Antiwar Poem
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- Category: English
- Date Submitted: 11/11/2010 01:43 AM
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Q- “Antiwar poetry interrogates statist notion of war and glory” Examine with reference to any two poems in tour syllabus.
Participation in a war and death in combat are regarded as loyalty and glory for those who trigger wars and order soldiers to shed blood for the sake of their nation. However, rather than glorifying the heroic of combat, antiwar works demythologize war by illustrating the debilitating effects of warfare on the individual combatant. Here are two antiwar poems which aim at debunking popular myths about war: Wilfred Owen in his “Dulce et Decorum Est” subverts the illusions about the soldier as romantic hero and glorious battle field through realistic description, and Henry Reed in his “The Naming of Parts” shows the influence of war on naive individuals. They take shapes of different forms but their interrogations are clear: What the warfare which is wrapped in glory and honor really is.
Henry Reed, who is the author of “The Naming of Parts”,which is the first in a sequence entitled “Lessons of the War”, was a war poet in the sense of the first hand experience as he was called up in 1941 as a translator of Japanese and underwent military training. Therefore, without that experience he would not have been able to write the three “Lessons of the War”. The principal theme of “Naming of parts” is recognition of power of military training and the semi-monastic conditions of army life which change the imaginative and creative man into something almost as impersonally destructive as a rifle. The most noticeable thing about “Naming of parts” is the difference between the two speakers’ thoughts. One is talking about a rifle, which is used to kill, whereas the other is talking about the nature and living things. The former is a trainer engaged in the mindless processes of army training, and his tone is dry and factual; the latter is probably a recent draftee for whom the training is just the enervating boredom of routine.
Because of...
Participation in a war and death in combat are regarded as loyalty and glory for those who trigger wars and order soldiers to shed blood for the sake of their nation. However, rather than glorifying the heroic of combat, antiwar works demythologize war by illustrating the debilitating effects of warfare on the individual combatant. Here are two antiwar poems which aim at debunking popular myths about war: Wilfred Owen in his “Dulce et Decorum Est” subverts the illusions about the soldier as romantic hero and glorious battle field through realistic description, and Henry Reed in his “The Naming of Parts” shows the influence of war on naive individuals. They take shapes of different forms but their interrogations are clear: What the warfare which is wrapped in glory and honor really is.
Henry Reed, who is the author of “The Naming of Parts”,which is the first in a sequence entitled “Lessons of the War”, was a war poet in the sense of the first hand experience as he was called up in 1941 as a translator of Japanese and underwent military training. Therefore, without that experience he would not have been able to write the three “Lessons of the War”. The principal theme of “Naming of parts” is recognition of power of military training and the semi-monastic conditions of army life which change the imaginative and creative man into something almost as impersonally destructive as a rifle. The most noticeable thing about “Naming of parts” is the difference between the two speakers’ thoughts. One is talking about a rifle, which is used to kill, whereas the other is talking about the nature and living things. The former is a trainer engaged in the mindless processes of army training, and his tone is dry and factual; the latter is probably a recent draftee for whom the training is just the enervating boredom of routine.
Because of...