When words survive war: trauma and the legacy of war poetry across World War I (1914–1918) and the Palestinian experience (1948 onwards)

Abstract

The poetic reactions that are produced as a result of war have always been in the face of suffering, loss, and psychological trauma. In addition to the physical pain, war makes people mute, whereas poetry is used to bring out and provoke those gruesome memories. The present paper is a comparative textual analysis of war poetry in World War I (1914-1918) and the ongoing Palestinian experience (1948 onwards) and how, in both cases, the personal trauma becomes a place of collective memory through poetry. The paper focuses on the works of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, poets in World War I, and also Mahmoud Darwish and Refaat Alareer, Palestinian poets. The thesis identifies the significance of war poetry as an ethical remembrance tradition by comparing World War I poetry to modern Palestinian poetry. The results of this thesis demonstrate that war poetry is not only a document of the psychological torment; it is also a kind of revolt against the prevailing social orders and cultural patterns.