Mhairi Pooler
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781781381977
- eISBN:
- 9781786945242
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781781381977.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Chapter 4 examines how Siegfried Sassoon’s deeply entrenched divided self formally and thematically shapes his autobiographical trilogy as a poet’s journey from Romanticism to Modernism. The second ...
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Chapter 4 examines how Siegfried Sassoon’s deeply entrenched divided self formally and thematically shapes his autobiographical trilogy as a poet’s journey from Romanticism to Modernism. The second prose trilogy by Sassoon is ‘the story of my effort to become a famous poet’. Although more explicitly Wordsworthian than James, Sassoon’s final undercutting of the Künstlerroman form in his so-called ‘straight autobiography’ is also more drastic, revealing the impact of war on artistic identity. The chapter discusses Sassoon’s self-theorising throughout the texts and his desire to write himself into something more than a soldier poet, which these texts achieve with ease. The chapter concludes that much like poetry, the structure of the text embodies equal meaning to the words, so that Sassoon’s ‘factual’ prose works invite literary interpretation and even poetic comparisons.Less
Chapter 4 examines how Siegfried Sassoon’s deeply entrenched divided self formally and thematically shapes his autobiographical trilogy as a poet’s journey from Romanticism to Modernism. The second prose trilogy by Sassoon is ‘the story of my effort to become a famous poet’. Although more explicitly Wordsworthian than James, Sassoon’s final undercutting of the Künstlerroman form in his so-called ‘straight autobiography’ is also more drastic, revealing the impact of war on artistic identity. The chapter discusses Sassoon’s self-theorising throughout the texts and his desire to write himself into something more than a soldier poet, which these texts achieve with ease. The chapter concludes that much like poetry, the structure of the text embodies equal meaning to the words, so that Sassoon’s ‘factual’ prose works invite literary interpretation and even poetic comparisons.
Jonathan Atkin
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719060700
- eISBN:
- 9781781700105
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719060700.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
In our search for reflections of aesthetic response to the Great War across barriers of experience, the soldier, poet and author Richard Aldington is a good example of John Galsworthy's ...
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In our search for reflections of aesthetic response to the Great War across barriers of experience, the soldier, poet and author Richard Aldington is a good example of John Galsworthy's identification of the human spirit under the pressure of a seemingly mechanised military existence (the ‘herd of life’). He introduces a series of creative men who actually donned a uniform at some stage (though not always willingly) and fought at the front. Gerald Brenan was another fledgling writer in uniform who, like Aldington, felt his soul threatened by the strictures of war. Unlike Brenan, the poet Max Plowman declared his anti-war feelings and suffered a court martial. For Plowman and others, the experience of being within the war machine acted both as a compass towards and a justification of his later anti-war stance. Two further examples of this process concerned possibly the most celebrated poets of the war: Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Robert Graves's concern was with the outward effect of an anti-war protest on the very individuals whom Siegfried Sassoon was supposedly trying to influence.Less
In our search for reflections of aesthetic response to the Great War across barriers of experience, the soldier, poet and author Richard Aldington is a good example of John Galsworthy's identification of the human spirit under the pressure of a seemingly mechanised military existence (the ‘herd of life’). He introduces a series of creative men who actually donned a uniform at some stage (though not always willingly) and fought at the front. Gerald Brenan was another fledgling writer in uniform who, like Aldington, felt his soul threatened by the strictures of war. Unlike Brenan, the poet Max Plowman declared his anti-war feelings and suffered a court martial. For Plowman and others, the experience of being within the war machine acted both as a compass towards and a justification of his later anti-war stance. Two further examples of this process concerned possibly the most celebrated poets of the war: Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. Robert Graves's concern was with the outward effect of an anti-war protest on the very individuals whom Siegfried Sassoon was supposedly trying to influence.
Jonathan Atkin
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719060700
- eISBN:
- 9781781700105
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719060700.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The Great War still haunts us. This book draws together examples of the ‘aesthetic pacifism’ practised during the Great War by such celebrated individuals as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and ...
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The Great War still haunts us. This book draws together examples of the ‘aesthetic pacifism’ practised during the Great War by such celebrated individuals as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and Bertrand Russell. It also tells the stories of those less well known who shared the attitudes of the Bloomsbury Group when it came to facing the first ‘total war’. The five-year research for this study gathered evidence from all the major archives in Great Britain and abroad in order to paint a complete picture of this unique form of anti-war expression. The narrative begins with the Great War's effect on philosopher-pacifist Bertrand Russell and Cambridge University.Less
The Great War still haunts us. This book draws together examples of the ‘aesthetic pacifism’ practised during the Great War by such celebrated individuals as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and Bertrand Russell. It also tells the stories of those less well known who shared the attitudes of the Bloomsbury Group when it came to facing the first ‘total war’. The five-year research for this study gathered evidence from all the major archives in Great Britain and abroad in order to paint a complete picture of this unique form of anti-war expression. The narrative begins with the Great War's effect on philosopher-pacifist Bertrand Russell and Cambridge University.
