War poetry originated during wartime as soldiers and civilians wrote poems to express the extreme emotions of experiencing conflict. This genre asks large questions about identity, humanity, and morality. Poets from the First World War like Owen, Rosenberg, and Sassoon wrote some of the most enduring works that have become "sacred national texts." While war poetry is not inherently anti-war, it examines the human experience of war through its impacts on life, death, duty, and national identity. It provides insight into the societies that produced such representations of soldiers and conflict.

1. War Poetry
Introduction
Ms. Vaidehi Hariyani
(Research Scholar and Visiting Faculty)
Department of English, MKBU

2. What is War Poetry?
• War poetry is a literary genre originated during war time when
hundreds of soldiers, and also civilians caught up in conflict, started
to write poetry as a way of striving to express extreme emotion at the
very edge of experience.
• This type of poetry is almost “anti-war”, however it include the very
large questions of life as: identity, innocence, humanity, compassion,
guilt, loyalty, desire and death.
• This poems have a relation of immediate personal experience to
moments of national and international crisis what gives war poetry an
extra-literary importance. Later on, the work of a handful of these
writers became a “sacred national text”.

3. • Poets have written about the experience of war since the Greeks, but
the young soldier poets of the First World War established war poetry
as a literary genre. Their combined voice has become one of the
defining texts of Twentieth Century Europe.
• In 1914 hundreds of young men in uniform took to writing poetry as a
way of striving to express extreme emotion at the very edge of
experience. The work of a handful of these, such as Owen, Rosenberg
and Sassoon, has endured to become what Andrew Motion has called
‘a sacred national text’.

4. • Although ‘war poet’ tends traditionally to refer to active combatants, war
poetry has been written by many ‘civilians’ caught up in conflict in other
ways: Cesar Vallejo and WH Auden in the Spanish Civil War, Margaret
Postgate Cole and Rose Macaulay in the First World War, James Fenton in
Cambodia.
• In the global, ‘total war’ of 1939-45, that saw the holocaust, the blitz and
Hiroshima, virtually no poet was untouched by the experience of war. The
same was true for the civil conflicts and revolutions in Spain and Eastern
Europe. That does not mean, however, that every poet responded to war
by writing directly about it. For some, the proper response of a poet was
one of consciously (conscientiously) keeping silent

5. • War poetry is not necessarily ‘anti-war’. It is, however, about the very large
questions of life: identity, innocence, guilt, loyalty, courage, compassion,
humanity, duty, desire, death. Its response to these questions, and its
relation of immediate personal experience to moments of national and
international crisis, gives war poetry an extra-literary importance. Owen
wrote that even Shakespeare seems ‘vapid’ after Sassoon: ‘not of course
because Sassoon is a greater artist, but because of the subjects’.
• War poetry is currently studied in every school in Britain. It has become
part of the mythology of nationhood, and an expression of both historical
consciousness and political conscience. The way we read – and perhaps
revere – war poetry, says something about what we are, and what we want
to be, as a nation

6. • Soldiers are usually dressed with a uniform that is used at battlefields.
This pattern is similar in most countries, using the typical forest or
pixel camouflage, although the color of camouflage and other
elements vary according to the geography in which a country would
use its soldiers.
• Fear, sadness and impotence could be good adjectives that are used
in this war poems and don't vary depending on the nationality of the
soldiers. Also they are portrayed as heroes for the people because of
their courage.
• How are soldiers typically portrayed?
• Is there a common theme which unites the various countries?
• What do these representations tell us about the society which
produced such an image?
• What was the role played by women in war times?

7. • By the 18th century, the role of women was accompanied armies
assigned combat missions, usually they have roles such as cooking
and laundry.
• Also, women worked in munitions factories and Nursing became a
major role starting in the middle 19th century.
• The main role in World War I was employment in munitions factories,
farming, and other roles to replace men drafted for the army.

8. Some Important War Poets
• Siegfried Sassoon
• Wilfred Owen
• Rupert Brooke
• Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
• Ivor Gruney

9. Selected War Poems
• 1.)Dulce et Decorum Est - Wilfred Owen
• 2.) The Soldier – Rupert Brooke
• 3.) The Fear – Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
• 4.) The Hero – Sigfried Sassoon
• 5.) The Target – Ivor Gruney

10. Works Cited
• Editors,The. War Poetry. Poetry Foundation.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/collections/144683/war-poetry