Slides for Day 16 in ELIT 46C, Spr 18

1. ELIT 46C
Day 16
THE WAR POETS

2. Business / Participation
Paper 2 is due NEXT Friday at noon on Canvas.
We will talk about it later today.
You will read The Waste Land this weekend.
Please schedule more time for it than you
think you’ll need.
Participation today: Three total points.
◦ Talk once in full group: 1 point.
◦ Say something useful or meaningful in small
group discussion: 2 points.

3. World War I
1914-1918
Germany and Austria (then Turkey and Bulgaria) vs. France, Britain, Russia (and eventually the US,
Italy, and Japan). The geopolitics of it is complicated, though.
Battlefields: mainly France and Belgium.
The “Lost Generation” (in England): almost 800,000 British men dead.
◦ First volunteers and then later, conscription.
Total carnage was almost unimaginable. 8.7 million people.
Technological aspects:
◦ Airplanes
◦ Artillery (the “big guns”): huge shells from great distances away
◦ Chemical warfare: gas (chlorine, mustard gas, etc.)
◦ Improved machine gun
Psychological aspects: shell shock (trauma from bombardment). Basically PTSD.

4. THE ‘WAR POETS’
J.S. Sargent, “Gassed” (1919)

5. “Dulce Et Decorum Est”
Wilfred Owen
1893-1918
Enlisted in 1917.
Shell shock at the Battle of the Somme.
Recovery at hospital in Edinburgh, where he
met Siegfried Sassoon.
Killed in action a week before the war ended.
Why is it “an ecstasy of fumbling”?
What is the relationship between ideology and reality here?
◦ What is the ideology here?
◦ And what is the reality?
How does immediacy vs. distance structure this poem?
How does the poem place you there? Why does it do so?
◦ Second person address.
◦ Vividness of images
◦ Sensory experience
What is the relationship with the poetic speaker and “you”?
◦ “my friend”
◦ Accusatory?
How does this poem address trauma?
◦ things that cannot be forgotten
◦ things that return in dreams.

6. Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
Many people in love with him.
Enlisted in 1914
Published his war poetry to
popular acclaim.
Died in 1915 on a hospital ship
off the coast of Greece.
Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967)
Enlisted in 1914, brave actions on
the Western Front.
But by 1917 refused to return to
duty and published a public letter
to that effect.
Forced hospitalization. Met and
became friends with Wilfred
Owen.
Eventually returned to the front.
Spent post-War life writing.Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)
Son of Lithuanian Jewish
immigrants.
Against the War from the
beginning, but enlisted for
practical reasons in 1915.
Killed on the Western Front in
1918.
May Wedderburn Cannan
(1893-1973)
Intellectual family.
Wrote and published British propaganda
during early part of the War.
Volunteered for a month at a railway
canteen in Rouen 1915.
Worked for MI5 (intelligence service) in
Paris until the end of the war.
Fiancée survived the War, but died of
influenza in 1919.
War Poets you read for today

7. War Poets: Group Work
SEVEN groups.
1. Rupert Brooke, “The Soldier” (2019)
2. Siegfried Sassoon, “They” (2023)
3. Sassoon, “On Passing the New
Menin Gate” (2026)
4. Rosenberg, “Louse Hunting” (2031)
5. Owen, “Anthem for Doomed Youth”
(2034-35)
6. Owen, “Apologia Pro Poemate Meo”
(2035-36)
7. Cannan, “Rouen” (2043-44)
I want you to consider the following questions:
1. Does this poem have an “argument” (a message that it wants to
convince you of)?
If so, what? (Try to be more specific than: “war is bad.”)
2. What are the key images that the poem works with? Why? How
are these images “poetic” or not?
3. What affect/emotion does the poem have? What does it want
you to feel?
4. How does this poem conceive of the relation between poetry
and war?
◦ What is the purpose of this poem in relation to the war? Why write this
poem?
Be prepared to report your answers back to the class.

8. Summer Reading?
Both Siegfried Sassoon and
Wilfred Owen show up as
characters in Pat Barker’s
fictional Regeneration trilogy
(1991-95).
(The third book in the trilogy
won the Booker Prize.)
The novels are about trauma,
psychoanalysis, and
homosexuality against the
backdrop of WWI.

9. Paper 2
DUE FRIDAY, JUNE 8, BY NOON.
EXTENSIONS ARE POSSIBLE, BUT I WILL BE MORE RIGID WITH THEM.
(AND THEY WON’T BE FOR AS LONG.)

10. Thesis Statements
Your thesis statement should:
• Appear toward the end of your intro.
• Answer all of the necessary questions in the
prompt. (They are there to make you have a
thesis.)
• Be specific.
• Correspond to what you say in your body
paragraphs.
• Not be a statement of fact, but a claim that
you are trying to convince your reader of.
A good thesis is not a statement of fact. It is a statement that
you are trying to persuade your reader to believe based on
evidence.
This means that any good thesis statement has to be
something that a reasonable person could disagree with.
BAD thesis: Joyce’s Ulysses is an example of modernism.
BETTER thesis: The modernism of Joyce’s Ulysses resides in its
stream-of-consciousness style of narration, which attempts to
represent the experience of human thought.
EVEN BETTER thesis: Joyce’s Ulysses presents a version of
modernism that is both deeply indebted to the symbolic past
and committed to the representation of the divided
consciousness of early twentieth-century life. In this way,
Joyce’s novel is an attempt to create a style that is
simultaneously old and new.

