SIEGFRIED, WILFRED AND THE IMAGES OF ‘BLOOD’, ‘ CORPSE AND HELL’, ‘GHOSTS AND SPIRITS’, AND ‘TRENCH’

For the most part, blood, corpse and hell, ghosts and spirits, and trench are among central constituents of the poetry of war. Indeed, Siegfried Loraine Sassoon (1886-1967) and Wilfred Edward Salter Owen’s (1893-1918) war poetry is not an exception. Without a doubt, many poets have written about wars of which they have had no firsthand experience. Being involved directly in the horrors and pains caused by The First World War, both of them were able to report repetitively the fears and agonies of The Great War. Nonetheless, the above mentioned images are hinted all over their poems. Since, both, the soldier poets, Siegfried and Wilfred were involved directly in the frontlines, they had the direct experience and actual knowledge of what war could do, both to the body and to the psyche. Examining their war poems through applying Freud’s Psychoanalytic Approach proves the fact that there is repetition compulsion on various levels including images like ‘Blood’, ‘Corpse and Hell’, ‘Ghosts and Spirits’, and finally ‘Trench’. As a matter of fact, such kind of repetition occurs, in some occasions, not only in the single poems but through all the poems all together