Literary Analysis Of Amy Lowell's 'September, 1918'

The organization of the poem is interesting. Each line is either an incomplete sentence or it finishes a sentence. The stanzas are each about three or four lines long which contain some arduous words. An example is the word “weir”. Lowell writes, “...the sea lapped/ the raw little match-stick/ mazes of a weir” (ll. 9-11). After research on it, the word means, a fence or enclosure set in a waterway for taking fish (Merriam Webster). This word is important to know because of the imagery it represents. The raw little match-sticks mean that it’s burnt out and so is their love for eachother. The weir is where the rock would be next to. They’d see the fish being trapped. This shows how the speaker the was fish. They were emotionally trapped in the town and the relationship.

‘War is Kind’ is astonishing poem about the victory of the Civil War. The irony of the poem shows how gruesome and awful the war really was. It talked about how maidens love their loves, children lose fathers, and mothers lose their sons, with the sarcastic tone at the end while saying “War is kind.” In the second stanza it states “Little souls who thirst for fight,-these men were born to drill and die.”

The poetry written in World War I was mostly dark and told of the terrible conditions of the war. The poetry shows how the soldiers suffered and struggled through unimaginable conditions. The conditions of the weather and battle were often brutal and uninhabitable; yet the soldiers endured these conditions. Nature was often a slow and painful killer. War is a constant in an ever changing world. It is easy to see that fighting is an almost futile attempt to conquer and prevail. The poetry from the war can express the pain of war in a beautiful manner. Through writing the authors can share the pain of what they experienced at war. The difficulty of war is viewed differently through the eyes of these two narrators, and while one views nature as the true enemy, the other sees the loss of people back home as the hardship.

In the year 1914, Europe began to tear itself apart, man fighting man, neighbor fighting neighbor. In Britain, there were posters everywhere, proclaiming the glory and importance of the fight. Very few stood against this notion, but their voices and words were strong. One of these few was a young man, who had recently returned from the line of duty. This man’s name was Wilfred Owen, and he is now known as one of the most talented British poets to emerge as a response to the so called Great War. Born on the 18th of March in 1893, Owen served on the front lines of World War I and brought back mental scars that would not heal. He served in France and saw horrors that he later spoke of in his poems, which he wrote from August of 1917 to September of 1918. Shortly before the end of the war, which he fought so hard to bring, he was killed in action at the age of twenty five. He left behind him a legacy and a warning for the world to read (“Wilfred Owen.”, Poetry). Wilfred Owen’s service during World War I greatly influenced the imagery and the subject matter of his poems, both of which show the horrors of war.

War has been one of the strongest words in the English dictionary that represented the bravery of the American people. Our nation had been branded by other countries to be the nation that is brave enough to spread our political influences to the peripheral countries, even if military forces is required. The word war brings pride to the American people due to all the international conflicts that our nation had conquered over history. As it is said in our national anthem, “And the rockets’ red glare, the bombs bursting in air, gave proof through the night that our flag was still there…” (Key). The spirit of war revolved around our nation’s history. In contrast, the word war brings great sadness to the ones that have lost a loved one and to the citizens that had been forced out of their will during the military draft that occurred for the duration of the Second World War. Joseph Heller, an American citizen during the mid-1900s, experienced the Second World War at a young age and the postwar situations during his middle-adulthood (Heller). With that being said, Heller’s works are heavily influenced by his life experiences. Through summarization and deconstruction of the text, the school of criticism can highlight the current events that was taking place or took place while the work of literature was being written.

Imagine this! You are a young brilliant child that loves to write poems but, theres a war brought upon you just as you start your next famous peom. What do you do? Well here’ a solution. Have you ever heard of the famous T.S. Eliot? He was an American who moved to Britain in 1914. As told by The Academy of American Poets, Eliot wrote most of Prufrock before he was 22 years old in the years before the start of World War I. At that time, Britain was considered the most modern country in the entire world. Therefore, the poem is set in a huge, but also a sickening city, and its speaker is a very questionable man that looks down on himself, and is also afraid of living. Therefore, he becomes bored with life and has little to do. War, cities, boredom,

“The war to end all wars” was a common phrase used to sardonically describe World War I. There were approximately eleven million deaths of military personnel in the first world war. Most wars were so distressing and emotionally traumatizing that a bulk of the remaining soldiers came back home with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Authors like Wilfred Owen and Kevin Powers took to writing poems to alleviate the memories of the grotesque nature of war. The authors would use imagery, structure, and irony to protest war in their writing.

