"""Though Their Bones Crunched, Their Shut Mouths Made No Moan"": Speaking the Corpse in Twentieth Century Anglo -American War Poetry"
Sychterz, Jeffrey Scott
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/81413
Description
Title
"""Though Their Bones Crunched, Their Shut Mouths Made No Moan"": Speaking the Corpse in Twentieth Century Anglo -American War Poetry"
Author(s)
Sychterz, Jeffrey Scott
Issue Date
2005
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Nelson, Cary
Department of Study
English
Discipline
English
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Literature, Comparative
Language
eng
Abstract
"Initially the term war poet was used to label a profusion of amateur British voices patriotically singing their soldiers off to the trenches of France. Although generally dismissed as unrealistic and escapist, popular WWI poetry shows an obsession with death that reflects deep anxieties about the war and the course of modernization. Around 1930 these largely consolatory visions of the apotheosized dead were replaced by a younger generation of ""trench"" poets who opened their voice to the corpse, allowing it to speak its strange truth in an imagistic and onomatopoeic language through them. The WWII poets developed this corpse voice around an absent but symbolically resonant corpse, which reflected an outlook that was more philosophically resigned to warfare even as it was politically astute. American poets of the Vietnam era returned to the stark poetic of the WWI trench poets, but increasingly turned their gaze from the soldier's cadaver to the Vietnamese prostitute's corpse-like body, which they used as an expansive symbol of America's imperial policies in Southeast Asia."
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