Wilfred Owen (1893–1918) is the greatest of the war poets. Sassoon’s work inspired the greatest of all the war poets Wilfred Owen. His other war poems are War Poems (1919), Picture-show (1920) and Satirical Poems (1926). It burns with anger with the arm chair politicians responsible for war. His poetry bears the stamp of his determination to shock the people at home into the bitter realization of the ghastly truth. A merciless and calculated realism gives to his work a vitality not previously found in English poetry. In his Counter-attack (1918), a collection of violent, embittered poems, he paints, with a studied bluntness, and often a provocative coarseness of language, the horrors of life and death in the trenches, dug-outs and hospitals. Unlike Rupert Brooke he does not throw any romantic veil over the realities of war, which he depicts “as a dirty mess of blood and decaying bodies.” A pacifist at heart he writes about the nightmare of trench warfare and other horrors. Invalided early in the war, he writes from his personal experiences in the front. Siegfried Sassoon (18861967) is the first soldier poet to treat the war with horrifying realism and bitter satire and irony. ”The war-time revival of English poetry,” as Ward says, “had its origin in Brooke alone.” Yet, however poetic in himself, he is more important as the occasion of poetry in others. He saw the world with a clear eye and recorded what he saw with directness and clarity. The marks of greatness in his poems are few, but such marks there are. It is natural to speculate what a great poet he might have been if he had lived on. As a war-poet he takes an idealistic view of war and speaks of its glory, glamour and heroism, and not its brutality and ghastliness. He enlisted as a soldier and went to war to defend the honour of his motherland. It rings with his pride in being an Englishman and his glorification of the death of English soldiers in the front for England. Of his war sonnets the most typical is The Soldier. He became the spokesman for the dedication of the English people to the cause of their country. He wrote a number of war sonnets to express his patriotic enthusiasm, his pride in England, and his resolve to serve her. He hailed the war with patriotic fervour. Out of this Georgian mood he was swept by the high emotions inspired by the rising wave of patriotism on the eve of the world war. He began to write poetry in the Georgian tradition, drawing inspirations from nature and simple pleasures. Much of Brooke’s reputation is due to his remarkably good looks, his winning personality and his premature death in action stifling great expectations. The most outstanding of the romantic (idealistic) war poets was Rupert Brooke (1887-1915). The poets of the 1914-18 war divide themselves into two groups- romantic war poets and realistic war poets. This realistic attitude to the war was at first cried down as unpatriotic, but it has stood the test of time better than the romantic attitude of the early years. But as the carnage went on increasing and there was no hope of its end, other poets arose with the declared intention of blasting this romantic illusion of the glory of war by a frank realistic depiction of the horrors, savagery and futility of war. Many poets who lived and served throughout the war had this patriotic fervour of the early years unaffected. The first was one of patriotic fervour, almost of rejoicing in the opportunity of self-sacrifice in the cause of human freedom, and a revival of the romantic conception of the knight-at-arms (Albert). Broadly two phases of the national attitude can be distinguished in war poetry. There can be no clearer reflection of the changing national attitude to the war than that found in war poetry. Moreover, it serves as a great social document. It provided a new source of inspiration for the poets of established reputation and brought to public notice many poets, particularly among the young men who fought in the war. The First World War had a far-reaching effect on English poetry.
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