11. Body Paragraphs
Don’t begin or end a body paragraph with a
quotation.
Before (or after) you write each body
paragraph, decide what ONE point you want to
make in that body paragraph. Stick to that
point.
The first or second sentence of your body paragraph
should be a TOPIC SENTENCE. This tells your reader what
the ONE POINT of the paragraph is.
Example: your paragraph’s point is that the smoke in
“Prufrock” is a critique of everyday life in industrialized
London.
◦ Bad topic sentence: “Eliot writes about smoke.”
◦ Bad topic sentence: “The poem compares smoke to a cat.”
◦ Better topic sentence: “The poem’s multiple stanzas
describing smoke suggest the ubiquity and ordinariness of
pollution as a part of everyday life.”
When you’re done writing your paragraph, go back and
see if the topic sentence accurately captures your
intended point.

12. Using Quotations
How do you cite plays or poetry?
Luckily, there’s a handout on Canvas
(linked in the Paper 2 assignment) that
explains this!
You should not be using quotes to provide
basic plot points to your reader.
Rather, your quotes are where you call
attention to specific aspects of language
that you want to interpret for the reader.
You should never include a quotation that
you do not intend to spend 2-3 sentences
analyzing and interpreting. (This also
means you can’t end a paragraph with a
quote.)
Make sure your quote is long enough to
allow you to do good interpretation.
Note, for example, this close reading and interpretation of a quote from
“Prufrock”:
By the end of the poem, the poetic speaker has dismissed the possibility of living within
a Romantic fantasy world, a world that is full of magic and mystery. Prufrock recognizes
the power of such a fantasy, as he confesses that he has “heard the mermaids, singing”
(124). However, Prufrock recognizes the ephemerality of his encounter with the
mermaids:
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingered in the chambers of the sea
By sea-girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown. (126-131)
Prufrock’s report of his experience is entrancing, filled with imaginative detail (the
mermaids “combing the white hair of the waves”) and vivid color (the “white and black”
water and “red and brown” seaweed). Yet, this vividness is clearly belongs to a dream—
a dream from which he is awakened by the prosaic reality of “human voices.” The visual
fascination of this fantasy is broken by this auditory call back to reality. Even more
distressingly, the poem suggests here that it is not just Prufrock who cannot inhabit this
fantasy, but rather all of us. The first person singular (Prufrock’s “I”) of the penultimate
stanza has, in the last stanza, expanded to a first person plural (“We”) that includes the
reader as well. To those of us who dwell in modernity, the mythical can only be
experienced as escapist fantasy—as a brief respite from the banality of material reality.

13. A brief word about The Waste Land
It’s the most challenging work we will read this
quarter.
You will very quickly feel lost. You may feel like you
are an inadequate reader for this poem. You may feel
angry. This is all normal. (I feel all of this too.)
Eliot demands an almost impossible education for his
ideal reader of this poem: multiple languages
(French, Italian, German, Sanskrit), English literary
history, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu, and pagan
religious mythology, ancient history, etc.
None of us—myself included—has anywhere near
the education to make sense of this poem without
much work and help.
It is fine to question the politics of Eliot’s intellectual
elitism here. But that doesn’t mean you can dismiss
this poem as nonsense. Because it’s not. There is
meaning here. You have to work for it.
“The truth is that very much of the best poetry is
ambiguous in its immediate effect. Even the most
careful and responsive reader must reread and do hard
work before the poem forms itself clearly and
unambiguously in his [sic] mind. An original poem, as
much as a new branch of mathematics, compels the
mind which receives it to grow, and this takes time.”
(I.A. Richards on The Waste Land in 1926;
emphasis added).

14. The Waste Land: How to Start
Think about the poem as a spliced and
fragmented film or a montage—a piecing
together of sections, of images and sounds.
This imaginary film could be a real-life
documentary: there are no heroes or
heroines, and there is no narrator telling
readers what to think or how to feel.
Instead, multiple voices tell their individual
stories. Many of the stories portray a
degenerate or unsavory society; other stories
include Elizabethan England, ancient Greek
mythology, and Buddhist scriptures.
Because the poem is so complex, meaning is
interpreted in many ways; however, many
students of the poem have suggested that,
generally, the poem speaks of the collapse of
Western culture in the aftermath of the war.
The Structure:
An Epigraph and Five Sections
I. In the first section, “The Burial of the Dead,” one of
the speakers is an old Austro-Hungarian noblewoman
reminiscing about the golden days of her youth before
the disasters of World War I.
II. The first part of the second section, “A Game of
Chess,” is set in the boudoir of a fashionable
contemporary Englishwoman.
III. The third part, “The Fire Sermon,” mixes images of
Elizabeth’s England, the Thames and Rhine rivers, and
the legend of the Greek seer Tiresias.
IV. The fourth, “Death by Water,” is a brief portrait of a
drowned Phoenician sea-trader.
V. The fifth, “What the Thunder Said,” combines the
above themes with that of religious peace. These
parts combine to create a meaning that encompasses
all of them.

15. Homework
Read: T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land (2530-2543).
◦ (I also recommend reading the Norton’s intro to
the poem on p. 2529. Can’t hurt.)
◦ Read the footnotes.
◦ Don’t give up.
There’s always a Discussion Post.
Start thinking about Paper 2.
Participation today: Three total points.
◦ Talk once in full group: 1 point.
◦ Say something useful or meaningful in small
group discussion: 2 points.