Patrick Deer
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780199239887
- eISBN:
- 9780191716782
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199239887.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Contrasting the fractured point of view of combatant writers like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Ford Madox Ford to the heroic prospects projected by official War Artists like ...
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Contrasting the fractured point of view of combatant writers like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Ford Madox Ford to the heroic prospects projected by official War Artists like Muirhead Bone and war poets like Rupert Brooke, this chapter argues that most urgent task confronting the military authorities was to bridge the gulf between the commanding strategic perspective and the collapses of vision in the trench labyrinth of the Western Front. It explores how despite its notorious failures the war machine used propaganda, censorship, military discipline, camouflage and other new technologies to recapture the oversight of battle, turning the imperial sovereign gaze on the minds and bodies of the mass army in the trenches. Despite antimodernism on the home front, the military authorities covertly cannibalized modernist culture in their struggle to modernize. But the camouflaged modernism of Rosenberg, Vera Brittain, or Ford's Parade's End demonstrates a more sceptical response to the dominant perspective of war.Less
Contrasting the fractured point of view of combatant writers like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Ford Madox Ford to the heroic prospects projected by official War Artists like Muirhead Bone and war poets like Rupert Brooke, this chapter argues that most urgent task confronting the military authorities was to bridge the gulf between the commanding strategic perspective and the collapses of vision in the trench labyrinth of the Western Front. It explores how despite its notorious failures the war machine used propaganda, censorship, military discipline, camouflage and other new technologies to recapture the oversight of battle, turning the imperial sovereign gaze on the minds and bodies of the mass army in the trenches. Despite antimodernism on the home front, the military authorities covertly cannibalized modernist culture in their struggle to modernize. But the camouflaged modernism of Rosenberg, Vera Brittain, or Ford's Parade's End demonstrates a more sceptical response to the dominant perspective of war.
Robert Hemmings
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748633067
- eISBN:
- 9780748651887
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748633067.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This book explores Siegfried Sassoon’s writing of the twenties, thirties and forties, demonstrating the connections between trauma and nostalgia in a culture saturated with the anxieties of war. ...
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This book explores Siegfried Sassoon’s writing of the twenties, thirties and forties, demonstrating the connections between trauma and nostalgia in a culture saturated with the anxieties of war. Informed by the texts of Freud, W.H.R. Rivers and other psychological writers of the early twentieth century, as well as contemporary theorists of nostalgia and trauma, it examines the pathology of nostalgia conveyed in Sassoon’s unpublished poems, letters and journals, together with his published work. The book situates Sassoon’s ongoing anxiety about ‘Englishness’, modernity and his relation to modernist aesthetics within the context of other literary responses to the legacy of war, and the threat of war’s return, by writers including Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves and T. E. Lawrence. This study teases out the relationship between nostalgia, trauma and autobiography, and forges connections between the literatures of the two world wars. As a case study of modern nostalgia, the book offers an alternative to the perception that Sassoon’s historical and cultural relevance touches the First World War only.Less
This book explores Siegfried Sassoon’s writing of the twenties, thirties and forties, demonstrating the connections between trauma and nostalgia in a culture saturated with the anxieties of war. Informed by the texts of Freud, W.H.R. Rivers and other psychological writers of the early twentieth century, as well as contemporary theorists of nostalgia and trauma, it examines the pathology of nostalgia conveyed in Sassoon’s unpublished poems, letters and journals, together with his published work. The book situates Sassoon’s ongoing anxiety about ‘Englishness’, modernity and his relation to modernist aesthetics within the context of other literary responses to the legacy of war, and the threat of war’s return, by writers including Edmund Blunden, Robert Graves and T. E. Lawrence. This study teases out the relationship between nostalgia, trauma and autobiography, and forges connections between the literatures of the two world wars. As a case study of modern nostalgia, the book offers an alternative to the perception that Sassoon’s historical and cultural relevance touches the First World War only.
Robert Hemmings
- Published in print:
- 2008
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748633067
- eISBN:
- 9780748651887
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748633067.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter introduces Siegfried Sassoon and his selective approach to the past, looking at his literary responses to each world war by studying his poetry and prose from the 1920s to the 1940s. It ...
