WILFRED AND SIEGFRIED’S PROJECTION OF WAR-PHOBIA AND CONFLICT BETWEEN FRONTLINE’S BRUTAL REALITY AND RELIGION AND SPIRITUALISM

In this article I would like to indicate that many poets have written about wars of which they have had no direct experience. However, the poet fighters Siegfried Loraine Sassoon (1886-1967) and Wilfred Edward Salter Owen (1893-1918) have the firsthand experience and actual knowledge of what war can do, both to the body and to the psyche. In the First World War people in the UK considered a part of a spiritual war or even as a holy war. Understandably Owen and Sassoon’s opinions and their succeeding war poems were distinguished among other contemporary poets for being much more realistic, objective and truthful since their concerns were not ethnic, religious, sectarian, and sociopolitical, in fact it was universal and human. As thoughtful individuals and nationality bound citizens Sassoon and Owen were not happy with the religious and the motive of war. The experiences they earned in the frontlines made them realise that an individual’s personal and social life should not be destroyed by the war and any such incident that gets ground of religious callings and promises made for the uncertain and unseen future. They felt that if there is an urge for religion in the world then it should be natural religion, and that must be based on superb metaphysics and respectable epistemology with logical antecedents and ingredients of the concepts related with the divine and sacred elements or form of religion and spiritualism.