How can ?poetry? inform ?history?? Aristotle contrasts poetry with history, claiming that literature and creative writing can tell more universal stories than history can. Review the Aristotle, Owen, and Yeats passages quoted in Unit 1: Poetry and their arguments about the power and limitations of poetry.
Should historians use literature as a way to understand what happened in the Great War? Why or why not? In an essay of 750 words, answer these questions using specific quotes and details from poems, Hemingway, and Dalton to support your argument (These sources are provided in the ‘File Section’ under Poems). Cite your sources using the “Insert Footnote” function and included the author & title and page number if appropriate.
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Create a separate paragraph that summarizes what is in this link:
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Write a paragraph summarizing what you learned. You do NOT need to answer the questions inside the Nearpod module.
DRAFT for FlipBook1
Poem 1:
(Britain, 1887-1915, served in the Royal Navy)
Brooke was a literary star even before the war began. He befriended his classmates at Cambridge,
including John Maynard Keynes, who would become a world-famous economist, and Hugh Dalton, who
later wrote of his experiences during the Battle of Caporetto in With British Guns in Italy. After
graduation he traveled across the world and continued to write poetry. He volunteered for service as soon
as the war began. He joined the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve and was stationed in Belgium, where he
saw no military action and continued writing. It is here he wrote The Soldier. In early 1915 he was sailing
to join the Gallipoli campaign when he contracted blood poisoning from an insect bite and died. He was
buried on the island Skyros in Greece.
The Soldier (written in late 1914, published in January 1915)
If I should die, think only this of me:
That there?s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England?s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
And think, this hear, all evil shed away,
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;
And laughter learnt of friends; and gentleness,
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven
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Poem 2:
Amelia Josephine Burr (United States, 1878-1968, worked with Red Cross)
Having graduated from Hunter College in New York, Burr traveled extensively across the globe. She
wrote about Italy, Egypt, and India, among other places. She was a popular writer before the war started,
publishing poetry in a variety of magazines. She served with the American Red Cross from 1917-1918.
Her work is included in many anthologies of American war poems. She seems to have ceased publishing
soon after her marriage in 1921 to Reverend Carl Hopkins Elmore, who served as a Presbyterian minister
in Englewood, New Jersey.
Red Cross Work
(first published in The Red Cross Magazine, v 13, Jan 1918, 62; reprinted in Burr, The Silver Trumpet
(NY: George H. Doran, 1918), 41)
Interminable folds of gauze
For those whom we shall never see . . . .
Remember, when your fingers pause,
That every drop of blood to stain
This whiteness, falls FOR YOU AND ME,
Part of the price that keeps us free
To serve our own, that keeps us clean
From shame that other women know . . . .
O, saviours we have never seen,
Forgive us that we are so slow!
God ? if that blood should cry in vain,
And we have let our moment go!
America to Europe (February, 1917)
(Burr, The Silver Trumpet (NY: George H. Doran, 1918), 95)
I gave a pittance of my gold
To unimaginable need
And was so proud of what I doled ?
It was my blindness, not my greed,
For I have children who could see
And to their vision have been true.
Remember, when you think of me,
My sons who gave themselves to you,
Who succored faithfully and well
The hungry and the fatherless,
Who faced the battle?s triple hell
To aid the wounded man?s distress,
Who went with singing lips and heart
To the red reaping of the guns.
You judge me by my nobler part
Who know the service of my sons.
Sisters who find me dull to see
And cold to feel and slow to do,
Remember, in the days to be,
My sons who gave themselves to you!
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Poem 3:
Zinaida Nikolaevna Gippius (Russia, 1869-1945)
Already well known for her literary talents, Gippius left Russia after the Russian revolutions in 1917 with
her husband to live in Paris. There she continued to write and maintain her strong advocacy for sex and
gender equality, rejecting traditional notions about femininity and masculinity.
Without Justification (1916; reprinted in Margaret Higonnet, Lines of Fire (NY: Plume, 1999), 472-473)
No, I shall never be reconciled.
My curses are genuine.
I shall not forgive, I shall not fall
Into iron clutches.
Like everyone living, I shall die, I shall kill,
Like everyone, I shall destroy myself.
But I shall not stain my soul
In justification.
