The First World War in Poetry. Comparing the Home Front and the Trench Poets

Seminar paper from the year 2018 in the subject History of Europe - Ages of World Wars, grade: 1,0, University of Göttingen, language: English, abstract: This paper focuses on the poetry written about the First World War. It examines the ways, in which the theme of war is presented in poems and how the various battlefields are presented. The paper will also look at the image of soldiers as perceived in the early years of the war and how it changed as the World War progressed. Further, the text highlights the view of twenty-first century poets on post-war memory poems. The selection of poetry in this paper stresses the gap between the perception of the war at the home front and the actual experience on the frontline.

Poetry played a significant role in shaping the view of the war at the home front. Poetry fostered the enthusiasm for war more than pamphlets and articles at the time. Newspapers were filled with patriotic verse celebrating war struggle and encouraging volunteers to join the troops. This paper will analyse the heterogeneity of the stance towards of the war and the contrastive depiction of action taken by nationalist and pacifist poets of the time. To achieve this, the research is divided into three parts. The first one discusses the nationalistic and propagandist narrative represented in the celebrated poems of the time. The second part analyzes the pacifist view taken up by the trench poets at the frontline and the last segment focuses on the post-war poems written long after the war.