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To: AnAmericanMother
I haven't seen that before. Get Siegfried Sassoon's "War Poems." Nightmarish!
49 posted on 05/12/2003 8:58:39 PM PDT by Tax-chick (That's right - you're not from Oklahoma ...)
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To: Tax-chick
I've read most of the World War poets. The thing that troubles me about Sassoon and Wilfred Owen is that they catalog the horror, but never go anywhere with it. Especially Owen sees only the immediate dreadfulness of the war, and it causes him to reject totally the society and ideals of the West - "dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." In Kipling's war poems and short stories, you can see him struggling with the idea of redemption, of good coming out of the war, of ideals surviving the horror. It nearly broke him (look at the photo of Kipling and his wife at the dedication of the British military cemetery at Loos - he served on the War Graves Commission and wrote the inscription on the cenotaph. He looks like a dying man. But he did not die until, IIRC, 1927.)
51 posted on 05/12/2003 9:03:58 PM PDT by AnAmericanMother (. . . there is nothing new under the sun.)
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