War writings, Protest writings, poetry...etc.... Options

[Hope4Future]

I decided to create a war writing topic thread only because it feels approprate for writers to write there protest and war releated writeings.

Why am I starting a war wrtiers thread?

Well...I am starting my finals for one and my topic for my English Lit class paper is an eight to ten page Essay on Sassoon and Owens, war poets from WW I. I am currently on page five of this paper and decided to take a break from this paper and check out the forums. As soon as I have finished this essay on the these two war poets I promise that I will post it to this thread for everyone to read.

Why did I decide to do my paper on the war poets of WW I ?

Well duh....I am in the mood to write a social commentary regarding war, especially when we have so many good men and women giving their lives for a meanless war in Iraq.

So meanwhile...I hope other people decide to write essays, commentaries and other literary stylings about war.

This post has been edited by brendan: Dec 9 2004, 10:03 PM

[brendan]

This site could be some help for your project:

20TH CENTURY POETRY AND WAR
http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/poetry/

[Hope4Future]

This site could be some help for your project:

20TH CENTURY POETRY AND WAR
http://www.ppu.org.uk/learn/poetry/

Thanks for the link...I'll probably put it to use along with all the books I have besides me.

[Magmak1]

Studied those WWI poets in high school... in 1966... "Today we shall have naming of parts." Went off to college in '67 and joined ROTC. I didn't just march... I was in an elite commando unit. It was fun (like advanced Boy Scouts) for a while, but then my very young and impressionable mind began to wake up, aided immensely by the fact that my roommate was a member of SDS and a conscientious objector. I began to understand viscerally that I was being trained to kill, that I would likely come home in a box. I went home on a spring weekend in my dress uniform, and the look on my revered high school English teacher's face said it all. He literally would not talk to me. Another impression, a telling one. I left the unit shortly thereafter. ("The Duke" saved my life.)

I wrote this haiku shortly after 9/11.

Zanshin (the state of mind prized by samurai warriors)

Soot and ashes fallen,
Petrified by blood and tears:
Whetstone for a sword?

While it's probably off topic in some senses, get a hold of either the video series or the related book by the Canadian Gwynne Dyer called War. Or see the one-hour long PBS documentary on the Battle of the Bulge.

And read Morihei Ueshiba's The Art of Peace (Shambhala).

[Hope4Future]

Okay here is my paper. It makes me nervous to post this because I just sent this off to my professor about an hour ago.



Owen and Sassoon: Poets of war
There are many poets who wrote against World War I and wrote about the suffering and anguish of what occurred in Europe during this time. However, there are so many English poets that I am only able to discuss two English war poets: Owen and Sassoon. These two poets’ poetry ended up making an impression upon society not only regarding war during World War I but war in general. These two war poets’ poetry remains the most remembered among other war poets.
Sassoon’s poetry was not at first against war but in fact many of Sassoon’s first poems were in fact non-oppositional to the war. Robert Graves, another war poet of this time, was showing to Sassoon his ”first book of poems, Over the Brazier, … [and]…had one or two drafts in [his] pocket-book and showed them to Siegfried” (Silkin 130). Sassoon frowned and said that war should not be written about in such a realistic way (Silkin 130). He then showed Graves some of his poems and one of them, (‘To Victory’) began:
Return to greet me, colours that were my joy,
Not in the woeful crimson of men slain…. (Silkin 130).
Graves then told him in his old-solider manner, that he would soon change his style (Silkin 130). Eventually of the thirty-five poems in ‘War Poems: 1915-1917’ that Sassoon wrote (one section of The Old Huntsman and other Poems (1917)), twenty-one fulfill Graves’s prediction, of being poems against war (Silkin 130).Graves’s testimony is interesting because it emphasizes how much Sassoon’s earlier attitude to the war changed, and how dramatically (Silkin 130). Sassoon obviously had little understanding of the horrors of war at this time but eventually Sassoon changes his opinion as the war drags on and he becomes an influence against war.

