacGreevy’s post- Poemssilence, only Michael Smith, in the short piece with which the book concludes, mentions the late lyrical resurgence of “Moments Musicaux” and “Breton Oracles,” a diptych published in Poetrymagazine in 1961. MacGreevy’s achievement as a poet (and translator) thus appears more attenuated than was actually the case, a state of affairs exacerbated by the fact that neither Schreibman’s Collected Poemsnor Thomas Dillon Redshaw’s earlier New Writers’ Press edition of his poetry is presently in print (the poems are not part of the online MacGreevy Archive). MacGreevy’s reputation at home has nonetheless risen in recent years, due to Ireland’s belated reconciliation with the nearly 200,000 Irishmen, MacGreevy among them, who enlisted in the British armed forces during World War One. Although he was an Irish nationalist and an out-and-out Anglophobe, MacGreevy joined up in 1916. Serving with the Field Artillery, he was wounded at Ypres salient, and again at the Somme. Gerald Dawe’s landmark anthology of Irish First and Second World War poetry, Earth Voices Whispering(2008), takes its title from MacGreevy’s “Nocturne”: I labour in a barren place, Alone, self-conscious, frightened, blundering; Far away, stars wheeling in space, About my feet, earth voices whispering. (MacGreevy, Collected Poems1) Compact and cosmic...

Continuities and Disjunctions: Investigating British Poetry Anthologies of the Second World War

British Second World War poetry provides a rich and complex set of voices offering multiple perspectives on notions of heroism, selfhood, youth, combat, civilization, and the relationship between art, politics, and wartime society. While First World War poetry has had a dominant role in shaping the war poetry genre, becoming embedded in a range of cultural practices, Second World War poetry has also been of increasing interest to anthologists and literary critics during the post-war period and has been mapped, reappraised and reconceptualized as significant in its own right. Beginning with this critical and contextual perspective, the article focuses on the anthology form and the set of poetry anthologies published during Second World War. It explores the value of these anthologies as literary and cultural historical sources, using taxonomical and textual inquiry into the tropes, techniques, themes, and agendas of the poems and the anthologists’ editorial approaches.

Introduction: Interdisciplinary war and culture studies in action

This is the first Varia issue of Volume 6, and a first glance at the titles suggests that it contains an apparently eclectic series of five articles. Looked at more closely, however, it becomes clear that this issue provides an excellent example of the Journal of War and Culture Studies’ (JWACS) commitment to fostering interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary approaches, and to building a multidisciplinary community of scholars to consider diverse relationships between war and culture. This engagement with a range of disciplines is manifested not least in the academic, and indeed practitioner, backgrounds of the contributors to this issue. This issue also exemplifies the broad geographical scope now offered by the JWACS as the articles take their examples and objects of study from several very different European countries and cultures, North America, and Australia. Sara McDowell’s discipline is Human Geography, and her interest in the geography of conflict and in territoriality leads necessarily to a concern with memory and memorialization. In her article, ‘Time elapsed: untangling commemorative temporalities after conflict and tragedy’, she demonstrates how power and politics ultimately determine when the past is officially remembered, using examples of diverse forms of conflict and trauma from Britain, Ireland, Spain, the former Yugoslavia, the United States and Canada. The time that elapses between a conflict or traumatic event and its memorialization can vary significantly, due, as she shows here, to a range of collective social, economic, and political circumstances, but due also to individual needs and motivations. Philippa Lyon brings a literary and cultural analysis perspective to ‘Continuities and Disjunctions: investigating British poetry anthologies of the Second World War’. The poetry of this period has undergone a re-appraisal by anthologists and literary critics, and is now asserting its own significance with regard to the First World War poetry which has so dominated in British culture and in perceptions of the war experience, previously pushing the poetry of the later war to a marginal position. Her approach here is to investigate the value of a set of poetry anthologies published, it is important to note, during the war itself. She engages with this body of anthologies through four taxonomical categories which function as an interpretive journal of war & culture studies, Vol. 6 No. 3, August, 2013, 183–184

Maternity, Mortality and Mourning in the Trench Poetry of World War I

This investigation of the ways in which Italian poet soldiers represented mothers and motherhood seeks to shed light on the relationship between gender and war in early-twentieth-century Italy by exploring the intersections and divergences between the official discourses on motherhood and the Madre-patria, represented here by D'Annuzio's “Il rinato,” and the counter-discourses offered in the poetry of Ugo Betti and Corrado Alvaro. In order to illustrate a fundamental difference in the way D'Annunzio, on the one hand, and Betti and Alvaro, on the other, portray mothers, I will focus on their various depictions of maternal grief. I argue that Betti's and Alvaro's representations of melancholic mothers constitute an ethical choice that runs counter to the nationalist narrative of sacrifice and regeneration, but in the end I also question whether their melancholic mothers can be viewed as a new kind of model of womanhood or if she is just another iteration of the mater dolorosa projected onto women by both Catholicism and pseudo-science.