At the final hour, in darkness, in fire,
Let not my heart forget:
There is no justification for war
And there never will be.
And if this is the command of God-
A bloody path-
My spirit will go into battle even against Him,
Will rise up even against God.
April 1916. St. Petersburg.
Translated by Temira Pachmuss
Today on Earth (1916; reprinted in Margaret Higonnet, Lines of Fire (NY: Plume, 1999), 473)
There is something so hard,
something so shameful.
Almost impossible ?
something so hard:
This is to lift one?s lashes
and look into the face of a mother
Whose son has been killed.
But don?t talk about it.
September 20, 1916. St. Petersburg
Translated by John Henriksen
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Poem 4:
Siegfried Sassoon (Britain, 1886-1967, served on the Western Front)
Born into a wealthy family Sassoon lived a life of leisure before the war, dropping out of Cambridge
University. He met Rupert Brooke whose talent at poetry was already recognized. Sassoon felt
dissatisfied with life and joined the military the day Britain declared war against Germany. He served in
the Royal Welch Fusiliers and got to know fellow officer and poet Robert Graves. He was awarded the
Military Cross for rescuing an injured soldier in 1916 under fire. He worried he would be court-martialed
when his letter of protest against the war was read aloud in the House of Commons. Graves defended him
by saying Sassoon suffered from shell shock. Sassoon was admitted to Craiglockhart War Hospital in
1917 where he met Wilfred Owen, also recovering from the psychiatric effects of the war. He published
Memoirs of an Infantry Officer, a novel, in 1930.
Wirers
(published in Sassoon, Counter-Attack and Other Poems (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1918), 16-17)
?Pass it along, the wiring party?s going out? ?
And yawning sentries mumble, ?Wirers going out.?
Unravelling; twisting; hammering stakes with muffled thud,
They toil with stealthy haste and anger in their blood.
The Boche sends up a flare. Black forms stand rigid there,
Stock-still like posts; then darkness, and the clumsy ghosts
Stride hither and thither, whispering, tripped by clutching snare
Of snags and tangles.
Ghastly dawn with vaporous coasts
Gleams desolate along the sky, night?s misery ended.
Young Hughes was badly hit; I heard him carried away,
Moaning at every lurch; no doubt he?ll die today.
But we can say the front-line wire?s been safely mended.
Suicide in the Trenches
(published in Sassoon, Counter-Attack and Other Poems (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1918), 31)
I knew a simple soldier boy
Who grinned at life in empty joy,
Slept soundly through the lonesome dark,
And whistled early with the lark.
I winter trenches, cowed and glum,
With crumps and lice and lack of rum,
He put a bullet through his brain.
No one speaks of him again.
You smug-faced crowds with kindling eye
Who cheer when soldier lads march by,
Sneak home and pray you?ll never know
The hell where youth and laughter go.
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Poem 5:
Captain James Griffyth Fairfax (Australia & Britain, 1886-1976, served in Mesopotamian
Campaign)
Fairfax was born in Australia to a wealthy and prominent family, but he moved to England as a teenager.
He attended Oxford, studied English, and published poetry. He befriended the American poet Ezra Pound.
They both were in love with the same woman, but she chose to marry Pound in 1914. Fairfax joined the
Indian Division of the Royal Army Service Corps when the war began and served for five years. In 1922
he married the daughter of an officer in the Royal Navy. After the war he became a member of British
Parliament as a Conservative, a position he held until 1929. He lived his retirement years in the south of
France.
Noon
(published in Fairfax, Mesopotamia: Sonnets and Lyrics at Home and Abroad, 1914-1919 (London: John
Murray, 1919), 17-18)
The clouds are gathered and the wind blows, wet with tears
The River is ruffled grey,
And swept in a curve like a sinister steel blade
Tapering slimly away.
In the hand of Destiny this sword severs our years,
Sunders the light and shade.
Madhij (Yemen).
Dusk
(published in Fairfax, Mesopotamia: Sonnets and Lyrics at Home and Abroad, 1914-1919 (London: John
Murray, 1919), 17-18)
A long lean cloud, like a greyhound,
Chases a fading sun;
The plain turns black, and the wave turns gold,
Then dark, and the day is done,
And the bats swing out in circles,
And the stars wake, one by one.
Falluja (Iraq)
