The imagery of landscape in the English poetry of the First World War.

Abstract

The English ‘War Poets’ who took part in the European conflict that shook the world in the second decade of the 20th century, initiated a new kind of poetry which combined the tranquil scenes of the previous tradition with a feeling of despair and intense pain. It is in the descriptions of landscape where this combination is most striking, where the rupture with the past is most evident and where a modern sense of anxiety takes place, exploding in multiple ways. The aim of this paper is to analyze four representative poems of this period and to examine their portrayal of a distorted nature as the instrument to express a feeling of ‘angst’ caused by the war.