English war sonnets of the beginning of the 20th century

VI Республиканская научно-практическая конференция для школьников

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Исследовательская  работа

English war sonnets of the 20th  century

                                                        Терехова Дарина, Харисова Чулпан, 10 класс

Направляющая  организация:

МБОУ «Гимназия № 28», г.Казань

Научный  руководитель:

Учитель I категории  Э.Д. Сибгатуллина

Казань 2016

Content

1. Introduction ........................................................................ 3

2. Main body ............................................................ .............. 5

3. Conclusion ..........................................................................12

4. References ..................................................................... ..13

English war sonnets of the beginning of the 20th century

                Introduction

The meaning of historical and literary development consists in the constant mastering of new ideas about the world, man and the essence of his being. The main driving force of this process is the desire to achieve the ideal world order and ideal person. The whole development of literature is determined precisely by such a creative attitude. In the center of literature there was always a person, his personality. Writers, referring to a person and his role in the world, turn to a variety of genres. One of the genres that embodied the movement of time, the formation and transformation of the personal foundations of the universe, is a sonnet. Therefore, in our opinion, it seems relevant to study sonnets of the early 20th century in terms of reflecting ideas about man and the world, since in literary studies there are relatively few works devoted to the sonnet in modernism.

The subject of the study is the image of a lyrical hero in English sonnets of the early 20th century.

The object of study is the meaningful possibilities of the genre and stanza form of the sonnet in the artistic practice of contemporary poets.

The purpose of this study is to determine the specifics of the artistic concept of the individual in the sonnets of English modernists on the basis of the textual analysis. The following tasks are set for achieving the goal:

1. Consider the evolution of the sonnet as a genre;

2. To determine the reasons for resorting to the sonnet genre at the beginning of the 20th century;

3. Analyze the image of the lyrical hero and the means of its creation in English  sonnets of the early XX century;

4. To characterize the specifics of the genre interactions of the sonnet in the lyric system of modernism.

The aim and objectives of the study are determined by the choice of a comprehensive research methodology. The main research methods were: a descriptive method, a method of functional-semantic analysis, a contextual one, as well as elements of linguo-poetical analysis.

Material of research. The choice of  the texts for analysis is dictated by the goals and tasks set and is determined by the internal logic of the study. We refer to the texts of W.H. Odena, Dylan Thomas, W.B. Yeats.

Theoretical and practical significance of the work. Research materials can be used in literature and English lessons in studying the history and theory of the genre and stanza form of a sonnet.

Main body

A sonnet is a poem in a specific form which originated in Italy; Giacomo Da Lentini is credited with its invention.

The term sonnet is derived from the Italian word sonetto (from Old Provençal sonet a little poem, from son song, from Latin sonus a sound). By the thirteenth century it signified a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure. Conventions associated with the sonnet have evolved over its history. Writers of sonnets are sometimes called "sonneteers", although the term can be used derisively.

The history of the sonnet. Italy is the birthplace of the sonnet. It was there, in 1292, the first book of sonnets "New Life", authored by Dante Alighieri - the great Western European poet of the Middle Ages. This book was a lyrical confession of the poet, consisting of twenty-six sonnets, which he dedicated to his beloved - Beatrice.

The first person of the new era - the Renaissance, is considered to be Francesco Petrarca. It was he who brought the genre of the sonnet to perfection. His poetic confession was the famous "Book of Songs", the work on which Petrarch finished in 1372. This collection included 336 poems, of which 317 are sonnets. All sonnets in the collection would be dedicated to the beautiful Laura.

Sonnet finally formed in Europe only in the sixteenth century. It was at this time that interest in this genre was great in Spain, France and England. Later, three main types of the European sonnet were singled out: Italian, French and English.

A lot of new in the contents of the sonnet introduced William Shakespeare - the great English poet and playwright. He expanded the range of the main themes of the genre and pondered in his sonnets about time and the volatility of the world. Particular attention was paid by the poet to the traditional theme of the sonnet - the theme of love. It was in this feeling that Shakespeare saw the only good power with which the nobility of the soul and everything bright that is happening in this world is connected.

The classical sonnet is characterized by a stable volume (14 lines), a clear division into four stanzas, a strict repeatability of rhymes, a stable rhyme system. In the sonnets the poets talked about love, about the feelings they experienced, and described their experiences and hopes.

