World War I and Literary Modernism

Lecture 21
English 1120 -- War in Literature
Professor Timothy H. Wilson
Department of English, University of Ottawa (Winter 2022)

A short introduction to the poetry of the World War I "Soldier Poets" and how they departed from the patriotic themes of the previous century.

Time Codes:
0:00 - Introduction and discussion of Assignment #3 Results
4:00 - Lecture Outline
4:41 - Recapitulation: Ancient, Medieval and Modern approaches to War; Homer, Virgil, Shakespeare and Woolf
10:02 - Timeline of Texts Studied
11:13 - Modernism and English Literary History
14:02 - War Poetry Before World War I
16:26 - Ralph Waldo Emerson "Concord Hymn" (1837) close reading
24:59 - World War I: Trench Warfare, Battle of the Somme compared to Agincourt
32:30 - World War I Poets: Rupert Brooke "The Soldier" (1914) close reading
37:10 - Wilfred Owen "Dulce Et Decorum Est" close reading
42:04 - Siegfried Sassoon "Attack" (1918) close reading

Course Web site – War in Literature: https://sites.google.com/site/unterge...

Professor Wilson's Web site -- The Western Canon: https://sites.google.com/site/unterge...

The powerpoint slides for this lecture can be found here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-krD...

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