sassoon :: essays research papers

In the early 20th century, many poets began to commence a broad literary movement which was a reaction against the love story of the 19th century, the purpose of which was to depict more(prenominal) realistic situations, rather than the more sentimental aspects of the poems that preceded them. The instals of World War I, which lasted from 1914 to 1918, had a great effect on this modernist movement. In Siegfried Sassoons A Working Party, we can stupefy to see this modern realism through the determination of hard, dry, precise description, traditionally unpoetic language, and the juxtaposition of the personal and universal war experience, as an expression of the poets views of the harshness and horror of a world war.In contrast to Romanticism, which was often characterized by the use of vague language, Sassoon makes use of exact, descriptive verbs in the foremost stanza, which describes the unnamed soldier walking through the trench. However, Sassoon never uses a give voice a s vague as walking he employs verbs such as blundered, sliding, poising, groping, tripped, and lurched. By using these exact raillerys, Sassoon is able to make a disputation on the individual level nearly the difficulty of life in the trenches of the war. By using blundered, the poet is suggesting a difficult journey, integrity where perhaps he was having trouble getting footing or keeping his balance. This is further suggested with the use of groping with his boots. The word groping connotes the soldier having no sense of agency in his actions. He does not know where he is going, as if he is completely unaware of what is in front of him symbolically, this represents the ignorance that the individual soldier has about the future of war, and consequently, his own future. By showing us a soldier who is tripping and lurching along the walls of a damp trench, Sassoon is showing us one aspect of the harshness of the war experience on the personal level.In addition to his use of exac t verbs, Sassoon also employs deliberately unpoetic language as a means of de-romanticizing the war experience. This is seen in the phrase, Often splashing/wretchedly where the seepage was ankle-deep. This is clearly not a poetic-sounding line by the standards of ordinal century poetry a Romantic poet would not have seen the word sludge as worthy of being used in a poem. It simply is not a pleasant image, and the image of a soldier, other idea that was often Romanticized prior to the twentieth century, trodding through disgusting sludge is not a pleasant image either.