The revival of the sonnet in the poetry of the late XIX - first third of the XX century is associated primarily with the evolution of the idea of ​​the individual, actualizing the principles of poetics and architectonics of the genre and stanza form. The antinomical composition-shaped structure of the sonnet in the artistic practice of modernism continues to bear the basic ideological and aesthetic load: it reveals the cultural contradictions of the epoch, denotes the conflict of time, determines the clash of external and internal determinants, moral and psychological, embodied in the image of the individual.

By the end of the 19th century, the sonnet had been adapted into a general-purpose form of great flexibility.This flexibility was extended even further in the 20th century. Among the major poets of the early Modernist period, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay and E. E. Cummings all used the sonnet regularly. William Butler Yeats wrote the major sonnet "Leda and the Swan", which uses half rhymes. Wilfred Owen's sonnet "Anthem for Doomed Youth" is another sonnet of the early 20th century. Spaniard Federico García Lorca also wrote sonnets. W. H. Auden wrote two sonnet sequences and several other sonnets throughout his career, and widened the range of rhyme-schemes used considerably. Auden also wrote one of the first unrhymed sonnets in English, "The Secret Agent" (1928). Robert Lowell wrote five books of unrhymed "American sonnets", including his Pulitzer Prize-winning volume The Dolphin (1973). Half-rhymed, unrhymed, and even unmetrical sonnets have been very popular since 1950; perhaps the best works in the genre are Seamus Heaney's Glanmore Sonnets and Clearances, both of which use half rhymes, and Geoffrey Hill's mid-period sequence "An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England". The 1990s saw something of a formalist revival, however, and several traditional sonnets have been written in the past decade.

Other modern poets, including Don Paterson, Joan Brossa, Paul Muldoon used the form. Wendy Cope's poem "Stress" is a sonnet. Elizabeth Bishop's inverted "Sonnet" was one of her last poems. Ted Berrigan's book, “The Sonnets”, is conventional almost exclusively in the line count. Paul Muldoon often experiments with 14 lines and sonnet rhymes, though without regular sonnet meter. The advent of the New Formalism movement in the United States has also contributed to contemporary interest in the sonnet. This includes the invention of the "word sonnet", which are fourteen line poems, with one word per line. Frequently allusive and imagistic, they can also be irreverent and playful. The Canadian poet Seymour Mayne published a few collections of word sonnets, and is one of the chief innovators of the form. Contemporary word sonnets combine a variation of styles often considered to be mutually exclusive to separate genres, as demonstrated in works such as "An Ode to Mary".

Anthem For Doomed Youth

By Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?

Only the monstrous anger of the guns.

Only the stuttering rifles' rapid rattle

Can patter out their hasty orisons.

No mockeries now for them; no prayers nor bells;

Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,

The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;

And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

What candles may be held to speed them all?

Not in the hands of boys, but in their eyes

Shall shine the holy glimmers of good-byes.

The pallor of girls' brows shall be their pall;

Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,

And each slow dusk a drawing-down of blinds.

"Anthem for Doomed Youth" employs the traditional form of a Petrarchan sonnet, but it uses the rhyme scheme of an English sonnet.

Much of the second half of the poem is dedicated to funeral rituals suffered by those families deeply affected by the First World War. The poem does this by following the sorrow of common soldiers in some of the bloodiest battles, either the battle of the Somme, or the battle of Passchendaele, of the 20th century. Written between September and October 1917, when Owen was a patient at Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh recovering from shell shock, the poem is a lament for young soldiers whose lives were unnecessarily lost in the European War. The poem is also a comment on Owen's rejection of his religion in 1915.While in the hospital, Owen met and became close friends with another poet, Siegfried Sassoon. Owen asked for his assistance in refining his poems' rough drafts. It was Sassoon who named the start of the poem "anthem", and who also substituted "dead", on the original article, for "doomed"; the famous epithet of "patient minds" is also a correction of his. The amended manuscript copy, in both men's handwriting, still exists and may be found at the Wilfred Owen Manuscript Archive on the world wide web. The revision process for the novel was fictionalized by Pat Barker in her novel Regeneration.The poem is among those set in the War Requiem of Benjamin Britten.

During live performances of the song "Paschendale", Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson often recites the first half of the poem.

The title of BBC WW1 drama The Passing Bells derives from the first line of the poem: "What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?"

The third album by British band The Libertines is named Anthems For Doomed Youth, and features a song of the same name.

