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In August 1914, Britain went to war in a mood of intense patriotic fervour. The literature produced in the early months of the conflict reflects this mood: confident, idealistic, drawing on classical and chivalric traditions to present war as noble, purifying, and glorious. Understanding this early war literature is essential for two reasons: first, because some of it — particularly Brooke's sonnets — is genuinely accomplished poetry that deserves serious analysis; and second, because the later war poets defined themselves against this tradition. You cannot fully understand Owen's fury or Sassoon's satire without understanding what they were rejecting.
Within Paper 2 (Texts in Shared Contexts), Option 2A, early war literature is the baseline against which the rest of the option is measured. Brooke is a named anchor poet; Jessie Pope is the recipient of Owen's most famous dedication and the archetype of "the certain Poetess" the protest poets attacked. The objectives in play, with their typical weighting for this material:
| Assessment Objective | What it rewards | Relevance to this lesson |
|---|---|---|
| AO1 | Coherent, terminologically precise argument | Distinguishing genuine craft (Brooke) from rhetoric (Pope) without caricature |
| AO2 (dominant here) | Analysis of form, language, structure | The sonnet as a vehicle for ideology; the sporting metaphor as persuasion |
| AO3 | Significance of contexts of production and reception | The 1914 recruitment climate, white feathers, the press, classical inheritance |
| AO4 | Connections across texts | How later poets quote, parody, and reverse the early idealist mode |
| AO5 | Different interpretations | Whether Brooke is "naive," "complicit," or a sincere voice of a real 1914 feeling |
AO2 is dominant for this material because the central interpretative task is to show how patriotic feeling is constructed in language and form — why the Petrarchan sonnet, why the sporting metaphor, why the conditional mood. A weak answer paraphrases the patriotism ("Brooke thinks dying for England is good"); a strong answer anatomises the machinery of persuasion and asks what work each formal choice performs.
| Factor | Detail |
|---|---|
| Voluntary enlistment | In August 1914 alone, approximately 750,000 men volunteered to serve. By January 1915, over one million had enlisted |
| Social pressure | Women handed white feathers (symbols of cowardice) to men not in uniform. Recruitment posters used emotional manipulation ("Daddy, what did YOU do in the Great War?") |
| Press enthusiasm | Newspapers presented the war as a righteous crusade against German militarism and "barbarism" (real and exaggerated) |
| Literary tradition | The dominant literary models for war were classical (Homer, Virgil) and chivalric (Tennyson's "Charge of the Light Brigade"). War was associated with heroism, honour, and sacrifice |
| The "Edwardian summer" | For the privileged classes, the pre-war period seemed a golden age of stability and certainty. The war was initially welcomed by some as an escape from peacetime complacency |
AO3 Insight: The enthusiasm of 1914 was not simply naive. It was shaped by powerful cultural forces — a literary tradition that glorified martial valour, a social structure that valorised duty and sacrifice, and a press that suppressed information about the reality of modern warfare. The early war poets wrote within these constraints, not in ignorance of them.
Brooke is the most famous — and most controversial — of the early war poets. His five war sonnets, published in the collection 1914 and Other Poems, captured the national mood so perfectly that they made him a celebrity. When he died of sepsis (from an infected mosquito bite) on a hospital ship off the Greek island of Skyros in April 1915, on his way to the Gallipoli campaign and before seeing significant combat, he became a national icon — the beautiful young poet who had given his life for England. The manner of his death mattered enormously to his myth: he did not die in the squalor of the trenches but, as it were, en route to glory, his body unmarked by the war's true horrors. Winston Churchill wrote a celebrated obituary in The Times praising him as a symbol of England's youth and sacrifice. Brooke thus became, almost overnight, less a poet than a national symbol — and it is partly against this symbol, as much as against the poems themselves, that the later war poets reacted. Understanding Brooke means understanding how a culture manufactures the figures it needs.
This is Brooke's most anthologised poem and the defining text of early war idealism:
If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England.
| Feature | Analysis |
|---|---|
| Form | Petrarchan sonnet — the form traditionally associated with love poetry. Brooke transfers the language of romantic devotion to patriotic devotion |
| Speaker | First person; addresses an implied listener ("think only this of me"). The tone is calm, assured, almost consoling |
| "If I should die" | The conditional mood softens the reality of death. "If" suggests possibility, not certainty; "should" is polite, almost genteel |
| "some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England" | The dead soldier's body sanctifies the foreign soil, transforming it into English ground. The body becomes a form of imperial expansion — even in death, Englishness claims territory. Note the chiastic balance of "foreign" against "England," resolved in favour of England: the grammar enacts the conquest |
| Imagery of England | The octave imagines a "dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, / Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam, / A body of England's, breathing English air, / Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home." England is personified as mother and maker; the soldier's body is England's body. The imagery is pastoral, idyllic, nostalgic — and crucially generative, not destructive: a list of gifts received, not wounds suffered |
| The sestet's spiritualisation | The closing six lines move from earth to spirit: the dead heart, "all evil shed away, / A pulse in the eternal mind," "Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given." Death becomes a return of England to itself, a frictionless transaction with "no less" lost than gained. The final cadence — "In hearts at peace, under an English heaven" — sanctifies the whole, replacing the Christian heaven with an English one |
| Absence of combat | The poem contains no images of violence, suffering, or the physical reality of war. Death is abstracted, aestheticised, rendered beautiful. There is no enemy, no wound, no fear — an absence that later readers find either consoling or culpable |
Critical Perspective: Brooke's sonnets have been read in very different ways. To contemporaries, they expressed something genuine and deeply felt — a willingness to sacrifice that was widely shared in 1914; Dean Inge read "The Soldier" from the pulpit of St Paul's on Easter Sunday 1915, days before Brooke's death, which cemented its status as quasi-scripture. To later readers, particularly after the Somme, the sonnets seem dangerously naive, complicit in the propaganda that sent men to their deaths. The critic Paul Fussell, in The Great War and Modern Memory, treats Brooke as the type of the literary man whose idealism is untroubled by the facts of modern war. Yet Charles Hamilton Sorley — himself a serving soldier — offered the sharpest contemporary critique, objecting that Brooke had taken too sentimental an attitude, making a private, consoling drama out of a public catastrophe in which, Sorley felt, such sentiment had no place. The lesson for the exam is that "naive" is too blunt a verdict: Brooke's idealism was the authentic idealism of his moment, and its very sincerity is part of what later poets had to dismantle.
