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Experience of War
Index

Anthology:
Writing from the First World War
Poetry:

Rupert Brooke:
War Sonnets (1914)  
Peace
The Soldier
Fragment (1915)

Laurence Binyon (1914)
For the Fallen

Julian Grenfell:
Into Battle

John McCrae:
In Flanders Fields (1915)

Isaac Rosenberg:
Break of Day in the Trenches  
On receiving news of war, 1914
Girl to Soldier on Leave
Louse Hunting

Returning, We Hear Larks
Dead Man's Dump


W.B. Yeats:
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death  

Siegfried Sassoon:
Base Details 
Glory of Women
Does it matter?
Banishment
Survivors

The Hero
The Counter Attack
The Fathers
Repression of War Experience
How to Die
On Passing the New Menin Gate (1928)
To One Who Was With Me in the War (1928)

Wilfred Owen:
Exposure
Spring Offensive
Dulce et Decorum Est
The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
Strange Meeting
The Send-Off
Anthem for Doomed Youth
Greater Love
Disabled
The Letter




Edmund Blunden:
The Midnight Skaters
Premature Rejoicing
Report on Experience
Vlameringhe:Passing the Chateau, July 1917

Edward Thomas:
This is no case of petty right or wrong
As the Team's Head-Brass

Charles Hamilton Sorley:
When you see millions of the mouthless dead..

Robert Graves:
A Dead Boche

Rudyard Kipling:
The Beginings
epitaph
'My Boy Jack'
Mesopotamia
Justice
The Hyaenas
En-dor

Ivor Gurney:
Strange Hells
The Silent One
To His Love
War Books

Jessie Pope:
The Beau Ideal
The Call
War Girls
Socks

John Masefield: August 1914

Charlotte Mew: The Cenotaph

Edgell Rickword: Trench Poets

Philip Johnstone: High Wood

Carl Sandburg: Grass

May Wedderburn Cannan:
Lamplight
Rouen
Love,1916

 

 

Lesson plans:

Lesson 1: the 'meaning' of the Great War

Notes:

The 'myth' of the Great War

Writing from the First World War
Prose/Drama:

extract from The Middle Parts of Fortune (Frederic Manning) (1929)  
chapter 1
(dreams after combat)
chapter 7 (comradeship; feelings towards deserters)
Chapter 10 (writing a love letter for a French girl)
Chapter 16: going over the top (complete chapter)

extract from Goodbye To All That: Robert Graves (1929) (first hearing of shellfire and rifle fire)
extract from Goodbye To All That: Robert Graves (1929)
(return to the trenches after being wounded)
letter, March 1916 (...I always enjoy trenches...)

T E Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia):
The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926)
'a skirmish in the desert...'


Rudyard Kipling:
Mary Postgate

The Gardener

Rebecca West:
extract from Chapter 1: The Return of the Soldier

Julian Grenfell: extracts from diary and letter

R C Sherriff: Journey's End
from Act 2, scene 2

Vera Brittain:
letters - Sept-Oct 1914
letters - Sept 1915

Rupert Brooke:
letter, Nov 1914 (..incessant mechanical slaughter of these modern battles...)

Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (1929):
'..there were many words you could not stand to hear...'

Writing about wars before 1914:

Shakespeare:
Hotspur on 'honour'
Falstaff on 'honour'
Henry V at Harfleur
Henry V at Agincourt

Richard Lovelace: To Lucasta, Going to the Warres (1649) - (the English Civil War)

Sir William Davenant: The Soldier Going to the Field (17th century)

John Scott: The Drum (18th century)

Alfred, Lord Tennyson: The Charge of the Light Brigade
the ending of Maud (1855)

Walt Whitman:
The Wound-Dresser (1865, American Civil War)

Drummer Hodge: Thomas Hardy -(Boer War, 1899)

Joseph Conrad: extracts from Heart of Darkness (1899)

Ball's Bluff - Herman Melville (1861) -(American Civil War)

Rudyard Kipling:
Recessional (1897)
Tommy (1890)

The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna - Charles Wolfe -(Peninsular War, 1809) 

Simonides: Epitaph for the Spartans fallen at Thermopylae -(The Persian Wars, 480 BC)

Writing about the First World War from a later generation:

Regeneration:
from Chapter 9 (Feminization)

Vernon Watkins: The Great War

Philip Larkin: MCMXIV

The Missing of the Somme: Geoff Dyer (1994):
Thiepval and Redan Ridge
(end of book)
The Great War and Photography

Susan Hill: Strange Meeting
..the attack



 

Writing about wars after 1914:

Randall Jarrell:

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner - - (Second World War)
A Lullaby
(Second World War)
Losses (Second World War)

Keith Douglas:
Aristocrats-(Second World War, 1943)
Vergissmeinnicht -(Second World War, 1943)
How to Kill
(Second World War, 1943)
Desert Flowers - Keith Douglas
(Second World War, 1943)

Simplify me when I'm deads(Second World War, 1941)


Carentan O Carentan - Louis Simpson
(Second World War, 1944)

Eavan Boland - Outside History

W H Auden:
September 1, 1939

The Shield of Achilles (1952)

 

Writing in Translation:

Grodek - Georg Trakl (1914)
extract from 'War Music' (1984)

 

All Quiet on the Western Front: Erich Maria Remarque:
'taking cover in the graveyard'

 
 
 
 
       
 

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