What where the influences in Sassoon’s life that made him at first not against the war in which he participated? Perhaps it was Sassoon’s past that was the main reason as to why he was not at first against the war. Sassoon idealized his past, it has been said, and this is true perhaps. His wealthy country upbringing must have been idyllic in many ways ( Silkin 131). This is possible, because as Sassoon writes his first Memoir, he mentions nothing of the troubles that were occurring in Ulster, such as the case of the suffragettes, the social conditions of workers, and the series of increasingly bitter strikes which before the war were beginning to fracture the country’s social patterns (Silkin 131). It appears that Sassoon may have idealized his early youth and manhood (he was twenty-eight when he enlisted ), he has shown…that his background was not one to prepare him for either the war or for strenuous emotional and intellectual activity (Silkin 131). He [did not] allow himself…time to think over his enlistment ‘two days before the declaration of war’ and [this] gives the impression that he enlisted without questioning either his own patriotism or any contingent issues (Silkin 131). Sassoon was probably not unlike many men who enlisted during this time and he clearly wasn’t prepared for the war.
Sassoon had a peaceful life which more than likely was severely affected by World War I.

In comparison to Sassoon, Owen’s take on World War I was more than likely different. Owen, however before the start of the war, had much more social awareness than Sassoon did (Silkin 132). Owen in 1914 met Laurent Talihade, a pacifist who wrote Lettre aux Conscrits (1903) and Pour la Paix (1908) [and] almost certainly [these writings have] been read by Owen and….strengthened in [him the same pacifistic ideas] (Silkin 198). However, it was not only pacifist texts that strengthened Owen’s ideas but experience as well (Silkin 198). A letter that Owen wrote in August 1914, almost a month after the opening of war, Owen…callously [wrote about] the unselective decimation of combat: “ I feel my own life all the more precious and more dear in the presence of this deflowering of Europe. While it is true that the guns will effect a little useful weeding [sic], I am furious with chagrin to think that the Minds which were to have excelled the civilization of ten thousand years, are being annihilated—and bodies, the products of aeons of Natural Selection, [are] melted down to pay for political Statues” (Silkin 198-199). Finally, one month later , after having witnessed post-combat operations at Bordeaux hospital, it is not the cultural loss that he is [writing about] but the human suffering: “One poor devil had his shin-bone crushed by a gun-carriage-wheel, and the doctor had to twist it about and push it like a piston to get out the puss…I deliberately tell you all this to educate you to the actualities of the war” (Silkin 199). It is clear that Owen had his own feelings about war that he developed first hand. Unlike Sassoon, Owen had a realistic understanding about the horrors of war.

Despite the differing views on war that both Owens and Sassoon had, Owens like Sassoon eventually enlisted. What influences eventually changed Owens that made him enlist into the fray of war? Perhaps it was when he heard that Tailihad [had enlisted and] is shouldering a rifle( Silkin 199). Finally Owens writes to his mother and states, ”I could not beat to draw comparisons with the life of the trenches and mine; unless I felt in a manner to have suffered my share of life…I have not abandoned all idea of enlisting”( Silkin 199). Perhaps one of the reasons as to why Owen’s enlisted was because he wondered how he could write about the horrors of war unless he enlisted to be able to understand the horrors of war. Eventually in June the year of 1915 he told his mother: “I now do most intensely want to fight”(Silkin 200). Owen enlisted and he wrote to his mother before he left the base and stated: “This morning I was hit! We were bombing and a fragment from somewhere hit my thumb knuckle. I coaxed out 1 drop of blood. Alas! No more!! There is a fine heroic feeling about being in France…but excitement is always necessary to my happiness”(Silkin 200). Some of Sassoon’s early euphoria… emerges here, but it is qualified in such a way as to indicate that he is aware of himself and by no means absorbed by the idealistic cant…however, by 16 January, only a few weeks later, he has changed [and] he sees the war clearly,…[as he] can assess himself as one item in the total wreckage (Silken 200). It is clear that one can feel and see the exhilaration that both Owen and Sassoon first felt from the war, however both eventually change there stance later on regarding the war.



