WWI Poets

The poets from WWI gave us an image of war that was less than glorifying. Unlike the depictions of valiant and courageous soldiers of Lord Tennyson's The Charge of the Light Brigade, Sassoon, Gurney, Rosenburg, and Owen show us a more real and graphic trench life. Instead of making us want to get up and go fight, we want to crawl in a hole and hide. War is something that a lot of us can't truly understand and these poets help to give us a visual of what really happens. In Ivor Gurney's First Time In, I can almost feel his fear. He mentions that the Welsh folk songs they sing were "never more beautiful than there under the guns' noise," comforting them.

But the poem I really liked was Sassoon's Repression of War Experience. Literally, it is about the pain he still feels (and will probably forever feel) from the war. He basically has to talk himself through his day so that he can forcibly repress his horrible memories. In the poem, everything reminds him of war and he literally has to tell himself things like "no, no, not that,--it's bad to think of war" and "draw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen..." I liked this because it's like we are in his mind, watching him try to heal himself, rooting for him.