Mark Twain's Poem: The War Prayer

During the early formation of our nation, many great authors were putting their thoughts and feelings down on paper. These early American writers were the foundation upon which the literary culture of America was founded. Among these are the early writings of John Smith, Anne Bradstreet and Thomas Jefferson. Their writings were completed during a time of exploration and colonization characterized by many historical political and cultural transitions, and their literature accurately describes the events of that period. The literary works of these important authors convey the hardships that they experienced in a new land, as well as the evolution of the government and culture.

Nobody likes the war and it is really a difficult topic to write on it. Louisa May Alcott expressed her personal experience with a dying war soldier in such a beautiful way that it extract the sympathy and emotions of the audience and readers. In her excerpt “Hospital Sketches”, she writes about a young, brave and bachelor soldier named John, who participated in the civil war in 1863. She encountered him in an army hospital, while working there as a nurse. He was brought there with the fatal injuries. Using her writer’s experience, she presents an emotional retelling of an story, which advances an argument. She gets her readers emotionally involved in this narrative. By using diction, imagery, selection of details and her rhetorical

William Dean Howells was an advocate of realism in writing; he believed that literary art should reflect the reality of the common man and demonstrate the truth of everyday current issues. He believed in truthful writing and he accepted very little at face value. He practiced this belief in his own writing, and his story called “Editha” is a good example of this. In this ironic tragedy, W.D. Howells shows the truth and nature of war. He uses a combination of metaphoric characters, irony, and the pathos appeal to create an almost grotesque parody of the reality of war. In final analysis, Howells is successful in highlighting the consequences of war and inspiring the audience to question the wisdom of those who advocate armed conflict.

Twain recounted his war experiences for an audience in October of 1877 at a dinner for the Boston Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company. He spoke before the dinner recounting his actual Civil War experience.  Twain said, “I was made Second Lieutenant and Chief Mogul of a company of eleven men, who knew nothing about-war - nor anything, for we had no Captain. My friend, who was 19 years old…and just out of the infant school, was made Orderly Sergeant. His name was Ben Tupper. He had a hard time.” Important from his statement is the confirmation that Twain actually held the exact position of the narrator of his story and also the consistent youth and inexperience of the troops. The theme of inexperience is continued in his story many times over. An example of which can be seen when the narrator describes the daily activities of the men, “afternoons, we rode off here and there in squads a few miles and visited the farmer’s girls and had a youthful good time…” These are not the action of hardened killers. Rather, they are those of innocent and ignorant boys that have the misinterpretation that they are fighting a war. This very innocence could be that which Twain shared with his “narrator” at an actual time in history when he too was playing war with the Marion Rangers.

The people in this church are easily able to give money to pirates, who are known for being crooks and liars, inviting them to stay in their homes as an honor. Thus, Twain shows his disdain for religious beliefs by satirizing their blind faith and gullibility.

In the incredible book, All Quiet on the Western Front written by Erich Maria Remarque, the reader follows Paul Baumer, a young man who enlisted in the war. The reader goes on a journey and watches Paul and his comrades face the sheer brutality of war. In this novel, the author tries to convey the fact that war should not be glorified. Through bombardment, gunfire, and the gruesome images painted by the author, one can really understand what it would have been like to serve on the front lines in the Great War. The sheer brutality of the war can be portrayed through literary devices such as personification, similes, and metaphors.

Drew Gilpin Faust’s This Republic of Suffering: Death and The American Civil War tackles a subject that is not widely written about: the ways of death of the American Civil War generation. She demonstrates how the unprecedented carnage, both military and civilian, caused by the Civil War forever changed American assumptions of death and dying, and how the nation and its people struggled to come to terms with death on an unimaginable scale. The war created a veritable “republic of suffering” and Faust vividly portrays the United States’ ordeal, transformation, and

What they fought for is an analysis of a collection of nearly a thousand personal letters and journals entries written by the soldiers who fought America’s famous Civil War. This book seeks to define the ideology of what the soldiers understood they were fighting for, and their comprehension of the outcome of their service .Although counter arguments agree that most soldiers could not give a solid explanation of why they fought for, nor the real Constitutional issues that were at stake; the thoughts the soldiers recorded show that they fought for more than just masculine identity; they highly valued being at home safe with their loved ones, at any cost. This book gives an inside perception of the Civil War, and a

