Introduction to War Poets

Rupert Brooke:

Rupert Brooke lived a good life before he joined the army. He was born in an aristocratic family ( his father was the principal in a school), graduated from University of Cambridge, and he travelled to Europe and America after graduation. Even his decision of joining the army was made after meeting Winston Churchill, the Prime Minister of Britain at that time.

At first, his social status protected him from fighting in the frontline, which was always done by people from lower classes of the society, but also prevented him from ever experiencing the actual war. In his mind, war was beautiful and romantic, all soldiers were fighting with enthusiasm and patriotism, and when the war was over, all soldiers would return home like a hero, embracing the worship from their families and relatives. This is the reason why his early poems naively portrayed the beauty of the war, with a concentration on romantic deaths in his masterwork,The Soldier.

However, when he was sent to the South Seas to fight an actual battle, he saw what was a war really like ( trench warfares) , and consequently his poetry style changed from romanticism to realism. In other words, he began writing poems based on his actual experiences, instead of romantic but unrealistic dreams.

Siegfried Sassoon:

Like Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon was also born in an aristocratic family and went to University of Cambridge, but what makes them different was the experiences of the actual war. Siegfried participated in countless battles, and the experiences and feelings he gained from those battles became the key ingredients of his poems. He experienced pain, bitterness and fear. He knew how horrible the war was. Therefore, he appealed to the public to stop the war by writing poems that portrayed the evilness of the war, especially for those who considered to make profit out of the war or those helped to prolong the war. And that shaped his poetry—realism and sarcasm.

Wilfred Owen:

Like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen experienced the actual war, but too much—he was diagnosed as having neurasthenia, the formal name for a shell shock, during the war. In the hospital, Wilfred had traumatic nightmares about the war every night. Under Siegfried Sassoon’s direction, he wrote all of that into his poetry—the mud, rats, lice, corpses, etc.

He torn down the mysterious mask the war had been wearing for a long time, and showed the naked, harsh and bloody reality of the war to all people—the desperation, the horror, the cruelty.