What is War Poetry? Discuss its significance in the context of our classroom discussion regarding the content and form of war poetry.
What is War Poetry?
War poetry is a body of verse that takes war as its central subject, responding to its causes, experiences, consequences, and moral implications. It does not merely describe battles; rather, it explores human emotions, psychological trauma, patriotism, disillusionment, suffering, heroism, death, and the loss of innocence produced by war.
While war poetry existed long before the twentieth century (for example, in Homer’s Iliad or medieval chivalric ballads), modern war poetry—particularly First World War poetry—marks a radical shift in both content and form. The unprecedented scale of mechanized warfare forced poets to abandon romantic ideals and adopt realistic, often shocking modes of representation.
“The Soldier” – Rupert Brooke
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“Dulce et Decorum Est” – Wilfred Owen
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“The Hero” – Siegfried Sassoon
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“The Fear” – Wilfrid Wilson Gibson
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“The Target” – Ivor Gurney
Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier”: The Poetry of Idealism
Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” represents the pre-trench, patriotic vision of war. Written in the form of a Petrarchan sonnet, the poem elevates death into a spiritual act.
“If I should die, think only this of me:That there’s some corner of a foreign fieldThat is for ever England.”
The soldier’s body is imagined as sacred soil, and war becomes a means of spreading English values:
“A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware.”
In classroom discussion, this poem is often read as an example of war as imagined rather than experienced. Its smooth rhythm, idealized diction, and absence of violence reflect a romantic nationalism, later challenged by trench poets.
Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”: Shattering the Myth of Glory
Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” stands at the centre of war poetry studies because it directly attacks patriotic propaganda.
The poem opens with an image of physical exhaustion:
“Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags.”
The gas attack scene is one of the most graphic in war poetry:
“Gas! Gas! Quick, boys!—An ecstasy of fumbling.”
Owen’s most powerful condemnation appears at the end:
“The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.”
In class, this poem is discussed for its tension between traditional form and horrifying content. Owen uses poetic beauty not to glorify war, but to expose its cruelty, transforming poetry into a moral protest.
Siegfried Sassoon’s “The Hero”: Irony and Social Hypocrisy
Sassoon’s “The Hero” critiques the false narratives told to civilians, especially grieving mothers.
The poem begins with public praise:
“Jack fell as he’d have wished,” the Mother said,
And folded up the letter that she’d read.
However, the truth is starkly different:
“He’d panicked down the trench that night the mine
Went up at Wicked Corner.”
Sassoon uses irony and understatement to reveal how war stories are manipulated to preserve the illusion of heroism. Classroom discussion highlights how the poem exposes the emotional distance between the front line and the home front, and how truth becomes a casualty of war.
Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s “The Fear”: The Inner Battle
Unlike poems focused on death or patriotism, Gibson’s “The Fear” examines the psychological condition of the soldier.
The speaker confesses the constant presence of fear:
“I am afraid; and fear is more than fear.”
Fear here is not momentary but continuous and consuming, often more terrifying than combat itself. The poem’s plain diction and simple structure reflect the raw, unembellished nature of mental suffering.
In classroom discussions, this poem is important for showing that war poetry also records invisible wounds—anticipation, anxiety, and emotional breakdown.
Ivor Gurney’s “The Target”: Dehumanization and Absurdity
Ivor Gurney’s “The Target” presents modern war as mechanical and impersonal. The soldier becomes an object rather than a hero.
“I am the target for their aim.”
The enemy remains unseen, and death appears arbitrary. Gurney’s restrained tone emphasizes the absurdity of being reduced to a mere object in a vast killing system.
Classroom discussion often connects this poem to the modernist sensibility, where individuality dissolves under industrialized warfare.
What is the tension between message and form in "Dulce et Decorum est" by Wilfred Owen?
1. The Patriotic Message vs. the Poetic Form
The poem’s message is fiercely anti-war: Owen condemns the old patriotic belief that it is noble to die for one’s country—“Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori.” He calls this belief “the old Lie.”
However, the form initially resembles traditional war poetry:
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It uses iambic rhythms
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Regular rhyme schemes
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Structured stanzas
These formal elements were once associated with heroism, order, and honour in poetry. The tension arises because Owen uses this respected, almost classical form to deliver a message that utterly rejects traditional war ideals.
2. Controlled Form vs. Chaotic Content
While the form remains disciplined, the content is brutal and chaotic:
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Soldiers are described as “bent double, like old beggars under sacks”
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The gas attack plunges the poem into panic and horror
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The death scene is grotesque and unforgettable
This contrast creates tension:
Orderly poetic form contains disorderly, traumatic experience.
The form struggles to “contain” the horror, mirroring how language itself fails to justify war.
