Trench Poetry

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Trench Poetry
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World War I

• The ultimate shock of modernity
• the ultimate rite of passage a definitive
  coming to manhood for the industrial age, in
  which boys became men by confronting mechanical
  horror and discovering their essential
  masculinity, perhaps even their essential
  humanity, in a realm from which feminine presence
  is banished (Campbell 204).

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Rupert Brooke

• The Dead
• The Soldier

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War discourse

• Patriotism/nationalism
• Honor
• Nobility of spirit
• Selflessness
• Glory
• Holiness

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Work in groups of four

• Share the poems you have chosen and explain why
  you chose this particular poem.
• Discuss the following questions (in as much as
  they are applicable to your poems) and write your
  answers on a piece of paper
• Where is the poet? Who is he? What defines him?
• What are the most striking images in the poems?
  Why?
• How is nature portrayed?
• How is the Home Front (civilian life) portrayed?
• What might the purpose of the poem be?
• How does it compare with Rupert Brookes poems?
• Choose one poem to present to the class. Youll
  need to explain why you chose it.
• The poems

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Characteristics

• trench setting (dominant icon of WWI)
• formally conservative, realistic text
• portrays heretofore unknown gruesome details
• rather that beauty is truth (Keats), horror is
  truth
• participants point of view, emphasis on personal
  experience
• details of the physical and psychological effects
• presented as an unmediated truth
• soldier as passive sufferer
• some use of Crucifixion/Christ imagery
• inversion of pastoral imagery (nature)
• accusation of those at home
• separation between those who have experienced
  this and those who have not
• Purpose of shocking those at home and educating
  them

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• Sasoons declaration against the war

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Shell-Shock (post-traumatic stress)

• The extent of war neurosis among combatants in
  the 1st WW is a direct result of a tension
  between the offensive personality which the
  Western European military commands attempted to
  instill in their troops and the defensive
  personality required to survive the reality of
  trench warfare. The dominance of long-ranged
  artillery, the machine gun and barbed wire had
  immobilized combat, and immediately necessitated
  a passive stance of the soldier before the forces
  of mechanized slaughter When all signs of
  physical fear were judged as weaknesses and where
  alternatives to combat pacifism, conscientious
  objection, desertion, even suicide were viewed
  as unmanly, men were silenced and immobilized and
  forced, like women, to express their conflicts
  through the body (Showalter, 171).

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Works Cited

• Campbell, James. Combat Gnosticism The Ideology
  of First World War Poetry Criticism. New
  Literary History 30.1 (1999) 203-215.
• Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady. Women,
  Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. New York
  London Penguin, 1985.