Asset Details
Do you wish to reserve the book?
Jessie Pope, Wilfred Owen, and the politics of \pro patria mori\ in World War I poetry
Hey, we have placed the reservation for you!
By the way, why not check out events that you can attend while you pick your title.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Looks like we were not able to place the reservation. Kindly try again later.
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
Jessie Pope, Wilfred Owen, and the politics of \pro patria mori\ in World War I poetry
Do you wish to request the book?
Jessie Pope, Wilfred Owen, and the politics of \pro patria mori\ in World War I poetry
Please be aware that the book you have requested cannot be checked out. If you would like to checkout this book, you can reserve another copy
We have requested the book for you!
Your request is successful and it will be processed during the Library working hours. Please check the status of your request in My Requests.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Looks like we were not able to place your request. Kindly try again later.
Journal Article
Jessie Pope, Wilfred Owen, and the politics of \pro patria mori\ in World War I poetry
2014
Overview
This article undertakes a close comparative reading of the work of two key World War I English poets: Jessie Pope, a then immensely popular Home Front poet–journalist and staunch supporter of the Allied war effort; and Wilfred Owen, a soldier–poet whose verse would evolve from its Romantic-Georgian and pastoral roots to yield some of the most scathing indictments of the war. In focus are the poets' chief compositions, Pope's jingoist ballad, 'The Lads of the Maple Leaf' (1915), and the several drafts of Owen's antiwar trench lyric, 'Dulce Et Decorum Est' (1917–1920). The author argues that although the poems are diametrically opposed – politically and ideologically – they nonetheless share a set of cultural, historical, and literary markers which converge on Horace's ancient slogan in praise of an honourable death in battle, dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. Significantly, the article locates for the first time Pope's forgotten ballad as the most likely catalyst for Owen's famous gas poem. With Pope's poetry as a nexus, the discussion takes Owen's original mock-dedication of 'Dulce Et Decorum Est' to her and other pro-war poets as a point of departure for examining Pope's investment in the tropes and memes of Britain's imperial project, especially in relation to Canada. The aim is to explore Pope's mythopoeic glorification of Canadian troops in light of the non-partisan hellish vision of Owen's warrior poet. Given that Pope's poem establishes at the outset Canadians' submissive loyalty to the British Empire, the article enlists Canadian combatant and non-combatant poetry to illustrate the colonial–imperial traffic of ideas informing the belligerent poetic–aesthetic turn the war provoked in Canada and Britain. The argument thus sheds new light on one of the best-known war poems, whilst bringing Pope's long-neglected agitprop ballad out of the shadows.