There were many influences to Owen’s anti-war poetry. What are the influences that managed to show themselves in Owen’s poetry? Owen’s joining of the Army in 1915, did not significantly alter his poetic direction, for his training in Romanticism had attuned his imagination to war and given him a language and imagery with which to tackle its strange conditions (Hibberd 55). Owen is interesting not only for the intrinsic worth of his late poetry but also as a representative figure of his time (Hibberd 56). Like the men in Owen’s poem ‘Exposure’, many of the war generation believe that they had been born to die in war (Hibberd 56). Owen was also influenced by the Romantic era of the past age and used Romantic styling to help write his war poetry which was able to put across the belief that his generation had been born to die. In Owen’s letters he wrote: “I can see no excuse for deceiving you about these last 4 days. I have suffered seventh hell….We had a march of 3 miles over shelled road then nearly 3 along a flooded trench…and the ground was not mud, not sloppy mud, but an octopus of sucking clay, 3, 4, and five feet deep, relieved only by craters full of water. Men have been known to drown in them....High explosives were dropping all around out, and machine guns spluttered every few minutes [We were] three quarters dead, I mean each of us ¾ dead, we reached the dug-out, and relieved the wretches therein. My dug-out held 25 men tight packed. Water filled it to a depth of 1 or 2 feet, leaving say 4 feet of air. One entrance had been blown and blocked. So far, the other remained. The Germans knew we were staying there and decided we shouldn’t. Those fifty hours were the agony of my happy life….I nearly broke down and let myself drown in the water that was slowly rising over my knees (Silken 201). And on 19 January he wrote: “The want to call No Man’s Land, ‘England’ because we keep supremacy there. It is like the eternal place of gnashing of teeth; the Slough of Despond could be contained in one of its crater-holes; the fires of Sodom and Gomorrah could not light a candle to it—to find the way to Babylon the
Fallen. It is pock-marked like a body of foulest disease and its odour is the breath of cancer” (Silkin 201-202). Many of the constituents of his poetry are here [in these entries]: the detailed description of war’s effects; the outrage and indignation; the biblical references, and the pity (Silkin 202). Finally there is that crucial contrast between the uninformed civilian attitude to war and the actual conditions the soldiers endure (Silkin 202). The scenes of war in all there gripping reality was a strong influence on Owen and his poetry.

Sassoon had many experiences because of the war that affected his poetry as well. Sassoon began writing his first ‘war’ poem in 1915 whilst undergoing training (Caesar 67). The poem is entitled ‘Absolution’ and begins like this:
The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes
Till beauty shines in all that we can see.
War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise,
And, fighting for our freedom, we are free. (Caesar 67).
This poem has been dismissed by critics as an exercise in patriotic enthusiasm, and Sassoon himself encouraged this view when he subsequently wrote a note to the poem saying that this is how people ‘used to feel when they joined up in 1914 and 1915’( Caesar 67). Sassoon’s first trench poem, ‘The Redeemer’. Constitutes a narrative in which the poet attempts to convey the physical realities of the trenches (Caesar 70). He describes a working party lugging ‘clay-sucked boots along the trenches on a wet and a
miserable night, illuminated only by the explosion of shells and rockets (Caesar 70). The persona turns and sees ‘Christ’ in the form of a soldier floundering through the mud:
No thorny Crown, only a woollen cap
He wore- an English soldier, white and strong,
Who loved his time like any simple chap,
Good days of work and sport and homely song:
Now he has learned that nights are very long,
And dawn a watching of the windowed sky.
But to the end, unjudging , he’ll endure
Horror and pain, not uncontent to die
That Lancaster on Lune may stand secure.
He faced me, reeling in his wariness,
Shouldering his load of planks, so hard to bear.
I say that He was Christ… (Caesar 70-71)
Sassoon’s poetry showed at first the early glimpses of war such as the feelings of men before the war and the gradual change of these men as the war dragged on.
Sassoon’s poetry began to change as his time spent in the war and his earlier enthusiasm disappeared from support of the war to outright political protest of the war. Ironically, England rather than France had become the place of suffering for Sassoon (Caesar 85). And it seems clear…that guilt was the primary source of this mental anguish; but guilt which had made more than one source as is made clear from his lines ‘To the Warmongers’ (Caesar 85). This poem, like many others written in the following months, displays Sassoon’s anxiety to rub the noses of civilians into the mud and blood and slaughter of the western front (Caesar 85) Sassoon’s fury is evident in these poems, and nowhere more so than in ‘Warmongers’ (Caesar 85).. The poem begins with a series of images closely related to the nightmares quoted above, and concludes like this:
For you our battles shine
With triumph half-divine:
And the glory of the dead
Kindles in each pound eye.
But a curse is on my head,
That shall not be Unsaid,
And the Wounds in my hear are red,
For I have watched them die. (Caesar 85).
In Sassoon’s poem ‘Warmongers’, his perspective on war has taken a dramatic change. Instead of being a proud patriotic solider who accepts his role meekly with Christ like attributes, Sassoon writes a bitter acidic poem on war and blames civilians who have no understanding regarding war. Finally, Sassoon decides to make a public protest against the continuance of the war on behalf of the troops at the front (Caesar 86). He knew he was inviting court martial, losing close friendships and risking punishment but at this time Sassoon emotions were driven towards peace, not war (Caesar 86). His statement was sent to several eminent politicians and writers, and became the subject of a question in the House of Commons and was subsequently published in The Times and it reads: “I believe that this War, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest…I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the military conduct of the War but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them “ (Caesar 86). Sassoon finally motivated either by his own writings, torment of war or personal experience was moved to political activism. He wrote a sound complaint against war and was willing to risk punishment and the friendship of others to do so. Sassoon change in the subject matter of poetry eventually led him to protest the war in which he was fighting.