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This chapter introduces Siegfried Sassoon and his selective approach to the past, looking at his literary responses to each world war by studying his poetry and prose from the 1920s to the 1940s. It studies the role of nostalgia in his representation of his survival of war, how nostalgia is used as a way to filter the memories of the past, and nostalgia in Georgian and modernist poetry.Less
This chapter introduces Siegfried Sassoon and his selective approach to the past, looking at his literary responses to each world war by studying his poetry and prose from the 1920s to the 1940s. It studies the role of nostalgia in his representation of his survival of war, how nostalgia is used as a way to filter the memories of the past, and nostalgia in Georgian and modernist poetry.
Sarah Kingston
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780748694266
- eISBN:
- 9781474412391
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748694266.003.0008
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
This chapter explores the function of sleep habits and insomnia in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End and Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, arguing that insomnia is an embodiment of the ...
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This chapter explores the function of sleep habits and insomnia in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End and Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, arguing that insomnia is an embodiment of the individual's resistance to military discipline, loss of privacy, and the subjection of one's body to authoritative control. Insomnia, a liminal state between sleeping and waking, pits the body against the mind or mind against the body, and in doing so illustrates the failure of disciplinary mechanisms to completely regulate individual behaviours. Further, the phenomenology of insomnia is in many ways similar to the phenomenology of experience in the First World War, especially given the war's association with exhaustion and fatigue, nocturnal activity, a sense of endlessness, and idiosyncratic temporality, making it an apt device through which to express the anxieties associated with participation in the war.Less
This chapter explores the function of sleep habits and insomnia in Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End and Siegfried Sassoon's Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, arguing that insomnia is an embodiment of the individual's resistance to military discipline, loss of privacy, and the subjection of one's body to authoritative control. Insomnia, a liminal state between sleeping and waking, pits the body against the mind or mind against the body, and in doing so illustrates the failure of disciplinary mechanisms to completely regulate individual behaviours. Further, the phenomenology of insomnia is in many ways similar to the phenomenology of experience in the First World War, especially given the war's association with exhaustion and fatigue, nocturnal activity, a sense of endlessness, and idiosyncratic temporality, making it an apt device through which to express the anxieties associated with participation in the war.
Jonathan Atkin
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719060700
- eISBN:
- 9781781700105
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719060700.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
The Great War of 1914–1918 was the first ‘modern’ war, involving more spheres of human experience than perhaps any previous conflict. Whole populations were caught up in it and exhibited myriad ...
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The Great War of 1914–1918 was the first ‘modern’ war, involving more spheres of human experience than perhaps any previous conflict. Whole populations were caught up in it and exhibited myriad shades of reaction to it – including, naturally, opposition. This book concentrates on those individualistic British citizens whose motivation for opposition in thought or deed was grounded upon moral, humanistic or aesthetic precepts. In his Pacifism in Britain 1914–1945: The Defining of a Faith, the historian Martin Ceadel singles out what he terms ‘humanitarian pacifism’ as a valid form of anti-war feeling, stating that it is ‘no less a dogma’ than religious or political pacifism. The years of the Great War were the formative ones that helped to mould the Bloomsbury Group into the image which would be recast by the public imagination in succeeding generations. This book explores both the past itself and the personalities of bohemian Bloomsbury, from Bertrand Russell and Ottoline Morrell to Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Paul Nash, Ivor Gurney, Mabel St Clair Stobart, Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey.Less
The Great War of 1914–1918 was the first ‘modern’ war, involving more spheres of human experience than perhaps any previous conflict. Whole populations were caught up in it and exhibited myriad shades of reaction to it – including, naturally, opposition. This book concentrates on those individualistic British citizens whose motivation for opposition in thought or deed was grounded upon moral, humanistic or aesthetic precepts. In his Pacifism in Britain 1914–1945: The Defining of a Faith, the historian Martin Ceadel singles out what he terms ‘humanitarian pacifism’ as a valid form of anti-war feeling, stating that it is ‘no less a dogma’ than religious or political pacifism. The years of the Great War were the formative ones that helped to mould the Bloomsbury Group into the image which would be recast by the public imagination in succeeding generations. This book explores both the past itself and the personalities of bohemian Bloomsbury, from Bertrand Russell and Ottoline Morrell to Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Paul Nash, Ivor Gurney, Mabel St Clair Stobart, Virginia Woolf and Lytton Strachey.
