WW1 peotry coursework

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Describe and account for the different ways in which poets wrote about the 1914-1918 conflict

We have been asked to describe and account for the different ways in which poets wrote about the 1914-1918 conflict.  I am going to compare 4 different poems of my choice these are ‘Who’s for the game?’ Jessie Pope ‘The Soldier’ Rupert Brooke ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ Wilfred Owen and ‘Does it Matter?’ Seigfried Sassoon. I have chosen these poems to show that there were two different viewpoints on the war and that different people had different opinions about it. I have also chosen these poems because they all express their feelings in different ways.

Jessie Pope wrote the poem ‘Who’s for the Game?’ she did this to try and persuade young men to join the army and making them think that they are weak and scared if they don’t she does this by comparing it sports this makes it sound more like fun and not serious. This make people want to join up because its fun to play sports and they think if they join up they can have fun and play. She refers to not going to the war as ‘[lying] low and [being] out of the fun’ this shows how little she knew about the war, as it was dangerous and millions of people died. Jessie Pope was a female writer and had never been anywhere near the war, it was also written close to the start of the war so she would not know anything about what had been happening over in the trenches inevitably she would have had insufficient information. Wilfred Owen wrote ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ he wrote this originally to Jessie Pope but he could not for legal purposes write it personally to her, although he does write it to ‘my friend’ this is referring to Jessie Pope and her poem. Dulce is about young men going out to the war and an innocent man getting attacked in his trench by gas. He describes the gas killing him as ‘ froth corrupted-lungs’. Owen was a soldier in the war and he had been on the front line so he could see all of what had been happening first hand, he also wrote the poem towards the end of the war so he had seen and heard everything he has written about in his poem. Comparing this to how Jessie Pope thought about the war is a vast difference. Pope’s poem is about trying to get people to join and how great and ‘fun’ it will be and Owen’s poem is about persuading people like Jessie to stop writing these poems to young men and trying to get out how vile the war really is and how it should stop.

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‘ Does It Matter?’ by Seigfried Sassoon is about people who have had to come back from the war with deformities, these are ‘losing your legs’ and ‘losing your sight’ as well as talking about these physical things he talks about ‘ those dreams from the pit’ which most soldiers experienced. He describes each of the mental and physical illnesses not as how they got them, but how people would react to them back at home. Sasson was a soldier in the war he saw everything first hand and despite being quite a famous writer, he wrote poems to ...

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