The poetry of Owens and Sassoon clearly has its defining attributes. These two men started out as young inexperienced soldiers who had very little understanding regarding war. These two poets reaction towards war was at first positive as they felt the thrill and excitement of fighting in battle. However, as the war dragged on, they found there best poetry was written in the stress of war and in an anti-war stance. It is from there poetry of war that readers gather a new understanding towards the context of war.




Works Cited Page
Caesar, Adrian, Taking it like a man: Suffering, sexuality and the War poets Brooks, Sassoon, Owen, Graves New York: Manchester University Press, 1993
Hibberd, Dominic, Owen The Poet Georgia : The University of Georgia Press, 1986
Silkin, Jon, Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc. 1987

[Hope4Future]

Okay here is my paper. It makes me nervous to post this because I just sent this off to my professor about an hour ago.                 
                            Owen and Sassoon: Poets of war
There are many poets who wrote against World War I and wrote about the suffering and anguish of what occurred in Europe during this time. However, there are so many English poets that I am only able to discuss two English war poets: Owen and Sassoon. These two poets’ poetry ended up making an impression upon society not only regarding war during World War I but war in general. These two war poets’ poetry remains the most remembered among other war poets.
Sassoon’s poetry was not at first against war but in fact many of Sassoon’s first poems were in fact non-oppositional to the war. Robert Graves, another war poet of this time, was showing to Sassoon his ”first book of poems, Over the Brazier, … [and]…had one or two drafts in [his] pocket-book and showed them to Siegfried” (Silkin 130). Sassoon frowned and said that war should not be written about in such a realistic way (Silkin 130). He then showed Graves some of his poems and one of them, (‘To Victory’) began:
  Return to greet me, colours that were my joy,
  Not in the woeful crimson of men slain…. (Silkin 130).
Graves then told him in his old-solider manner, that he would soon change his style (Silkin 130). Eventually of the thirty-five poems in ‘War Poems: 1915-1917’ that Sassoon wrote (one section of The Old Huntsman and other Poems (1917)), twenty-one fulfill Graves’s prediction, of being poems against war (Silkin 130).Graves’s testimony is interesting because it emphasizes how much Sassoon’s earlier attitude to the war changed, and how dramatically (Silkin 130). Sassoon obviously had little understanding of the horrors of war at this time but eventually Sassoon changes his opinion as the war drags on and he becomes an influence against war.
   