Jonathan Atkin
- Published in print:
- 2002
- Published Online:
- July 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780719060700
- eISBN:
- 9781781700105
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719060700.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Bertrand Russell was just one man largely thinking and acting alone – and therein rests his reputation. But to what extent – whether in private or public – did similar anti-war concerns to those of ...
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Bertrand Russell was just one man largely thinking and acting alone – and therein rests his reputation. But to what extent – whether in private or public – did similar anti-war concerns to those of Russell and the Bloomsbury Group express themselves among the intelligentsia? In common with Russell, E. M. Forster believed the Great War to be partly due to misdirected destructive energies; forces that could be channelled during times of peace into creative efforts. In his letter to Siegfried Sassoon, he explained that his other hope for the future, though ‘very faint’, was for a League of Nations. This was a hope that Forster shared with both his frequent correspondent Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and with other intellectuals such as the writer and ruralist Edward Carpenter. The emotional response of Carpenter and Dickinson to the war was matched by that of Henry James. In contrast with James, the dry, precise tone of George Bernard Shaw provided perhaps the most prominent intellectual commentary of his time on the war's ebb and flow.Less
Bertrand Russell was just one man largely thinking and acting alone – and therein rests his reputation. But to what extent – whether in private or public – did similar anti-war concerns to those of Russell and the Bloomsbury Group express themselves among the intelligentsia? In common with Russell, E. M. Forster believed the Great War to be partly due to misdirected destructive energies; forces that could be channelled during times of peace into creative efforts. In his letter to Siegfried Sassoon, he explained that his other hope for the future, though ‘very faint’, was for a League of Nations. This was a hope that Forster shared with both his frequent correspondent Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson and with other intellectuals such as the writer and ruralist Edward Carpenter. The emotional response of Carpenter and Dickinson to the war was matched by that of Henry James. In contrast with James, the dry, precise tone of George Bernard Shaw provided perhaps the most prominent intellectual commentary of his time on the war's ebb and flow.
Sydney Janet Kaplan
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- September 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780748641482
- eISBN:
- 9780748671595
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748641482.003.0006
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
This chapter discusses Mansfield's return to London in April 1918, her marriage to Murry, and their adversarial relations with Lady Ottoline Morrell and others associated with Bloomsbury that ...
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This chapter discusses Mansfield's return to London in April 1918, her marriage to Murry, and their adversarial relations with Lady Ottoline Morrell and others associated with Bloomsbury that resulted from Murry's negative review of the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon. It considers the change in these relations when Murry took over the editorship of the Athenaeum in 1919, especially the cautious friendship between Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, and the professional competition between Murry and T. S. Eliot.Less
This chapter discusses Mansfield's return to London in April 1918, her marriage to Murry, and their adversarial relations with Lady Ottoline Morrell and others associated with Bloomsbury that resulted from Murry's negative review of the poetry of Siegfried Sassoon. It considers the change in these relations when Murry took over the editorship of the Athenaeum in 1919, especially the cautious friendship between Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, and the professional competition between Murry and T. S. Eliot.
Douglas Kerr
- Published in print:
- 1993
- Published Online:
- October 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780198123705
- eISBN:
- 9780191671609
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198123705.003.0016
- Subject:
- Literature, Poetry
The possibility for a book of Owen's poetry to be published during the last winter and spring of his life caused Owen to achieve a different perspective regarding his work. Owen, with the help of ...
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The possibility for a book of Owen's poetry to be published during the last winter and spring of his life caused Owen to achieve a different perspective regarding his work. Owen, with the help of Siegfried Sassoon, during this time was developing his own new poetic personality and was increasingly becoming dissatisfied with the old one. As such, he established his own voice as a way of organizing the various discourses involved in his experience that resulted in an urgent and expressive melange. As he was contemplating some of the editorial decisions for his upcoming book, he had to think much about the general shape of his work and how his poems were connected with one another. The titles that Owen came up with reflected his place in the community of poetry. He initially chose a title that hinted elegy through English Elegies which did not suit some of his works, and so he chose other more appropriate titles.Less
The possibility for a book of Owen's poetry to be published during the last winter and spring of his life caused Owen to achieve a different perspective regarding his work. Owen, with the help of Siegfried Sassoon, during this time was developing his own new poetic personality and was increasingly becoming dissatisfied with the old one. As such, he established his own voice as a way of organizing the various discourses involved in his experience that resulted in an urgent and expressive melange. As he was contemplating some of the editorial decisions for his upcoming book, he had to think much about the general shape of his work and how his poems were connected with one another. The titles that Owen came up with reflected his place in the community of poetry. He initially chose a title that hinted elegy through English Elegies which did not suit some of his works, and so he chose other more appropriate titles.
