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Insensibility
"Insensibility" is a poem written by Wilfred Owen during the First World War which explores the effect of warfare on soldiers, and the long- and short-term psychological effects that it has on them. The poem's title refers to the fact that the soldiers have lost the ability to feel due to the horrors which they faced on the Western Front during the First World War. Owen and the First World War During and after the First World War many combatants and former combatants found their lives and minds permanently altered by the violent, loud and traumatic life of trench warfare. This disorder was called "shell shock" or "neurasthenia". Wilfred Owen was diagnosed with neurasthenia in 1916, within four months of arriving in France, and was briefly invalided home. The "We wise" to whom the poem refers might, as Jon Stallworthy has suggested, be construed as "we poets", to which the Owen scholar Douglas Kerr adds the possibilities "we officers", "we shellshocked neurasthenics" and "we c ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Wilfred Owen
Wilfred Edward Salter Owen MC (18 March 1893 – 4 November 1918) was an English poet and soldier. He was one of the leading poets of the First World War. His war poetry on the horrors of trenches and gas warfare was much influenced by his mentor Siegfried Sassoon and stood in contrast to the public perception of war at the time and to the confidently patriotic verse written by earlier war poets such as Rupert Brooke. Among his best-known works – most of which were published posthumously – are " Dulce et Decorum est", " Insensibility", " Anthem for Doomed Youth", "Futility", " Spring Offensive" and " Strange Meeting". Owen was killed in action on 4 November 1918, a week before the war's end, at the age of 25. Early life Owen was born on 18 March 1893 at Plas Wilmot, a house in Weston Lane, near Oswestry in Shropshire. He was the eldest of Thomas and (Harriett) Susan Owen (''née'' Shaw)'s four children; his siblings were Mary Millard, (William) Harold ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
World War I
World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was List of wars and anthropogenic disasters by death toll, one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fighting occurring throughout Europe, the Middle East, Africa, the Pacific Ocean, Pacific, and parts of Asia. An estimated 9 million soldiers were killed in combat, plus another 23 million wounded, while 5 million civilians died as a result of military action, hunger, and disease. Millions more died in Genocides in history (World War I through World War II), genocides within the Ottoman Empire and in the Spanish flu, 1918 influenza pandemic, which was exacerbated by the movement of combatants during the war. Prior to 1914, the European great powers were divided between the Triple Entente (comprising French Third Republic, France, Russia, and British Empire, Britain) and the Triple A ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shell Shock
Shell shock is a term coined in World War I by the British psychologist Charles Samuel Myers to describe the type of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) many soldiers were afflicted with during the war (before PTSD was termed). It is a reaction to the intensity of the bombardment and fighting that produced a helplessness appearing variously as panic and being scared, flight, or an inability to reason, sleep, walk or talk. During the war, the concept of shell shock was ill-defined. Cases of "shell shock" could be interpreted as either a physical or psychological injury, or as a lack of moral fibre. The term ''shell shock'' is still used by the United States’ Department of Veterans Affairs to describe certain parts of PTSD, but mostly it has entered into memory, and it is often identified as the signature injury of the war. In World War II and thereafter, diagnosis of "shell shock" was replaced by that of combat stress reaction, a similar but not identical response to t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Neurasthenia
Neurasthenia (from the Ancient Greek νεῦρον ''neuron'' "nerve" and ἀσθενής ''asthenés'' "weak") is a term that was first used at least as early as 1829 for a mechanical weakness of the nerves and became a major diagnosis in North America during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries after neurologist George Miller Beard reintroduced the concept in 1869. As a psychopathological term, the first to publish on neurasthenia was Michigan alienist E. H. Van Deusen of the Kalamazoo asylum in 1869, followed a few months later by New York neurologist George Beard, also in 1869, to denote a condition with symptoms of fatigue, anxiety, headache, heart palpitations, high blood pressure, neuralgia, and depressed mood. Van Deusen associated the condition with farm wives made sick by isolation and a lack of engaging activity, while Beard connected the condition to busy society women and overworked businessmen. Neurasthenia was a diagnosis in the World Health Organiz ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jon Stallworthy
Jon Howie Stallworthy, (18 January 1935 – 19 November 2014) was a British literary critic and poet. He was Professor of English at the University of Oxford from 1992 to 2000, and Professor Emeritus in retirement. He was also a Fellow of Wolfson College, Oxford, from 1986, where he was twice acting president. From 1977 to 1986, he was the John Wendell Anderson Professor of English at Cornell University. Biography Stallworthy was born in London. His parents, Sir John Stallworthy and Margaret Stallworthy, were from New Zealand and moved to England in 1934. Stallworthy started writing poems when he was only seven years old. He was educated at the Dragon School, Rugby School and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he won the Newdigate prize. His works include seven volumes of poetry, and biographies of Wilfred Owen and Louis MacNeice. He edited several anthologies and is particularly known for his work on war poetry. While researching the local history of New Zealand St ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Douglas Kerr
Douglas Kerr is a British writer and academic who is best known for his work on Arthur Conan Doyle and George Orwell. Life and works Kerr was born in 1951 in Broughty Ferry, Dundee. Kerr went to school in Scotland, where he started reading Conan Doyle and never stopped. He went on to read English at Trinity College, Cambridge in 1969 before completing his PhD in comparative literature at Warwick University in 1978. In 1979, Kerr travelled to Hong Kong, where he had obtained an appointment as a lecturer in the Department of English Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Hong Kong. Over the next 38 years, he advanced his academic career in Hong Kong, appointed associate professor and head of the English Department in 1996, associate Dean of the Faculty of Arts in 2002, Professor of English in 2006 and Dean of the Faculty of Arts in 2014. Apart from his usual academic responsibilities, Kerr's publication record was prolific, and includes around 110 papers, ar ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Modern Language Review