    What where the influences in Sassoon’s life that made him at first not against the war in which he participated? Perhaps it was Sassoon’s past that was the main reason as to why he was not at first against the war. Sassoon idealized his past, it has been said, and this is true perhaps. His wealthy country upbringing must have been idyllic in many ways ( Silkin 131). This is possible, because as Sassoon writes his first Memoir, he mentions nothing of the troubles that were occurring in Ulster, such as the case of the suffragettes, the social conditions of workers, and the series of increasingly bitter strikes which before the war were beginning to fracture the country’s social patterns (Silkin 131). It appears that Sassoon may have idealized his early youth and manhood (he was twenty-eight when he enlisted ), he has shown…that his background was not one to prepare him for either the war or for strenuous emotional and intellectual activity (Silkin 131). He [did not] allow himself…time to think over his enlistment ‘two days before the declaration of war’ and [this] gives the impression that he enlisted without questioning either his own patriotism or any contingent issues (Silkin 131). Sassoon was probably not unlike many men who enlisted during this time and he clearly wasn’t prepared for the war.
Sassoon had a peaceful life which more than likely was severely affected by World War I.

In comparison to Sassoon, Owen’s take on World War I was more than likely different. Owen, however before the start of the war, had much more social awareness than Sassoon did (Silkin 132). Owen in 1914 met Laurent Talihade, a pacifist who wrote Lettre aux Conscrits (1903) and Pour la Paix (1908) [and] almost certainly [these writings have] been read by Owen and….strengthened in [him the same pacifistic ideas] (Silkin 198). However, it was not only pacifist texts that strengthened Owen’s ideas but experience as well (Silkin 198). A letter that Owen wrote in August 1914, almost a month after the opening of war, Owen…callously [wrote about] the unselective decimation of combat: “ I feel my own life all the more precious and more dear in the presence of this deflowering of Europe. While it is true that the guns will effect a little useful weeding [sic], I am furious with chagrin to think that the Minds which were to have excelled the civilization of ten thousand years, are being annihilated—and bodies, the products of aeons of Natural Selection, [are] melted down to pay for political Statues” (Silkin 198-199).  Finally, one month later , after having witnessed post-combat operations at Bordeaux hospital, it is not the cultural loss that he is [writing about] but the human suffering: “One poor devil had his shin-bone crushed by a gun-carriage-wheel, and the doctor had to twist it about and push it like a piston to get out the puss…I deliberately tell you all this to educate you to the actualities of the war” (Silkin 199). It is clear that Owen had his own feelings about war that he developed first hand. Unlike Sassoon, Owen had a realistic understanding about the horrors of war.
         
  Despite the differing views on war that both Owens and Sassoon had, Owens like Sassoon eventually enlisted. What influences eventually changed Owens that made him enlist into the fray of war? Perhaps it was when he heard that Tailihad [had enlisted and] is shouldering a rifle( Silkin 199). Finally Owens writes to his mother and states, ”I could not beat to draw comparisons with the life of the trenches and mine; unless I felt in a manner to have suffered my share of life…I have not abandoned all idea of enlisting”( Silkin 199). Perhaps one of the reasons as to why Owen’s enlisted was because he wondered how he could write about the horrors of war unless he enlisted to be able to understand the horrors of war. Eventually in June the year of 1915 he told his mother: “I now do most intensely want to fight”(Silkin 200). Owen enlisted and he wrote to his mother before he left the base and stated: “This morning I was hit! We were bombing and a fragment from somewhere hit my thumb knuckle. I coaxed out 1 drop of blood. Alas! No more!! There is a fine heroic feeling about being in France…but excitement is always necessary to my happiness”(Silkin 200). Some of Sassoon’s early euphoria… emerges here, but it is qualified in such a way as to indicate that he is aware of himself and by no means absorbed by the idealistic cant…however, by 16 January, only a few weeks later, he has changed [and] he sees the war clearly,…[as he] can assess himself as one item in the total wreckage (Silken 200). It is clear that one can feel and see the exhilaration that both Owen and Sassoon first felt from the war, however both eventually change there stance later on regarding the war.


