Rhetoric of cultural memory on the onslaught of global war: a selective study of Siegfried Sassoon's world war I poetry

Abstract EN

The first world war is not one scary myth in history which brought everything into cynicism, as much as a thawing “modernized experience” culminating into an intensified “literary” war.

in the world of poetics, nonetheless, modernism’s critics had often relegated WWI poets as paradoxically delinquent victims of war, considering their coeval tendency a way to shake human faith at the very sublime valorization of western civilization and culture.

from an austere counterpoint, the paper endeavours to resurrect the aesthetic potency of great war poetry by stressing mainly on living metaphors of death and trauma as dexterously employed by the visionary leading poet-Siegfried Sassoon.

substantially, sassoon’s reverberating imageries of war trauma and apocalypse are showcased as both; eloquent stylistic devices as well as a true vignette of existence that helps to commemorate the stone-dead scenes of brutality so far stifled in British historical memory.