In the poem ‘War Photographer’, the author Carol Ann Duffy brings out a severe highlight on the destruction and violence of which results from war and how the world does not seem to be concerned about what the war photographers have to witness during the war. The poem starts with an explanation and description of the war photographer standing by himself in the dark room. The photos that he had taken during the war were all organized in order. He thought of every place he had been to, locations were they were absolutely destroyed and demolished, remembering all the deaths of innocent people and soldiers he had to witness. While he carries on with his work, the ironical fact is that he wasn’t terrified during the gunfire and witnessing people loose their lives and at that moment after war, he knows that he is safe and does not have to worry about the ground blowing up beneath his feet and causing mayhem.

The first seven lines of the poem set up the scene of a battle-taking place at dawn as soldiers and tanks line up to fight. The poem initially builds suspense in the beginning lines by showing the natural setting and the advancement of troops, "In the wild purple of the glowing sun" and "Tanks creep and topple forward." In the other half of the poem, darkness approaches as fearful soldiers leave the trenches to go out and fight on the front lines as, “time ticks blank and busy on their wrists.” Images such as these add to the hopelessness of the poem by describing the physical demeanor of the soldiers by indicating that their decisions during this time are out of their control and that they are racing towards death. Each line of the poem builds

“Poetry is when an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found words.” Like movies, novels and music, poems are texts that people use to reflect on their lives and experiences. Poems can have an impact on people’s thinking, not only through the things they might say to their readers, but through the discussions that readers have with each other about poems. I truly agree with this statement and believe that it accurately describes how people can reflect on their lives after reading poems. I chose the genre of war poetry, as it is one of the most successful, it captivates the reader, with either glorious and courageous events or tragedy and loss resulting from war. Today I will be comparing two poems, both relating to war but from different time periods; they are ‘Beach Burial’, by Kenneth Slessor, written In 1944 during the Modern Era, and ‘Charge of the Light Brigade’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson written in 1854 during the Victorian Era.

War impacts a lot of people; it destroys lives, it destroys innocence. Thousands of lives are lost, thousands of innocent people die because of hatred and the needs for power. The poem "Disabled" and the text "The Last Night" are both based on war and the destruction that war causes: losing lives, losing families, losing body parts and losing innocence. "Disabled" and "The Last Night" both convey the impact of war on the young, innocent people. "Disabled" conveys the message of soldiers losing themselves and remembering who they used to be before the war and "The Last Night" tells a sad story about two brothers who have lost their parents and are being taken to the concentration camp. It relays the sadness and the loss of their youth and innocence.

Poetry can seem like a boring topic full of unrelatable information and drawn out cliches. It can also be scary to read poetry with all the big terms like enjambment and consonance. However, when you take a deeper look at poetry and understand the true meaning of the “boring” information, it can be an enjoyable experience. One poet in particular is the master of these deeper meanings and confusing metaphors. Robert Lowell uses a variety of different writing styles and techniques to engage the reader on a amazing poetic journey.

The next stanza builds upon the idea of desensitization, into the idea of a loss of innocence with “The Rainbow comes and goes, And lovely is the Rose,/ The moon doth with delight/Look round her when the heavens are bare, Waters on a starry night/Are beautiful and fair;/The sunshine is a glorious birth;/But yet I know, where’er I go,/That there hath passed away a glory from the earth. In youth there is an excitement

To conclude the poem “War is Kind” By Stephen Crane includes three universal themes commonly seen in many examples of civil war literature. The themes of warfare, war on the home front, and patriotism occur in the poem as well as many other pieces of civil war literature. The overall theme of the poem is how war is cruel and unkind making the poem seem like mockery to those who believe war is

T. S. Eliot’s poem is a long and complex masterpiece that investigates the psychological, emotional and cultural disaster that was associated to the severely traumatic after effects of World War I. The title