Description and Objectives

We will be studying the poets of the Great War (WW1): Wilfred Owen, Rupert Brooke, Robert Graves, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, and Edmund Blunden. Special attention will focus on their various styles and their confrontations with the collisions of war propaganda and reality. Some of the poets we will study include: Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, May Sinclair, W. B. Yeats, Rudyard Kipling, Laurence Binyon, Robert Service, Edward Thomas, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and a host of others.

 

Textbooks

Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology (Oxford World Classics)

Course Requirements

Frequent in-class essays explicating the poems we are studying.

Successful Students

Reading closely and repeatedly the poems before you is a great way of learning to read deeply.