Mhairi Pooler
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781781381977
- eISBN:
- 9781786945242
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781781381977.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century and Contemporary Literature
Writing Life offers a revisionary exploration of the relationship between an author’s life and art. By examining the self-representation of authors across the schism between Victorianism and ...
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Writing Life offers a revisionary exploration of the relationship between an author’s life and art. By examining the self-representation of authors across the schism between Victorianism and Modernism via the First World War, this study offers a new way of evaluating biographical context and experience in the individual creative process at a critical point in world and literary history. Writing Life is also the story of four literarily and personally interconnected writers – Edmund Gosse, Henry James, Siegfried Sassoon and Dorothy Richardson – and how and why they variously adapted the model of the German Romantic Künstlerroman, or artist narrative, for their autobiographical writing, reimagining themselves as artist-heroes. By appropriating key features of the genre to underpin their autobiographical narratives, Writing Life examines how these writers achieve a form of life-writing that is equally a life story, artist’s manifesto, aesthetic treatise and modern autobiographical Künstlerroman. Pooler argues that by casting their autobiographical selves in this role, Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson shift the focus of their life-stories towards art and its production and interpretation, each one conducting a Romantic-style conversation about literature through literature as a means of reconfirming the role of the artist in the face of shifting values and the cataclysm of the Great War.Less
Writing Life offers a revisionary exploration of the relationship between an author’s life and art. By examining the self-representation of authors across the schism between Victorianism and Modernism via the First World War, this study offers a new way of evaluating biographical context and experience in the individual creative process at a critical point in world and literary history. Writing Life is also the story of four literarily and personally interconnected writers – Edmund Gosse, Henry James, Siegfried Sassoon and Dorothy Richardson – and how and why they variously adapted the model of the German Romantic Künstlerroman, or artist narrative, for their autobiographical writing, reimagining themselves as artist-heroes. By appropriating key features of the genre to underpin their autobiographical narratives, Writing Life examines how these writers achieve a form of life-writing that is equally a life story, artist’s manifesto, aesthetic treatise and modern autobiographical Künstlerroman. Pooler argues that by casting their autobiographical selves in this role, Gosse, James, Sassoon and Richardson shift the focus of their life-stories towards art and its production and interpretation, each one conducting a Romantic-style conversation about literature through literature as a means of reconfirming the role of the artist in the face of shifting values and the cataclysm of the Great War.
Tom Palaima
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- March 2016
- ISBN:
- 9780198738053
- eISBN:
- 9780191801594
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198738053.003.0013
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Robert Graves’s war poems use an ironic distancing effect that distinguishes him within the long tradition of war poets from Homer, Tyrtaeus, Callinus, Archilochus, Aeschylus, Euripides and Virgil to ...
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Robert Graves’s war poems use an ironic distancing effect that distinguishes him within the long tradition of war poets from Homer, Tyrtaeus, Callinus, Archilochus, Aeschylus, Euripides and Virgil to the soldier poets of World War I. Graves’s rhetorical stance is linked to symptoms of post-traumatic stress developing in his childhood and intensified by his near-death wounding in World War I. Graves writes war poems in the clear, spare, and low-toned style of other soldiers and veterans like Ernest Hemingway, Tim O’Brien, Wilfred Owen, and George Orwell. But he rarely forces readers to take in emotionally intense scenes, because he believes that those unbaptized in the suicidal sacrament of war cannot understand its realities. Graves’s cynicism about the capacities of power figures even to see the truth underlies the intellectualized satire in his translation of Homer’s Iliad and his poem about the Battle of Marathon, ‘The Persian Version’.Less
Robert Graves’s war poems use an ironic distancing effect that distinguishes him within the long tradition of war poets from Homer, Tyrtaeus, Callinus, Archilochus, Aeschylus, Euripides and Virgil to the soldier poets of World War I. Graves’s rhetorical stance is linked to symptoms of post-traumatic stress developing in his childhood and intensified by his near-death wounding in World War I. Graves writes war poems in the clear, spare, and low-toned style of other soldiers and veterans like Ernest Hemingway, Tim O’Brien, Wilfred Owen, and George Orwell. But he rarely forces readers to take in emotionally intense scenes, because he believes that those unbaptized in the suicidal sacrament of war cannot understand its realities. Graves’s cynicism about the capacities of power figures even to see the truth underlies the intellectualized satire in his translation of Homer’s Iliad and his poem about the Battle of Marathon, ‘The Persian Version’.
