A Dead Poets' Society : Rupert Brooke's and August Stramm's War Poems

Abstract

Among the millions of casualties of World War I, there were hundreds of poets, some of them quite well known when they enlisted, while others only found – and tragically lost – their literary voices during the war. It is the latter group of poets who are often regarded as ‘War Poets’ proper – War Poets, moreover, whose poems appear to express distinctly anti-war attitudes. Two of the most famous literary casualties of 1915 were Rupert Brooke and August Stramm. This article will discuss some of their war poems and will use these poems to illustrate the enormous formal and thematic range war poetry can, and does, cover. In the process, it will also suggest that recent comparative approaches to British and French World War I poetry, and to the presence or otherwise of an identifiable group of War Poets in national literatures, should be extended so as to include German examples.