The Futility Of War Poetry By Siegfried Sassoon

The First World War influenced a drastic, revolutionary changes in the poetry of the twentieth century. This transformation is evident from the works of popular war poets, like Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, among others, that the self-satisfied poetry of the recent past needed to be broken and they could not simply write poetry celebrating nature. War poetry captures the physical and emotional, brutal reality of the war, the pain, madness, and degradation of human kind. The finest and the most discussed wars poets like Owen, Thomas, Rosenberg, Sassoon were young and had experienced war up close. Futility was a theme popular among the war poets. The futility of war was felt by war poets due to the conditions of despair and hopelessness created by the war. War poets like Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, whose first-hand experience of war represented the ugly face of war. The younger generation was exposed to the ugly, bitter truth of the war, which they looked at romantically. This assignment is intended to focus on the theme of Futility: the futility of war, of institutions, as well as of human …show more content…
The imagery in this poem moves from that of a young, happy boy to a young depressed soldier who has no hope in life and unable to bear this state of futility and hopelessness, resorts to suicide. What is most disheartening is that even after the young soldier is dead, he will be as easily forgotten as while he was alive. Sassoon further depicts how the common people will never know or feel the loss that soldiers go through where their entire youth is spent in the futility that the war is and all common people would be doing is, cheering by. These contrasts are used by Sassoon to highlight the psychological effects of the war on