Twain describes the time of war as “a glad and gracious time,” and the victorious soldiers as “bronzed heroes, welcomed, adored, submerged in golden seas of glory!” His positive description of imperialism represents the common belief that war is a glorious event and a source of pride for the victors. Twain also describes those against the war, but in a negative light: “the half dozen rash spirits that ventured to disapprove of the war and cast a doubt upon its righteousness straightway got such a stern and angry warning...” Twain’s description of anti-imperialists and the treatment they received from others shows how unpopular and seemingly insane their ideas were. Though Twain himself was an anti-imperialist, he describes them in a negative way to gain readers. Most Americans in the early 1900’s were imperialists, and through a positive and prideful description of imperialism at the beginning of his essay, Twain is able to draw in many readers he would have offended if he wrote only of the horrors of imperialism. Twain’s word choice drew in more readers, causing many to now question imperialism. Twain’s word choice describing both pro- and anti-imperialists widens his audience, and his thoughts on the effects of imperialism are seen by more readers. His word choice effectively spreads his message.

Often times war is depicted in a victorious, triumphant manner when in reality war is chaotic; full of destruction and death. In Stephen Crane’s “A Mystery of Heroism” and Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge,” we witness the harsh reality of the war and the common human reaction to the havoc. Fred Collins simply wants water, but the well is on the other side of the battlefield. Peyton Farquhar, a loyal civilian to the South, just wanted to help in the war but instead was hanged for his good-intentioned attempt to destroy the bridge to help the Confederates. Ambrose Bierce and Stephen Crane wrote “An Occurrence At Owl Creek Bridge” and “A Mystery of Heroism” to show the natural human condition in adverse situations.

In “September, 1918”, Amy Lowell shows her readers an interesting and illuminating poem. That war can be an ugly time and the people that experience it often seems to live in a “broken world” (19). To fight an evil, sometimes war is needed, nonetheless it is still costly to the people living through the war. Some in a literal sense, like soldiers fighting in a war, while some in a physical sense by the world that they now see and live in. I find the poem truly interesting though, in how the author shows that even in war we can still hold onto hope for more promising days. Lowell portrays a melancholy mood throughout her poem that makes her readers thinking about war but also the hope of it being over.

“To the Person Sitting in Darkness” is another one of Twain’s works that uses irony to present an argument, therefore allowing an easier way to discuss the argument. However, this work is not presented in a light-hearted fashion. Rather, it uses satire to show extremes in order to force people to consider the problems with imperialism. This essay discusses several world events in which

During the turn of the latter portion of the nineteenth century, many authors wrote literature with an American Realism approach. An approach that gave others an in depth look at conditions happening in the country. Charles W. Chesnutt was one of them. Chesnutt, author of “The Goophered Grapevine”, writes a story that represents the sentiments of that time: the north was in the south, yet the south was resistant. The reason for this invasion was to reconstruct after the Civil War. This story shows the symbolic relationship, through characters, and even with dialect, of the North and the South during the aftermath of the civil war—the

The aftermath of the Civil War shook the nation. A new way of life was beginning for the people of America. A way of life that was beautiful and free to some and absolutely devastating to the rest. The country had changed and nobody did a better job at documenting this change than the authors. The authors used this new world to explore new and unique stories as well as capturing what it was actually like living in the post-Civil War times. This paper will examine post-Civil War Literature and its importance to documenting this period in history.

Since the emergence of written history, many fables regarding war have encompassed a significant portion of prosodic literature. Two of the foremost war poets of the 19th and 20th century—Emily Dickinson and Rupert Brooke—have both written about profound implications of war on society and also upon the human spirit albeit in two very different styles. The book, Catcher in the Rye by J.D Salinger, theorizes through Allie, that Emily Dickinson was indubitably the superior war poet. Furthermore, when we analyze their works as well, we realize the invariable fact that Dickinson’s work delves into war with a much more holistic approach as well. She not only honours the soldiers for their valiant efforts, but also deftly weaves notions of liberty and civilian duty in regards to war as well as compared to Rupert Brooke who carried a romanticized imagery of martyrs within his poetry. In summation, Emily Dickinson is a superior war poet for her incisive analysis of death, and human nature in correspondence to war as compared to the patriotic salvos of Rupert Brooke’s poetry.