Greek and Roman Antiquity in First World War Poetry Making Connections

Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Charles Sorley all died in the First Word War. They came from diverse social, educational, and cultural backgrounds, but for all of the writers, engagement with Greek and Roman antiquity was decisive in shaping their war poetry. The world views and cultural hinterlands of Brooke and Sorley were framed by the Greek and Latin texts they had studied at school, whereas for Owen, who struggled with Latin, classical texts were a part of his aspirational literary imagination. Rosenberg's education was limited but he encountered some Greek and Roman literature through translations, and through mediations in English literature. The various ways in which the poets engaged with classical literature are analysed in the commentaries, which are designed to be accessible to classicists and to users from other subject areas. The extensive range of connections made by the poets and by subsequent readers is explained in the Introduction to the volume. The commentaries illuminate relationships between the poems and attitudes to the war at the time, in the immediate post-war years, and subsequently. They also probe how individual poems reveal various facets of the poetry of unease, the poetry of survival, and the poetics of war and ecology.

1 - Rupert Brooke (1887-1915)
2 - Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895-1915)
3 - Isaac Rosenberg (1890-1918)
4 - Wilfred Owen (1893-1918)

Lorna Hardwick is Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at the Open University and Honorary Research Associate at the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama, Oxford. She is the Director of the Open University Classical Receptions in Drama and Poetry in English 1970-2005 digital project and the joint Series Editor of the OUP series Classical Presences and Classical Interventions. She convenes the international research network Classics and Poetry Now (CAPN) and was a founding convener of the Classical Reception Studies Network (CRSN). Hardwick was the founding editor of the Classical Receptions journal and the Practitioners' Voices in Classical Reception Studies. Stephen Harrison is Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Oxford, Senior Research Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford and Extraordinary Professor at the University of Stellenbosch. He has written extensively on Latin literature and its reception, including neo-Latin poetry, and has been a visiting professor in France, Italy, Norway, Denmark, Israel, the US and New Zealand. Elizabeth Vandiver is the Clement Biddle Penrose Professor of Latin and Classics, Emerita, at Whitman College. She also held visiting professorships at Northwestern University and at the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome. She has published widely on classical receptions in English literature of the 1910s and 1920s, especially in First World War poetry and in early Modernism.