Compare the way Jessie Pope (War Girls) and E.A. Mackintosh (Recruiting) write about civilian attitudes to the Great War?

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Lula Teunissen, 11H                07/05/07

Compare the way Jessie Pope (War Girls) and E.A. Mackintosh (Recruiting) write about civilian attitudes to the Great War?

Both Pope and Mackintosh have used wartime propaganda in their poems to get across civilian attitudes about the war. Pope uses phrases very similar to the catchy propaganda that encouraged people to participate in the war effort, for example ‘they’re going to keep their end up’. Lines like these are positive and upbeat and give the poem an assured feeling that civilian attitudes were to pull together and try to get on with the war situation.

In contrast Mackintosh uses an actual propaganda phrase, “Lads you’re wanted” to get his message across. He makes it clear in the first verse that this phrase is propaganda by saying that it is on a poster. Then, throughout the rest of the poem he twists this phrase to make it ironic and give a negative attitude, for example when he says

“Lads you’re wanted! Over there, shiver in the morning dew”.

This is obviously not the sort of image that people who write propaganda would want to project, the use of the word “shiver” suggests vulnerability rather than the attitude of acceptance of duty, shown in ‘War Girls’. By doing this Mackintosh is showing the (at the time) controversial attitude that war is pointless, and people who fight in it are just normal, but brave everyday people. Mackintosh also speaks of the kind of propaganda that Jessie Pope is promoting, “Girls with feathers, vulgar songs – washy verse on England’s need”. However he shows his disdain with words such as “vulgar”, suggesting to the reader that the propaganda attitudes are falsely cheerful, whereas Jessie Pope has none of the cynicism, the attitudes in ‘War Girls’ are simple, positive and determined.

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Nevertheless the two poets do show their different attitudes by using the same technique -– repetition. In ‘War Girls’ Pope repeats the phrase “there’s the girl” whilst Mackintosh uses “lads you’re wanted” throughout ‘Recruiting’. This use of repetition hammers home to the reader the essence of the attitudes in the poems, and also gives a feeling of the attitudes being fixed and unchanging.

Both poems show different attitudes through the action in the poems. Mackintosh uses lines such as

“Leave the harlots still to sing comic songs about the Hun”

to demonstrate opinions other than his own. However ...

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