Keywords
Edward Thomas; Georgian poetry; World War I poetry; modernism
Abstract
The manifestos of various modern poetry movements attest to the primacy of vision in modernist aesthetics and a belief that the image could convey the stark truth of the modern condition. The development of photography and the rise of Imagism led to a faith in the documentary veracity of the image and to a consequent distrust of lyricism. High moderns, like Pound, offered the precision and clarity of Imagism as a corrective to the verbosity and sentimentality of Victorian poetry. They associated the aural effects of conventional lyric forms with antiquated, inexcusably optimistic sentiments that were contrary to modern experience. However, while Pound was breaking the pentameter and Stein was disparaging the sonnet, other poets argued for the continuing value of traditional lyric forms by adapting those forms to their modernist purposes. The British war poets Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, and Edward Thomas recognized that sound, in addition to sight, was a key aspect of the modern experience and of war. In their works, the war’s damaging effects manifest themselves most clearly through the aural disruption of the poetic forms. Owen’s pararhymes famously register the dissonant effect of the war on the officers and soldiers, the society, and even on poetic form itself. Sassoon’s reliance on more colloquial rhythms, exact rhymes, and ballad stanzas enhances by contrast his satiric critique of the war. Thomas demonstrates how the sounds of war invade his pastoral English landscapes through his use of displaced rhymes, ghostly refrains, and incongruous alliteration linking apparently contradictory elements. Yet, while the poetry of Owen and Sassoon became increasingly radical and anti-war as the war progressed, Thomas’s poetry became more Georgian and more conservative. In his early poems, like “The Owl” and “The Green Roads,” nature cannot offer the speakers an escape from war because war has already affected the natural world. In contrast, his later poems, like “The Trumpet,” present a harmonious relationship between sound, form, and landscape.
Date Created
February 2016
STARS Citation
Edford, Rachel, "Modern sound and Georgian sense in Edward Thomas’s war poetry" (2016). EGS Content. 249.
https://stars.library.ucf.edu/egs_content/249
https://works.bepress.com/rachel-edford/8/download/
Notes
https://web.archive.org/web/20160104183726/http://www.thelouisvilleconference.com/program_2016.php