PUBLIC LECTURE: UWA Albany Public Lecture

The Great War saw a radical shift in poetic representations of warfare, of the experience of ordinary men in theatres of war, and of the understandings of heroism, patriotism, and propaganda. Poetry was used as part of the propaganda machine, but also, for the first time, began to be used as a medium of public education by individual poet-soldiers acting independently of the military. Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon were soldier-poets of this kind. In this public lecture the ‘realist’ poetry of WWI is seen against the background of ‘patriotic’ poetry from which is both diverged but also drew upon. The lecture is illustrated with readings of both British and Australian World War I verse.