참전 시인 그레이브즈(Robert Graves)의 전쟁시 읽기

A Reading of the War Poet, Robert Graves’s War Poetry

This paper aims to explore and depict Robert Graves’s war poetry of World War I, which he used to condemn the falsehoods and propaganda that led millions of young European soldiers to their deaths. In 1909 Graves was sent to Charterhouse and he left the school at the end of July 1914. Two weeks later he joined the Royal Welch Fusiliers and moved to the front line like the Battle of Loos and Somme in France as an infantry officer. At first, Graves was gallant and brave facing the enemy in battles like S. Sassoon and W. Owen, but he soon came to recognize that it was being unnecessarily prolonged as the Great War continued. Graves’s attitude towards the war became increasingly negative after many assaults and killings in the battles such as the everlasting trench war at Mamets Wood. After the Great War, Graves and Sassoon survived and they continuously demonstrated the unheroic war from the perspective of someone who was traumatized by terrible scenes and horrors of it. The analysis area of my article is focused on the R. Graves’s early war poems in Fairies and Fusiliers. I also demonstrates that the war poet, R. Graves described ironically the horror, disgust, anger, irony, and satire of the war and at the same time the futility and hypocrisy through his anti-war poetry although he was still a war poet.