World War I was a terrible waste of an estimated 9 million young lives. With this loss comes sadness and an inability to understand just why? Two young poets of the day, Rupert Brooks and Wilfred Owen, were victims of this war, but before they died they used their pens to leave a lasting testament to what came before. This article briefly describes how two talented writers came from different worlds to finally meet the same fate.
On November 11, 1918, in Shrewsbury, England, the bells rang to celebrate the armistice and the end of the first world war, happiness rained throughout the county until there was a knock on the door and a telegram was passed, the The smiles on Mr. and Mrs. Owen’s faces sank. as they read how their poet son Wilfred Owen had been killed in the battle at the Sambre Canal. But Wilfred hadn’t even joined the armed forces in April 1915 when Rupert Brooke, another famous war poet, was assassinated, and his worlds of poetry and life couldn’t have been more different before the carnage of “The Great Folly.” “I’ll bring them both. into the world of needless death and slaughter.
Rupert, born in Rugby, England, was a man of good looks and boyish charm that led the Irish poet William Butler Yeats to describe him as “the handsomest man in England”. After winning a scholarship to King’s College, Cambridge, Rupert became an active member of many theater groups and writers’ clubs and soon became a man adored by many, some for his talent and others for good luck. appearance of him. Virginia Wolfe once bragged about skinny dipping. with Rupert and his society was generally much in demand. However, he was a man confused by his sexuality and began to travel throughout parts of the United States and Canada writing travelogues for the Westminster Gazette. On his way back to England via the long route, he settled on an island off Tahiti, where he fathered a daughter with a local woman with whom he was said to have found his most complete emotional relationship, but still his wondrous lust left him. did go ahead. Back in England, he became romantically involved with several notable actresses of the day and when his writings became war poems, he came to the attention of Winston Churchill, who commissioned him into the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve. At the age of 27, Rupert took part in the Royal Navy’s Antwerp Expedition in October 1914, followed by a voyage with the British Mediterranean Expeditionary Force on February 28, 1915, but was bitten by a mosquito and infected. from resulting sepsis resulted in his death. on April 23, 1915. His body was buried in Skyros, Greece, at a site chosen by his friend and writer William Denis Browne, who later wrote about Brooke’s death.
It was in September of this same year, 1915, that Wilfred Owen, then a teacher in continental Europe, visited the war-wounded at a local military hospital and was deeply affected by their stories and their condition. He was only 22 years old when he decided to enlist in the British Army and in a statement in September 1915 he said: “I went out to help these boys, directly directing them to the best of an officer’s ability; indirectly, by looking at their sufferings so that I can speak of them as well as a lawyer can. I have done the former. Owen was sent home wounded in March, 1917, but returned to the front in August, 1918, where he was killed soon after. Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen entered the First World War for their own reasons, but their writings and poetry endure as testimony to their common fear of what was then considered modern warfare.
I cannot claim to be able to write anything as emotionally charged as his individual works, and therefore recommend as a true ending to this piece that you click on the Internet to read the following two poems.
Rupert Brooks-The Soldier.
Wilfred Owen – Dulce et Decorum est (the old lie).
Point of note:
In Westminster Abbey, Poets Corner, is a slate monument commemorating 16 World War I poets, including Rupert Brooks and Wilfred Owen, whose work is also inscribed as follows:
“My subject is the War, and the pity of the War, the Poetry is in the pity”.