<p> This essay explores a neglected aspect of Great War literature,
the verse written by women. The essay suggests possible reasons for the
long neglect of the poetry written by women and points to the work yet to
be done in the area,in addition to making some initial critical comment
on the poetry. Before discussing the poems which women wrote about the
Great War experience it was necessary to find them and for that reason
this work is divided into two parts: the poems which form the appendix
and, in an Introduction and two chapters, the first critical appraisal
of this material. </p> <p> The poems, which were found tn popular and literary journals,
in collected works and anthologies, are gathered here and presented for
consideration for the first time. The twenty-nine poems in the appendix
were chosen from among thousands available, a quantity which clearly
provided a wide range of quality. My first consideration in choosing
the poems was to choose those in which the poet matched the content and
the treatment of the content. discarded the clearly sentimental and
the trite and looked for poetic attempts to come to terms with basic
emotions and experiences. Some of the poems of lesser quality or poems
with a few good effects or ideas have been included in the critical commentary.
Other poems have been included in the body of the essay to illustrate themes or attitudes. </p> <p> One of the problems for an anthologist is to decide on the categories
for arranging poems. War anthologies are sometimes printed
alphabetically by author and more often by placing poems with similar
attitudes together. I decided to use the latter method. When the poems
had been selected and arranged so that those which were similar in content
were together it became clear that chronology is also important.
As the war continues the poetry changes. The earliest poems, particularly
those printed in the United States, express anger and seek causes for
war. The later poems express despair and disillusionment. Thus the essay
not only discusses common themes and symbols used by the poets to describe
their experience of the Great War it also shows the development of
attitudes to the war as expressed in poetry. </p> / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/19660 |
| Date | 10 1900 |
| Creators | Bean, Joann |
| Contributors | Berland, Alwyn, None |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
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