Strong Poison

Intro Today I have been challenged to write a blog answering the question that both text and context do exist in literature. WW1 was a bloodbath there's no doubt and such awful things happened to the most innocent of lives, during the times of war however it shone a light on the poets who wrote both anti and pro war poems. Each with a different meaning, from Jessie Pope the women who encouraged young men to risk their lives for their country and honor to Owen Wilfred who’s words reached out to…

The Terrible Beauty of the Forgotten War In The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien’s, use of words to describe his memories of the Vietnam war transform the stories in his novel. O’Brien is able to take images of disturbing horror and turns them into a romanticized vision, that the reader can understand. Because this is a war story, it’s obvious there will be horrible images that O’Brien and his platoon had to experience, but he able to transforms them into beautiful narratives. Throughout the…

Fritz Haber was a German chemist who won the Nobel Prize in 1918 for "improving the standards of agriculture and the well-being of mankind". Yet the same process that landed him the highest honor for saving many lives ended up taking just as many away. He threw himself into the World War I by making bombs out of the love of his country. In the Radiolab Podcast about Haber and "What's Eating America" by Michael Pollard talks about how hard it is to place Haber under the category of good or evil.…

Wilfred Owen’s Disabled is poem of the post-Great War period, when hundreds of young men were -similarly to the protagonist- abandoned to their misery and handicaps in military hospitals. The intentionally vague and indistinguishable character is presented as empty, an indicator of his inability to recover. However, despite his superficial remorse and apathy, we can distinguish an underlying message; Owen portrays the value of an individual in society as both fleeting and unappreciated. He uses…

The use of Chemical Warfare in World War 1 was horrifying as many soldiers would say. Chemical gases were used as a physical weapon as much as a psychological weapon. The first major gas attack happened on January 31, 1915 when over 18,000 tear gas shells rained down on the russian lines but as surprising as it may seem the gas did little to no effect on the russian lines as one soldier said “The results left him disappointed” (Pruszewicz, 2015). Even tho the first gasses weren't that effective…

Introduction Wilfred Owen joined the army in 1915, where he fought on the Western front, experiencing shellshock. Owen developed his war poetry by getting inspiration from Siegfried Sassoon who was a poet himself. (bbc.co.uk) Rupert Brooke was also a soldier who fought In World war 1, but did not experience it fully, due to his death in 1915, when the war was not over at all. Through the poems of Wilfred Owen and Rupert Brooke, form, structural devices, figurative language, and sound devices…

War is one of those things that as much as one tries, one will never fully understand till one has lived the experience. However, Stephen Crane in his novel, The Red Badge of Courage, and Edward C. Judson in his poem, The Attack and Repulse, thoroughly explain the experience of being on the battlefield from two different perspectives. Crane, specifically in Chapter 5, writes about war seen through the eyes of the protagonist, Henry, and Judson writes about his own experience. Though both…

In the poem Disabled, by Wilfred Owen, the character in the poem reminisces on past events and reveals all of the things that he has lost during the war. Disabled is thought to be Owen’s most disturbing and shocking poem when written in the year 1917. He wrote this poem whilst he was spending time in the hospital recuperating after returning from the battlefield and he revised the poem a year later. The theme of loss is portrayed throughout the poem in order to reflect Owen’s own experience of…

First of all, the anthropomorphism of this war-driven horse already indicates a relation to political disturbances. Next, there is also a huge political change occurring during the creation and publication of the Georgics –Battle of Actium and the end of the Roman Republic– and the obvious presence of Octavian throughout the text. Finally, the plague at the end of Book 3 links together the use of anthropomorphism with the political discordance of the period. In Hunter H. Gardner’s journal “Bees,…

Throughout the war, the conditions in the trenches contributed heavily to the negative nature of trench warfare. Source 3.2 outlines just one of these aspects of the conditions in the trenches, mud. Written by Sergeant P Boyd of the allied forces, the source expresses how the mud consumed the soldiers in every aspect of their life, and that it was inescapable. The primary source quotes “I have known those who can face enemy barrage without flinching, who still shiver at the memory of their…