第一次世界大戦と戦争詩人 トマス・ハーディからアイザック・ローゼンバーグまで（1）
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概要
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After Germany violated Belgium's neutrality in order to attack France, Britain declared war on August 4, 1914. This war proved to be an unprecedentedly bloody and widespread four-year struggle. The poets responded to the war from various angles and they are roughly divided into two groups: patriotic poets and anti-war poets. After the outbreak of the conflict, Thomas Hardy, 74, joined a literary goup pledged to write for the Allied Cause. In a section of his Moments of Vision (1917) entitled "Poems of War and Patriotism," Hardy dscribes a variety of feelings and attitudes toward the war. In patriotic poems like "Men Who March Away" and "A Call to National Service," he tries to raise morale in a highly heroic tone. In poems on the Belgian destitute, he sympathetically portrays the helpless refugees, attacking Germany's brutal invasion and fanatic expansionism. Hardy, however, in other poems, does show his complex and critical views on the conflict. "England to Germany, 1914," "The Pity of It," and "In Time of Wars and Tumults" are all anti-war poems, imaging the war as a product of the imperialistic and destructive lust of the Powers for dominance and possession. In addition, both "A New Year's Eve in War Time" and "I Met a Man" reveral his deterministic view of the war, emphasizing its inevitability and atrocity. Although his conflicting and irreconcilable views on the struggle irritate and confuse some critics and lead others to hold an unfavorable assessment of the poet, his "unadjusted impressions have values" of their own, as he himself said elsewhere. He partly conforms to the social indoctrination demanded of him (and others) by the turn of circumstances, writing patriotic poems for the so-called "Cause," a war to end wars, but he also freely assumes anti-war attitudes, denouncing the absurdity and lustfulness of an imperialistic war. Consequently, he is able to show us a range of feelings and attitudes closely related to his times.
- 琉球大学法文学部の論文