     
    There were many influences to Owen’s anti-war poetry. What are the influences that managed to show themselves in Owen’s poetry? Owen’s joining of the Army in 1915, did not significantly alter his poetic direction, for his training in Romanticism had attuned his imagination to war and given him a language and imagery with which to tackle its strange conditions (Hibberd 55). Owen is interesting not only for the intrinsic worth of his late poetry but also as a representative figure of his time (Hibberd 56). Like the men in Owen’s poem ‘Exposure’, many of the war generation believe that they had been born to die in war (Hibberd 56). Owen was also influenced by the Romantic era of the past age and used Romantic styling to help write his war poetry which was able to put across the belief  that his generation had been born to die.  In Owen’s letters he wrote: “I can see no excuse for deceiving you about these last 4 days. I have suffered seventh hell….We had a march of 3 miles over shelled road then nearly 3 along a flooded trench…and the ground was not mud, not sloppy mud, but an octopus of sucking clay, 3, 4, and five feet deep, relieved only by craters full of water. Men have been known to drown in them....High explosives were dropping all around out, and machine guns spluttered every few minutes  [We were] three quarters dead, I mean each of us ¾ dead, we reached the dug-out, and relieved the wretches therein. My dug-out held 25 men tight packed. Water filled it to a depth of 1 or 2 feet, leaving say 4 feet of air. One entrance had been blown and blocked. So far, the other remained. The Germans knew we were staying there and decided we shouldn’t. Those fifty hours were the agony of my happy life….I nearly broke down and let myself drown in the water that was slowly rising over my knees (Silken 201). And on 19 January he wrote: “The want to call No Man’s Land, ‘England’ because we keep supremacy there. It is like the eternal place of gnashing of teeth; the Slough of Despond could be contained in one of its crater-holes;  the fires of Sodom and Gomorrah could not light a candle to it—to find the way to Babylon the
Fallen. It is pock-marked like a body of foulest disease and its odour is the breath of cancer” (Silkin 201-202). Many of the constituents of his poetry are here [in these entries]: the detailed description of war’s effects; the outrage and indignation; the biblical references, and the pity (Silkin 202). Finally there is that crucial contrast between the uninformed civilian attitude to war and the actual conditions the soldiers endure (Silkin 202). The scenes of war in all there gripping reality was a strong influence on Owen and his poetry.

