War Poetry: Analysis and comparison of Sassoon's 'Base Details' and Owen's 'Dulce et Decourm est' - page 1
Keywords: War Poetry Comparison Analysis Seigfried Sassoon Wilfred Owen Base Details Dulce Et Decorum Est
By roshooo on 10/06/2010
Level: GCSE Key Stage 4 (Years 10-11)
Page Number: 1 of 8 pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
In 1914 the Entente Powers took on the Central Powers in a war ironically called ‘The War to End All Wars’. In 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, was assassinated. The assassination was carried out by Gavril Princip, a Bosnian Serb and a group called ‘The Black Hand’. A heated conflict began between Austria-Hungary and Serbia and as the battle continued allies began to assist. Britain, Italy, France, Russia and Serbia took on Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. As the war waged on it became, not a small conflict, but a full-scale world war. War propaganda was suddenly everywhere and this propaganda influence thousands to go and fight for their country. There were three types of poetry that became of this, the first wave stimulated recruitment, and the second wave encouraged patriotism. They used patriotic language to portray war as a duty and an honour. The third wave was the realistic portrayal of war and the writers began telling the people about the harsh side of war and how it was not, in fact, what it was supposed to be. A poem that shows the patriotism people conformed to during the time of the first and second waves of poetry is a poem called ‘Who’s For The Game?’ by Jessie Pope, she tries to recruit men to the army by showing war as a game, ‘Who’ll toe the line for the signal to ‘Go!’. It was presented as a duty, a great experience and even an honour to fight however, this was not the reality. Many men went to war and came back broken and empty but there were still many young men signing up to battle for their country. Many people felt that they should express their views on the war to inform people of what it was like, as opposed to what it was supposed to be like and one of the mediums they used as a platform to express their opinions was through poetry.
To learn more about the First World War, I studied a variety of poems to see what I could find out and to see if they could help me form an opinion on the war. The poems I studied all agreed on the ideas of war; tragedy, hopelessness and inequality, but the ways in which they are written are very different. One poem I studied was called ‘Base Details’ which was written
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