Pope was a journalist and versifier (critics hesitate to call her a poet) who wrote recruitment verse for the Daily Mail. Her work is significant less for its literary quality than for its role as a target — Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est" was originally dedicated "To Jessie Pope" (later changed to "To a certain Poetess").
Who's for the game, the biggest that's played, The red crashing game of a fight? Who'll grip and tackle the job unafraid? And who thinks he'd rather sit tight?
| Feature | Analysis |
|---|---|
| Extended metaphor | War as a sporting "game" — rugby or football. This metaphor trivialises violence and appeals to masculine competitiveness |
| Rhetorical questions | The questions are not genuine enquiries but pressuring demands. The implied answer to each is "I will!" |
| Register | Colloquial, chatty, deliberately accessible — written to appeal to a mass audience, not a literary one |
| Binary opposition | Those who fight vs those who "sit tight." The poem constructs a simple moral universe: courage vs cowardice, participation vs passivity |
| Euphemism | "A seat in the stand" for staying at home; "come back with a crutch" for being maimed. The language sanitises the reality of injury and death |
| "Who wants a turn to himself in the show?" | War as entertainment, as spectacle — something to be watched or participated in, like a theatrical "show" |
AO5 Consideration: It is tempting to dismiss Pope's verse as contemptible propaganda, and in literary terms it certainly lacks complexity. But it is worth considering the context: Pope was writing within the dominant cultural assumptions of her time, using language and metaphors that were widely accepted. The question of whether she was cynically manipulative or genuinely patriotic remains open. Her verse is important because it represents the rhetoric that the later war poets set themselves against.
It is worth pausing on why the game metaphor was so culturally potent in 1914–15, because this is the kind of contextual insight that turns a competent AO2 point into a top-band one. Late-Victorian and Edwardian public schools had built an entire moral system around organised games — "the games ethic" — in which cricket and rugby were thought to teach courage, teamwork, fair play, obedience, and the willingness to subordinate the self to the side. Henry Newbolt's enormously popular poem "Vitaï Lampada" (1897), with its refrain "Play up! play up! and play the game!", had already explicitly mapped the cricket field onto the battlefield a generation before. Pope is therefore not inventing a metaphor but drawing on a ready-made cultural reflex: for her readers, to call war "the game" was to summon a whole apparatus of schoolboy virtue. This is why the metaphor is so insidious — it does not argue that war is good; it assumes it, smuggling the conclusion in beneath an image that already carried moral authority. When Owen later wrote of men "Knock-kneed, coughing like hags," he was not only describing a gas attack; he was demolishing the games-field body — fit, upright, playing up — on which Pope's whole rhetoric depended.
AO2/AO3 Link: The point to carry into an essay is that the persuasive force of "Who's for the Game?" is contextual as much as verbal. The poem is effective not because its language is subtle (it is not) but because it plugs into a pre-existing cultural code. Analysing the metaphor without that code is to miss why it could move a nation; analysing the code without the metaphor is to miss the poem. Fusing them is AO2 and AO3 working as one.
| Feature | Analysis |
|---|---|
| Tone | Exuberant, almost ecstatic — war as spiritual experience, a communion with nature and the divine |
| Nature imagery | "The naked earth is warm with spring" — the soldier is presented as part of the natural world, fighting as naturally as a tree grows |
| Influence | Drawing on a Romantic tradition (Wordsworth, Keats) that sees nature as a source of spiritual renewal |
| Absence | Like Brooke, Grenfell wrote before experiencing the worst of the war. He was killed by a shell fragment at Ypres in May 1915 |
| Feature | Analysis |
|---|---|
| Contrast with Brooke | Where Brooke sentimentalises death, Sorley refuses consolation: "Say not soft things as other men have said" |
| Tone | Bleak, unflinching, almost nihilistic — the dead are "mouthless," silenced, beyond comfort |
| "Give them not praise" | A direct rejection of the elegiac tradition that seeks to honour and console. Sorley insists that the dead are simply dead — gone, irretrievable |
| Date | Written in 1915, before the Somme, yet already anticipating the disillusionment of the later war poets. Sorley was killed at the Battle of Loos in October 1915 |
AO3 Significance: Sorley complicates the neat narrative of "early patriotism followed by later disillusionment." His work shows that critical, unflinching responses to the war existed from relatively early on — the shift was not as sudden or uniform as the textbook version suggests.
Set side by side, Grenfell and Sorley — both dead in 1915, both writing before the Somme — demonstrate how varied the early response already was, which is the single most useful corrective you can bring to a "before/after" question.
Grenfell's "Into Battle" pushes the idealism of 1914 to an almost mystical extreme. Its opening — "The naked earth is warm with spring" — fuses the soldier with the renewing natural world, so that fighting becomes as instinctive and life-affirming as the season itself. The poem draws on a Romantic inheritance (the Wordsworthian sense of nature as a moral teacher) to argue that the warrior is most fully alive in battle. Where Brooke aestheticises death, Grenfell aestheticises combat — a subtle but important distinction, and one worth deploying to show that "early war poetry" is not a single attitude but a spectrum.
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