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Lädt ... Up the Line to Death: War Poets, 1914-18von Brian Gardner (Herausgeber)
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Since its publication in 1964, Brian Gardner's Up the Line to Death has established itself as one of the most complete and compelling anthologies of poetry from World War I. Before his death on active service in 1918, Wilfred Owen said, "Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War and the pity of War." This anthology is also concerned with the stark reality of war, but shows how poetry can be used to convey horror and fear, how a form associated with declarations of love can similarly leave a reader feeling disturbed and uncomfortable. 72 poets are represented, of whom 21 died in action. Rudyard Kipling, Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Edmund Blunden, Wilfred Owen, and Thomas Hardy are all here, as well as poets almost entirely forgotten now. From the early exultation to the bitter disillusion, the tragedy of World War I is carefully traced in the words of those who lived through it. Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Maybe I've been spoiled, because my first sustained exposure to war poetry was in Hibberd and Onions' The Winter of the World, a comprehensive collection of First World War poetry which also managed to arrange things with a readable flow and provide unobstructive biographical context. But Gardner's older collection holds, and the uncomfortable truth of war poetry will likely never wane. There are probably many reasons for our continued fascination; Gardner's introduction speculates on some of them, including the immediacy of the lines from poets who didn't know if they would live long enough to write revisions, its own incomprehensibility to us in a peaceful time and our futile attempts to understand such horror, and the admiration for gentle men who, though they despised the war, could find the nobility of man in their war (pg. xx).
Personally, I think it is because, as Gardner writes, "the journey from Laurence Binyon's 'The Fourth of August' to Philip Johnstone's 'High Wood' was a long a terrible one" (pg. xxv) – there was a profound and violent shift in such a condensed period of time, from the happy patriotism of the summer of 1914 to the grey and wearied disillusionment of 1918's armistice. Such a seismic shift is always likely to fascinate us, particularly as one might pinpoint 1914-18 as the years when the Western world's back was broken, its leaping ascendency arrested. Whatever the reason, or whatever the correct hierarchy of the multiple reasons, one cannot help but read poetry of such grief and pain and disillusionment and vow never to forget, never to "misremember what once they learnt with pain" (Edward Shanks, 'The Old Soldiers', pg. 16). One reads the flawless 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and vows never to repeat the 'old Lie' that Wilfred Owen died to tell us about, just a week shy of the armistice. ( )