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Volume 8, Issue 4 (12-2025)
JSAL 2025, 8(4): 49-67 |
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Delbandi O, Taghavipoor S. (2025). From Pity to Reportage: The Evolving Voice of British War Poets from Wilfred Owen to Keith Douglas in the World Wars [In English]. JSAL. 8(4), 49-67.
URL: http://jsal.ierf.ir/article-1-206-en.html
URL: http://jsal.ierf.ir/article-1-206-en.html
1- Assistant Professor, Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Semnan University, Semnan, Iran , delbandy@semnan.ac.ir
2- M.A. Student of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Semnan University, Semnan, Iran
2- M.A. Student of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages, Semnan University, Semnan, Iran
Abstract: (900 Views)
This study examines the paradigmatic evolution of British war poetry by tracing the aesthetic and ethical transition from Wilfred Owen’s emotionally charged testimonial poetics of the First World War to Keith Douglas’s observational and detached style emerging from the Second World War, thereby revealing a fundamental historical redefinition of the poet’s moral and cultural function in representing modern conflict. Through an interpretive, comparative methodology integrating biographical context with stylistic analysis, the research demonstrates that Owen’s lyrical realism—marked by intense sensory imagery, dissonant pararhyme, and the concept of “the pity of war”—sought to dismantle patriotic illusions and expose the industrialized slaughter of modern warfare. His verse functions as both elegy and ethical protest: the poet bearing witness to dehumanization through visceral language that demands moral response. By contrast, Douglas, writing within a socio-historical context already aware of the Great War’s disillusionment, consciously rejected sentimental rhetoric, developing an “extrospective” poetics grounded in detached observation and moral ambiguity. His concise, imagistic diction transforms the poet from a participant-witness into a clinical observer, reflecting wartime modernity’s desensitized consciousness shaped by mechanized combat and media saturation. The juxtaposition of Owen’s moral immediacy and Douglas’s disciplined reticence highlights a shift from revelation to documentation, from moral instruction to interpretive independence, echoing the twentieth century’s broader epistemological transition from Romantic idealism to empirical realism. Textual evidence from Owen’s “Dulce et Decorum Est,” “Anthem for Doomed Youth,” and “Exposure,” alongside Douglas’s “Vergissmeinnicht” and “How to Kill,” reveals divergent approaches to representing trauma—Owen’s evocation of pity and communal suffering versus Douglas’s unemotional precision and awareness of human fragility within impersonal violence. The study argues that this evolution exemplifies the movement of war poetry from the moral witness tradition to a modern documentary mode, marking a redefinition of poetic ethics in response to collective historical trauma. Ultimately, the transformation from Owen’s compassionate intensity to Douglas’s controlled detachment encapsulates the moral and aesthetic trajectory of twentieth-century British war poetry, wherein the poet transitions from empathetic expositor to analytical recorder, renegotiating the boundaries between art, ethics, and historical testimony.
Type of Study: Research |
Subject:
Discourse Analysis
Received: 2025/09/13 | Accepted: 2025/11/22 | Published: 2025/12/1
Received: 2025/09/13 | Accepted: 2025/11/22 | Published: 2025/12/1
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