Profs & Pints DC: Poets of the First World War

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Profs and Pints DC presents: “Poets of the First World War,” on the lives and legacies of writers whose accounts from the trenches changed how we put warfare into words, with Christopher Hamner, associate professor of history at George Mason University and author of Enduring Battle: American Soldiers in Three Wars, 1776-1945.

The murderous realities of World War I shattered many traditional ideas about the glory, adventure, and heroism of war and left a generation of writers—most combat soldiers themselves—struggling to find ways to capture the horrors of their experiences in prose and verse.

Finding old idioms insufficient to describe the new, mechanized form of carnage that they witnessed, a new generation of poets and writers created a new language for writing about war. Their new vernacular was steeped in realism and irony and often deeply riddled with disillusionment and cynicism, and how they thought and wrote about war would influence writers and readers for the next century.

Learn about these figures and the works they produced at a key juncture of literary and military history with Professor Christopher Hamner, who previously has given fantastic talks on Washington D.C.’s war memorials and on African American involvement in World War II.

To set the stage, he’ll discuss how the First World War unleashed a variety of new battlefield technologies—among them the machine gun, barbed wire, poison gas, high-explosive artillery shells, and tanks—that combined to turn the fields of France and Belgium into industrialized slaughterhouses.

In a talk that combines a history of the fighting on the Western Front with the tools of literary criticism and literary analysis, Dr. Hamner will show how the “War Poets”—Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and others—tried to capture the horrors of the First World War in word form. In doing so, they gave rise to a literary movement reflecting a stark break from traditional ways of writing about conflict.

Tens of millions of troops fought in the muddy trenches of the Western Front, and some four million died there. Millions more came home with wounds, both visible and invisible. Many of the poets discussed in this talk would not come home, but their haunting words would live on to change how we think about war to this day. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Door: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)