          Sassoon had many experiences because of the war that affected his poetry as well. Sassoon began writing his first ‘war’ poem in 1915 whilst undergoing training (Caesar 67). The poem is entitled ‘Absolution’ and begins like this:
                      The anguish of the earth absolves our eyes
                      Till beauty shines in all that we can see.
                      War is our scourge; yet war has made us wise,
                      And, fighting for our freedom, we are free. (Caesar 67).
This poem has been dismissed by critics as an exercise in patriotic enthusiasm, and Sassoon himself encouraged this view when he subsequently wrote a note to the poem  saying that this is how people ‘used to feel when they joined up in 1914 and 1915’( Caesar 67). Sassoon’s first trench poem, ‘The Redeemer’. Constitutes a narrative in  which the poet attempts to convey the physical realities of the trenches (Caesar 70). He describes a working party lugging ‘clay-sucked boots along the trenches on a wet and a
miserable night, illuminated only by the explosion of shells and rockets (Caesar 70).  The persona turns and sees ‘Christ’ in the form of a soldier floundering through the mud:
  No thorny Crown, only a woollen cap
  He wore- an English soldier, white and strong,
  Who loved his time like any simple chap,
  Good days of work and sport and homely song:
  Now he has learned that nights are very long,
  And dawn a watching of the windowed sky.
  But to the end, unjudging , he’ll endure
  Horror and pain, not uncontent to die
  That Lancaster on Lune may stand secure.
  He faced me, reeling in his wariness,
  Shouldering his load of planks, so hard to bear.
  I say that He was Christ… (Caesar 70-71) 
Sassoon’s poetry showed at first the early glimpses of war such as the feelings of men before the war and the gradual change of these men as the war dragged on.
Sassoon’s poetry began to change as his time spent in the war and his earlier enthusiasm disappeared from support of the war to outright political protest of the war. Ironically, England rather than France had become the place of suffering for Sassoon (Caesar 85). And it seems clear…that guilt was the primary source of this mental anguish; but guilt which had made more than one source as is made clear from his lines ‘To the Warmongers’ (Caesar 85).  This poem, like many others written in the following months, displays Sassoon’s anxiety to rub the noses of civilians into the mud and blood and slaughter of the western front (Caesar 85) Sassoon’s fury is evident in these poems, and nowhere more so than in ‘Warmongers’ (Caesar 85).. The poem begins with a series of images closely related to the nightmares quoted above, and concludes like this:
  For you our battles shine
  With triumph half-divine:
  And the glory of the dead
  Kindles in each pound eye.
  But a curse is on my head,
  That shall not be Unsaid,
  And the Wounds in my hear are red,
  For I have watched them die. (Caesar 85).
In Sassoon’s poem ‘Warmongers’, his perspective on war has taken a dramatic change. Instead of being a proud patriotic solider who accepts his role meekly with Christ like attributes, Sassoon writes a bitter acidic poem on war and blames civilians who have no understanding regarding war. Finally, Sassoon decides to make a public protest against the continuance of the war on behalf of the troops at the front (Caesar 86). He knew he was inviting court martial, losing close friendships and risking punishment but at this time Sassoon emotions were driven towards peace, not war (Caesar 86). His statement was sent to several eminent politicians and writers, and became the subject of a question in the House of Commons and was subsequently published in The Times and it reads: “I believe that this War, upon which I entered as a war of defence and liberation, has now become a war of aggression and conquest…I have seen and endured the sufferings of the troops, and I can no longer be a party to prolonging those sufferings for ends which I believe to be evil and unjust. I am not protesting against the military conduct of the War but against the political errors and insincerities for which the fighting men are being sacrificed. On behalf of those who are suffering now, I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced upon them “ (Caesar 86). Sassoon finally motivated either by his own writings, torment of war or personal experience was moved to political activism. He wrote a sound complaint against war and was willing to risk punishment and the friendship of others to do so. Sassoon change in the subject matter of poetry eventually led him to protest the war in which he was fighting.

  The poetry of Owens and Sassoon clearly has its defining attributes. These two men started out as young inexperienced soldiers who had very little understanding regarding war. These two poets reaction towards war was at first positive as they felt the thrill and excitement of fighting in battle. However,  as the war dragged on, they found there best poetry was written in the stress of war and in an anti-war stance. It is from there poetry of war that readers gather a new understanding towards the context of war.
   
                Works Cited Page
Caesar, Adrian, Taking it like a man: Suffering, sexuality and the War poets Brooks, Sassoon, Owen, Graves New York: Manchester University Press, 1993
Hibberd, Dominic, Owen The Poet Georgia : The University of Georgia Press, 1986
Silkin, Jon, Out of Battle: The Poetry of the Great War New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc. 1987

I got my grade back on my paper... "A"

WHOOOO my Professor said it was "Excellently well done."

I guess that's pretty good praise.

[The_Bammo]

Where Were You http://d21c.com/Bammo/W_W_You.html

[The_Bammo]

Bury Me With Soldiers http://d21c.com/Bammo/Bury_Me.html - Death of a Soul http://d21c.com/Bammo/DeathOfSoul.html - G.I. Deathland http://d21c.com/Bammo/GI_Deathland.html - He Stepped off the Trail - http://d21c.com/Bammo/HeSteppedOffTheTrail.html - James C. Grafton http://d21c.com/Bammo/JG.html - Lt. Conn - http://d21c.com/Bammo/LT_Conn.html - The Biker - http://d21c.com/Bammo/The_Biker.html - To The Wife of a Vietnam Vet http://d21c.com/Bammo/WifeVet.html - Dirty John - http://d21c.com/Bammo/dirty_john.html - Ode To the Vietnam Vet http://d21c.com/Bammo/ode.html - 58,178 http://d21c.com/Bammo/58178 - Untitled - http://d21c.com/Bammo/untitled.html - Night Before Christmas http://d21c.com/Bammo/xmas.html - Some I wrote, some friends wrote, your welcome to check them out anytime -- for sure!