Wilfred Owen

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The Poets of World War I Since ancient times, poets of every culture have made war and soldiering important subjects of their work, in epic poems (long poems) that celebrate heroic exploits, in lyrics and odes that honor the courage of the warrior, or in pacifist works that criticize the brutality and horror of war. Some of the finest verses in the history of English literature were written by poets who served in World War I, many of whom died in combat while still in their twenties. The following men are among the most prominent of the British war poets: Rupert Brooke (1887–1915): After brief noncombat duty in Belgium, he died of an infection caused by a mosquito bite; he was serving in the Greek islands at the time. A sequence of sonnets (poems with fourteen lines and a definite rhyme pattern) titled 1914 contains his most famous lines: “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England. . . .” Biographer Paul Delany calls Brooke “the most famous British hero of the war.” Robert Graves (1895–1985): Though he was severely wounded in combat in 1916, Graves lived to be ninety. He served as a captain with the Royal Welch Fusiliers during World War I and befriended another member of the regiment, poet Siegfried Sassoon. Graves’s collection of war poems, Fairies and Fusiliers, helped establish his reputation as a literary figure after the war. The novel I, Claudius (1934) and the mythological study The White Goddess (1948) are his bestknown works. One of his sons was killed in World War II. Isaac Rosenberg (1890–1918): The son of Russian Lithuanian immigrants to England, Rosenberg enlisted in the British army in 1915, and because he was rather short, he was assigned to the Bantam Battalion, a regiment made up of volunteers who were below the regulation minimum height of 5 feet 2 inches. In the head, near Liverpool. Owen attended Birkenhead Institute until he was fourteen, when the family moved back to Shropshire, settling in the county seat at Shrewsbury. There, he attended Shrewsbury Technical School but failed in his efforts to win a scholarship to the University of London. He felt inclined toward religious work and accepted a position in which he received room and board in exchange for work with the vicar (a minister in charge of a church) of Dunsden in 112 World War I: Biographies
last two years of his brief life, Rosenberg wrote several important versedramas about Old Testament subjects, including Moses and The Unicorn (about King Saul and his wife). Two important poems that he wrote while in military service are titled “Marching” and “Break of Day in the Trenches.” Critics regard Rosenberg’s “Dead Man’s Dump” (1917) as his finest “war” poem. Rosenberg was shot to death while on patrol duty during the Battle of the Somme on April 1, 1918. Siegfried Sassoon (1886–1967): One of the poets who survived long after World War I, Sassoon befriended and encouraged such poets as Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, and Wilfred Owen. Although he enlisted in the army and received awards for heroism, Sassoon became a pacifist and wrote an antiwar letter, “A Soldier’s Declaration,” that led some politicians to call for his courtmartial. With Robert Graves’s help, Sassoon was committed to a mental hospital instead, but he decided to return to combat so as not to betray his fellow soldiers. In 1919 The War Poems of Siegfried Sassoon was published. The final poem celebrates the armistice of 1918 in these words: “. . .O, but Everyone / Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.” Edward Thomas (1878–1917): Killed on Easter Sunday, 1917, during the Battle of Arras, the thirty-nine-year-old Thomas was older than most of the other World War I poets, and he had already established his literary career before the war. He was strongly influenced by the American poet Robert Frost (1874–1963). “Rain,” one of Thomas’s most important “war” poems, written in 1916, includes these lines: “Rain, midnight rain, and nothing but wild rain / On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me / Remembering again that I shall die. . .” His wife, Helen Thomas, also was a noted poet. Oxford. He left this position partly for health reasons and partly because he came to believe that the established church was failing in its duty to the poor. He returned to his family’s home briefly, then accepted a position teaching at the Berlitz School of Languages in Bordeaux, France. During this period, Owen started writing poetry. He admired the writings of the Romantic poets, like John Keats, and he became friends with the poet Laurent Tailhade, who was a fellow pacifist. Wilfred Owen 113
Page 1: Wilfred Owen March 18, 1893 Oswestr
Page 5 and 6: Learning from Other Poets As his ti
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Wilfred Owen

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