Who is this poet?

[atreides]

It is someone we studied in highschool that I quite enjoyed, but dont remember his name so am having trouble looking him up.

He was a war poet, and died two weeks before the end of world war 2.

One of his poems was titled Futility I think.

[Isagel]

I think the poet you are searching for is Wilfred Owen (1893-1918). There is quite alot of information about him, even a website- just google him. I read his poetry a long time ago in school, and was fascinated with the absence of war glory themes, that where so common in this age. In his poems the war is filled with mud and dead youth. I now there is a poem about him, by one of his friends, but I can´t remember who wrote it. I´ll see if I can find it for you in my books at home. It is very good.

I think this might be the poem you are looking for:
Futility


Move him into the sun--
Gently its touch awoke him once,
At home, whispering of fields unsown.
Always it awoke him, even in France,
Until this morning and this snow.
If anything might rouse him now
The kind old sun will know.


Think how it wakes the seeds--
Woke, once, the clays of a cold star.
Are limbs so dear-achieved, are sides
Full-nerved,--still warm,--too hard to stir?
Was it for this the clay grew tall?
--O what made fatuous sunbeams toil
To break earth's sleep at all?

[atreides]

Yes thats him! for some reason whenever I tried to think of his name, I always thought of William Wordworth. Must be the "W".

*Hands Isagel a gummy bear*

Thanks

[atreides]

Oh yes, I seem to recall something else about that poem. Didnt Owen die before he finished that poem, and his close friend wrote the last two lines? I always thought those two lines didnt fit with the rest of the flow of the poem. I will look him up tomorrow but for now its 6 am and I should go to bed, lol :P

[emily655321]

Here ya go: http://www.hcu.ox.ac.uk/jtap/warpoems.htm

Yeah, we read a couple of his in school. It was the first anti-war poetry I'd read from that era. "Dulce et Decorum Est" just floored me. (Possibly one of the most poignant titles ever.)

I recall he had a tragic death, something like two weeks before Armistice -- or after Armistice was declared, but before the fighting stopped.

[atreides]

Yes, poor bastard

In September, he returned to the front line, where he won the Military Cross for bravery. He was preparing his first collection when, on 4 November, he was killed. The telegram informing his parents of his death arrived on 11 November, the day the signing of the Armistice ended the war. His first collection, introduced by Siegfried Sassoon, appeared two years after his death.

[atiguhya padma]

Owen died whilst attempting to take the Sambre Canal, if I recall correctly. Pat Barker wrote a trilogy which involves Owen and Sassoon meeting whilst convalescing in the asylum at Craiglockhart, Scotland. Sassoon had been admitted to the sanatorium because he threatened to write a letter to Parliament complaining of the injustice of the war. For this, he was deemed to be suffering from mental disorder.

It is an amazing trilogy. The BBC made a film based on the first of these books, entitled Regeneration. One of the most harrowing scenes, is where patients who have lost their ability to speak, due to shell shock and battle fatigue, are given electric shock treatment, in order to get them back to the front. The treatment increases in its intensity, until the patient feels more pain from the treatment, than from the idea of going back to the front. When this threshold is overcome, the patient speaks and is shipped back to France.

[Isagel]

There where similar attempts to cure shell shock in Germany. Shell shock where diagnosed as a kind of hysteria- and therefore a female disorder unfit for men. The cure was healthy male work, outdoors, and no involvment with women or female relatives. The patients where moved from there home area , and put to hard labor. Similar thoughts where common in europe, the ones complaining about the war where seen as hysterical, frail and unmanly - and their opinons where not trustworthy. Now they would probably be diagnosed as suffering from posttraumatic stress. Now we see the pain as a reaction to what the person has seen, then the reaction was more attributed to a certain flaw in character combined with a biogical nervous reaction .