Each of these men obviously felt he had something to say about the war. Each chose to express those thoughts as a poem. Why? If a writer has something to say, why express those thoughts in poetry, rather than in a novel, a short story, a non-fiction essay or book, or a play?
John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” as the note tells you, was probably the most re-printed poem of the war. The poem itself became so well known that the phrase Flanders fields or fields of Flanders in the popular imagination (especially in the United States) became shorthand for the western front — even for the war itself, although the region called Flanders comprised only one portion of the front, which itself was only one front in a war that consumed most of Europe. What made this poem affect the popular imagination so strongly?
Rupert Brooke was already famous — and well-connected, as I will explain in class — before the war. In fact, he was something like a literary rock star: by the time he was twenty-five he was already considered the next great poet of a country that took its poetry seriously. In death, he became a “young Apollo, golden-haired,” the symbol of heroic English youth and the nation’s sacrifice. Consider the three 1914 sonnets you are reading. What makes these poems both effective and affecting?
Thomas was a slightly older man (in his 30s) than the others, and one critic has argued that his verse is more “mature.” Where do you see the effects of Thomas’s maturity?
William Butler Yeats is generally considered the greatest poet of his era, and even of the entire 20th century, as well as a national hero of Ireland. (From 1976-1993, he was on the Irish £20 note; Ireland has since switched to the Euro.) Yeats was inspired to write “An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” when Major Robert Gregory, who was the son of his patron and colleague Lady Augusta Gregory and who was one of the greatest cricket bowlers in Irish history, was killed in combat. (Gregory died in a friendly fire incident, when an Italian pilot shot him down by mistake. Italy and Great Britain were allies.) How convincingly does Yeats convey the psychology of a pilot in those days, when mortality rates for pilots were astronomical? Also, consider the question of whether this poem is more a war poem, a political poem, or something else.
The essay “Foreign Field, English Heaven: Rupert Brooke Emerges Victorious in ‘The Soldier’” is an excellent model of what is called an explication — which literally mean an unfolding — or close reading of a poem. It painstakingly advances through the poem, giving attention both to its themes and how Brooke conveys them to the reader. Do you find the essay’s arguments persuasive? What, to you, is the most surprising or enlightening point the essay makes? Do you now see this poem the way the author of the essay does?