We didn’t get to discuss further the war poetry in Chapter 4 and put it into conversation with the war poems we read earlier in the semester. If it is your turn to write a blog post for our next class, you might focus on one aspect of this agenda that we would have discussed in class on 2/15. Remember that posts are due by Sunday night so that everyone has a chance to read them and comment by 3:00pm on Wednesday. You can focus on any poem we have not yet discussed from Chapters 4 or 5. Of course, you can refer to other poems we have already discussed for the sake of comparison. One of our goals for the semester is to make our work cumulative, so that we bring all the reading and discussions we have done with us to each subsequent poem.
*Â Â Â Â *Â Â Â Â *
Read Jeannette Barnes, “Battle-Piece” 108
Q: What war images do you see? What do they tell you about the speaker’s attitude about war? What do they tell you about the poem’s message?
Read Walt Whitman, “Cavalry Crossing a Ford” 109
Q: What war images do you see? What do they tell you about the speaker’s attitude about war? What do they tell you about the poem’s message?
Compare the two. Look at the other war poems we read, and even consider Wilfred Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est” 121-122, Marvin Bell, “The Uniform” 122-123—how do they convey ideas similarly? Differently? What connections can we see among them? What is unique?
