| This dissertation examines the relationship that exists between wartime poetry written by soldiers during WWI and that written by both soldiers and civilians in subsequent conflicts including WWII and the post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The major figures analyzed in this project are the WWI poets, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Brian Turner and Jorie Graham. This comparison is conducted through the presence of a core set of tenets that exists across the poetry examined here: the hero figure, the spheres of war experience, and the changing poetic idiom. War poetry has been written about many times, but this study is attempting to create a dialogue between the work of soldiers and civilians, two groups whose work remains largely sequestered when analyzed. While much of the genre centers on the soldier poets of WWI, this project uses Wittgenstein's theory of family resemblance to illustrate the numerous ways in which the wartime poetry written after WWI by both soldiers and civilians confronts similar issues, but in a different way, bearing a "resemblance" to the core writers and works of the genre. The key becomes allowing new poetry written in a new context to be different rather than forcing it to match the soldier poetry of WWI to qualify as war poetry. The goal is to provide an updated lefinition of war poetry so as to gain a better understanding of how poetry functions as a medium of response during times of crisis---what does it help us understand about how war affects soldiers, civilians, or enemies? War continues into the twenty-first century but the genre is still defined in terms of WWI. By limiting our understanding to only a select group, we fail to grasp how poetry can elucidate the myriad complexities of war and how it affects the world. |
