Siegfried Sassoon

Cultural and societal identities have been characterised throughout history using a variety of mediums. As illustrated by many authors; such as Roy, Barker or Barnes, the written word, can be among the most powerful form of rhetoric, giving society the “stamp” of identity as chosen by the author. Culture and society can be described as the defining expression of our identity, national or otherwise. Group identity begins with the basic patterning of social cohesion such as inherited knowledge,…

In his autobiography Doing Battle Paul Fussell writes of his personal experiences which also tie in to several themes touched upon by social historians such as George Roeder in The Censored War. Roeder documents how the participation and suffering of African-American soldiers was censored carefully so as not to offend racists. While photographs showing dead American soldiers were a propaganda staple (as long as not too gruesome and not showing faces of the corpses), photos of black American…

accent. The general being a staff officer would himself not go into the battlefield. He would merely politely and cheerfully address his soldiers "as they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack" to meet their cruel and untimely deaths. In this poem Sassoon directs his anger on those most directly responsible for the soldiers’ fate. The germ of this brief but highly effective satire seems to have come from an incident in Sassoon’s journey to Arras in Northern France when his regiment, the 2nd…

Charlotte Mew (1869-1928) is the first selected woman poet in this study. Writing in the last decade of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, Mew’s poetry straddles the fin de siècle and early modernist periods. Thus Victorian and feminist approaches are used in examining her poetry. Mew's poetic voice is an integral link in women's writing from the end of the nineteenth century into the first two decades of the twentieth century in that it enables contemporary…