''Modern Language Review'' is the journal of the Modern Humanities Research Association (MHRA MHRA may refer to: Organisations * Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency, UK * Michigan Hot Rod Association, US * Modern Humanities Research Association, UK ** ''MHRA Style Guide'', an academic style guide Other uses * Men's human r ...). It is one of the oldest journals in the field of modern languages. Founded in 1905, it has published more than 3,000 articles and 20,000 book reviews. ''Modern Language Review'' is published four times a year (in January, April, July and October). All articles are in English and their range covers the following fields: * English (including United States and the Commonwealth) * French (including Francophone Africa and Canada) * Germanic (including Dutch and Scandinavian) * Hispanic (including Latin-American, Portuguese, Catalan, and Galician) * Italian * Slavonic and East European Studies * General Studies (including linguistics, comparat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mental Cases
"Mental Cases" is one of Wilfred Owen's more graphic poems. It describes war-torn men suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, otherwise known as shell shock. Owen based the poem on his experience of Craiglockhart Military Hospital, near Edinburgh, where he was invalided in the summer of 1917 with neurasthenia, and became the patient of Dr A.J. Brock. Using imagery of death and violence, Owen presents a chilling portrait of men haunted by their experiences. Short analysis The poem adopts a questioning tone initially, with the speaker asking “Who are these? Why sit they here in twilight?” Owen uses this to present the men almost as strange carnival exhibits to be inspected or wondered at, emphasised by the base pronoun "these". They are depicted as grizzly, fascinating creatures, which seem "hellish" to the speaker. The second stanza goes on to depict memory as a cruel monster which tortures their minds, forcing them to relive the "Carnage incomparable" they witne ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Siegfried Sassoon
Siegfried Loraine Sassoon (8 September 1886 – 1 September 1967) was an English war poet, writer, and soldier. Decorated for bravery on the Western Front, he became one of the leading poets of the First World War. His poetry both described the horrors of the trenches and satirised the patriotic pretensions of those who, in Sassoon's view, were responsible for a jingoism-fuelled war. Sassoon became a focal point for dissent within the armed forces when he made a lone protest against the continuation of the war in his "Soldier's Declaration" of 1917, culminating in his admission to a military psychiatric hospital; this resulted in his forming a friendship with Wilfred Owen, who was greatly influenced by him. Sassoon later won acclaim for his prose work, notably his three-volume fictionalised autobiography, collectively known as the "Sherston trilogy". Early life Siegfried Sassoon was born to a Jewish father and an Anglo-Catholic mother, and grew up in the neo-gothic mans ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Craiglockhart Hydropathic
Craiglockhart Hydropathic, now a part of Edinburgh Napier University and known as Craiglockhart Campus, is a building with surrounding grounds in Craiglockhart, Edinburgh, Scotland. As part of a large extension programme by the university in the early 2000s the original building and surrounding campus underwent significant restoration and modernisation as a result many of the original interior features of the building are no longer visible. The exterior of the building has been preserved. Origins The estate in which the Hydropathic's building lies was sold in 1773 to Alexander Monro, who was second of three generations to be Professor of Anatomy at the University of Edinburgh. It stayed in the Monro family for more than a hundred years. The Hydropathic and the War Hospital In 1877, the estate became the property of the Craiglockhart Hydropathic Company, who set about building a hydropathic institute. The Hydropathic was built in the Italian style by Architects Peddie & Kin ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
World War I Poems
In its most general sense, the term "world" refers to the totality of entities, to the whole of reality or to everything that is. The nature of the world has been conceptualized differently in different fields. Some conceptions see the world as unique while others talk of a "plurality of worlds". Some treat the world as one simple object while others analyze the world as a complex made up of many parts. In '' scientific cosmology'' the world or universe is commonly defined as " e totality of all space and time; all that is, has been, and will be". '' Theories of modality'', on the other hand, talk of possible worlds as complete and consistent ways how things could have been. '' Phenomenology'', starting from the horizon of co-given objects present in the periphery of every experience, defines the world as the biggest horizon or the "horizon of all horizons". In '' philosophy of mind'', the world is commonly contrasted with the mind as that which is represented by the mind. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Poetry By Wilfred Owen
Poetry (derived from the Greek '' poiesis'', "making"), also called verse, is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and often rhythmic qualities of language − such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre − to evoke meanings in addition to, or in place of, a prosaic ostensible meaning. A poem is a literary composition, written by a poet, using this principle. Poetry has a long and varied history, evolving differentially across the globe. It dates back at least to prehistoric times with hunting poetry in Africa and to panegyric and elegiac court poetry of the empires of the Nile, Niger, and Volta River valleys. Some of the earliest written poetry in Africa occurs among the Pyramid Texts written during the 25th century BCE. The earliest surviving Western Asian epic poetry, the ''Epic of Gilgamesh'', was written in Sumerian. Early poems in the Eurasian continent evolved from folk songs such as the Chinese ''Shijing'', as well as religious hymns (the Sanskrit ''R ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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