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On WWI Poetry (ENGL 221)
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On WWI Poetry (ENGL 221)
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On WWI PoetryMarch 23rd, 2022
Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918)
A bisexual man who couldn’t really explore much of his sexuality during that time.
● When he met Siegfried Sassoon, his work turned from Keatsian Romanticism to satirical,
after also suffering from immense shell-shock during WWI.
● Masculinity was at stake, so Owen kept going back to the war, even if he didn’t have to.
● Died 9 days before the war ended.
20th Century – the Century of War
● By the turn of the century, 75% of inhabitants of Great Britain lived in cities and towns.
● The word “suburbia” was coined in the 1890s, already carrying a pejorative connotation.
● Electrified trams, bicycles and cars, alarm clocks, rationalization of working hours, rush
hour, traffic jams, industrial regimentation, telephones, mass media, cinema and radio…
● Education Acts of late 19th century came with the spread of literacy
● Development of popular or mass art and “high” art
● 1914-1918: The Great War
A New Kind of War
● Heavy artillery, machine guns, tanks, motorized, transport vehicles, high explosives,
chemical weapons, airplanes, field radios and telephones, aerial reconnaissance cameras,
and rapidly advancing medical technology and science we just a few of the areas that
reshaped twentieth century warfare
WWI and Modernism
● Although modernism as a movement tends to be dated between 1890-1940, the major
modernist achievements tend to cluster in the 1920s, the decade immediately
following WWI.
○ Unprecedented amount of slaughter (~7 million)
○ Unprecedented involvement of noncombatants
■ Rules: countries do not go to war with noncombatants (the US is being a
bit disingenuous when they slam Russia, pretending like they’ve never
done the same thing in the Middle East)
○ Unprecedented scale of the demonstration of bureaucratic and technologically
assisted inhumanity
● Paul Fussell: A “public embarrassment to the idea of progress” (a critique of modernity)
○ We are drawing attention to the failures of modernity, not the failures of
modernism (these are different things)
○ Modernity at its very root is that humanity is progressing to perfection
■ Owen and Woolf both critique the idea of modernity
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