3. Romantic Language vs. Graphic Reality
Earlier war poetry often used elevated, romantic diction. Owen subverts this tradition by filling a conventional form with:
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Harsh imagery
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Violent verbs (“guttering, choking, drowning”)
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Sensory brutality
Thus, the form evokes expectation, while the message shatters it. Readers expecting noble sacrifice encounter instead physical suffering and moral outrage.
4. Irony as the Central Tension
The final quotation of the Latin motto is delivered ironically. Traditionally a noble aphorism, it becomes:
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A bitter accusation
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A moral indictment of those who glorify war
Here, form preserves the authority of tradition, while message exposes its falsehood—a powerful contradiction at the heart of the poem.
Write a war poem on the Indo-Pak War of 1971 in the style and tone of [War Poet you have studied in this unit]. Reflect on the generated poem while comparing it with the poems you have studied in this unit.
War Poem (in the Style and Tone of Wilfred Owen)
“December on the Eastern Front, 1971”
Bent-backed men moved through the marshland dusk,
Boots swallowed by mud, rifles rusted with rain.
No trumpets here—only the cough of fear
And orders drowned beneath artillery’s groan.
A flare split the sky like a wounded sun;
For a moment, boys became shadows of men,
Faces pale as letters never sent,
Mothers’ names trembling on cracked lips.
Gas was not the killer here—
It was hunger, cold, the waiting,
The slow arithmetic of death
Counted in footsteps toward the wire.
One fell—no anthem rose,
Only blood warming foreign soil.
Tell them at home, if they still speak of glory,
That victory smells of rot and smoke.
Do not teach the young that borders are holy,
Or that dying makes a nation proud.
December remembers what history forgets:
War does not free—it only replaces grief.
Reflection on the Poem (Comparative Analysis)
This poem consciously adopts the style and tone of Wilfred Owen, particularly drawing from “Dulce et Decorum Est” and “Exposure.” Like Owen, the focus is not on battlefield heroics, but on physical exhaustion, psychological dread, and moral disillusionment.
1. Anti-Heroic Representation of Soldiers
Just as Owen describes soldiers as “bent double, like old beggars under sacks,” this poem opens with:
“Bent-backed men moved through the marshland dusk”
The soldier is not heroic but dehumanised by conditions, echoing Owen’s insistence that modern war strips men of dignity rather than granting honour.
2. Shared Themes with War Poetry of the Unit
Across the poems studied—
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Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est”
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Sassoon’s “The Hero”
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Ivor Gurney’s “The Target”
—war is presented as:
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A lie sustained by propaganda
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A space of needless suffering
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A betrayal of youth
This poem mirrors Sassoon’s bitter irony when it says:
“Tell them at home, if they still speak of glory…”
Like Sassoon, the speaker directly addresses those removed from the battlefield, exposing the gulf between lived experience and patriotic narrative.
3. Historical Shift, Same Human Cost
Although the Indo-Pak War of 1971 differs historically from World War I, the poem highlights a crucial insight found throughout war poetry:
Technology, borders, and politics change—human suffering does not.
This aligns with Owen’s belief that war poetry should warn, not glorify. The absence of gas warfare does not lessen horror; instead, hunger, waiting, and cold replace it—similar to Owen’s “Exposure.”
4. Message vs. Form: A Shared Tension
Like Owen’s poems, this poem uses:
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Controlled free verse
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Stark imagery
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Moral urgency
The form remains restrained, while the message is accusatory, reinforcing the central tension seen in “Dulce et Decorum Est.” The final lines directly reject patriotic education, echoing Owen’s attack on the “old Lie.”
Concluding Reflection
Like Owen, this poem does not seek to remember war as history—but as warning.
Works Cited
Blunden, Edmund. War Poets, 1914–18. Oxford University Press, 1930. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/jj.3079075
Silkin, Jon, editor. The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. Penguin Books, 1979.
(Useful for contextual grounding of Owen, Sassoon, and other war poets.)
Fussell, Paul. The Great War and Modern Memory. Oxford University Press, 1975. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/40127021
Hibberd, Dominic. “Wilfred Owen and the Poetry of War.” Critical Quarterly, vol. 19, no. 3, 1977, pp. 35–49. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4296067
Das, Santanu. Touch and Intimacy in First World War Literature. Cambridge University Press, 2005. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1017/CBO9780511483796.
Mahmud, Mohammad Riaz. “The Impact of the First World War on the Poetry of Wilfred Owen.” IIUC Studies, vol. 6, 2009, pp. 45–58. ISSN 1813-7733.
Dong, Yinan. “A Psychoanalytical Approach to Wilfred Owen’s War Poetry.” International Journal of Education and Humanities, vol. 14, no. 1, 2024, pp. 264–269. ISSN 2770-6702, doi:10.54097/vzbkym98.
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