American composer Stephen Whitehead included an orchestral setting of "Anthem for Doomed Youth" as a movement in his orchestral piece "Three Laments on the Great War" for soloists and orchestra. The piece is scored as a duet for mezzo-soprano and bass/baritone with orchestra.

Peace

by Rupert Brooke

the first of his sonnets in the 1914 sequence

Now, God be thanked Who has matched us1 with His hour,  

And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping,  

With hand made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power,  

To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,  

Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary,  

Leave the sick hearts that honour could not move,  

And half-men, and their dirty songs and dreary,  

And all the little emptiness of love!2

Oh! we, who have known shame, we have found release3 there,

Where there's no ill, no grief, but sleep has mending,

Naught broken save4 this body, lost but breath;  

Nothing to shake the laughing heart's long peace there  

But only agony, and that has ending;  

And the worst friend and enemy is but Death.

All of Brooke's war sonnets appear in both Out in the Dark and Minds at War. Only Out in the Dark has notes on the poem. Minds at War has a good deal of biographical information about Brooke including extracts from his letters.  

Rupert Brooke (1887-1915) is one of the best-known war poets who had written during the First World War. It is the series of five sonnets written by him on the theme of war that mostly account for his fame as a war poet. ‘Peace’ is one of those five sonnets. Like other sonnets, it consists of a total of fourteen lines. In this case, the fourteen lines are divided into two stanzas. The first stanza is made up of eight lines, and is known as an octet, and the second stanza is made up of six lines, and is known as a sestet (you can read more about this in the poem ‘analysis’ section of this article).

In the first stanza, Brooke expresses his thankfulness to God for being born, and subsequently living, at a glorious time in the history of the world – the time of the First World War. He considers this the greatest fortune for his generation. Previously, the youth had been asleep and unaware of all the injustices being practised by their fellow men, but war has awoken them into consciousness, and inspired them to stand up for what is right. To this end, war has given them a purpose in life. Brooke goes on to say that war has made both their hands and their vision keen, both their bodies and their minds sharp and strong, and he compares this to the cleansing effect of a dive in clear water. That war can be purifying is a strange notion, but perhaps it is this differential view of war that makes Brooke such a great poet of war. He does not regard war as a corrupted and wasteful enterprise, but as a rite of passage that every young man needs to experience in his life. Against such young men, he contrasts the old world – the world before 1914, before the start of the First World War. That world was “cold” and “weary” he says, not youthful and energetic like the soldiers of his generation, not warmed by the passion for a rightful fight. The hearts of men of the older generation was “sick”. Here “sick” does not signify physical weakness as much as it does moral degeneration, for the honour that comes with battle could not move those men. Brooke feels that a man who cannot fight for right, who feels no impulse to protest against injustice is not a man at all. He may appear to be human, but in heart and mind he is certainly not so. That is why Brooke labels such people as “half-men”. Rupert’s generation is one of masculine pursuits. Love and women have no place in this value system, since they have no depth and can threaten the purity of men.

In the second stanza, Brooke says that the youth of his generation have felt shame for their previous actions, both mistakes and indifference, but war has given them a sense of relief and freedom from such thoughts. In fact, all the damage that is attributed to war – “ill” and “grief” – is temporary. A good night’s sleep can make it all disappear. The body may be weakened by war, and young men may stop breathing, but in their hearts they shall be happy. They shall laugh with no inhibitions, with no shame. As a result, they will achieve a long-lasting sense of peace. This pace can refer both to mental restfulness, and the peace of death (as the last two lines of the poem hint). Brooke says that since war involves killing one’s opponents who belong to the other side, it can sometimes result in agony, but that agony also comes to an end with death. Brooke calls Death (now personified) both a friend and an enemy of soldiers, since it takes away life, but brings meaning to their lives as well when they die a peaceful death for a just cause.

Conclusion

Thus, it can be concluded that the era of modernism played a large role in the development of the meaningful possibilities of the sonnet, defined the interaction with the culture of the past and the present, involvement in the flow of modern reality. This is what allowed us to see "the desire to delimit the chaos with the help of a sharpened, perfect, crystalline artistic form." in the use of modernist classical form of a sonnet.

References

1. https://poetrysociety.org.uk/

2. http://www.modernpoetry.org.uk/

3. http://www.poetrylibrary.org.uk/

4. http://mastersinenglish.org/poetry/

5. http://www.bl.uk/