#I keep having to put the book down during the Isaac Rosenberg sections because | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

rustchild · 5 months

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I am reading an ARC about WWI war poets and it’s kinda wild how the first three guys are like. 1. Beautiful rich asshole with serious mommy issues who writes two sonnets about how majestic dying for England will be and then dies before the fighting begins from an infected mosquito bite. 2. Batshit insane American who keeps writing about how happy he is to be fighting for the good of France even as his friends bodies are mangled on barbed wire around him. And 3. Dirt-poor Jewish painter who hates the aristocracy too much to get a patron, enlists because he has no money, and then writes about how fucked and stupid everything is until the war kills him

#Literally the first 100 pages of this book are about Rupert Brooke’s rich friends and serious issues with women #and then in the last 10 pages he FINALLY gets to war #before dying in the most anticlimactic way possible #anyway not to be weird about dead men but #I keep having to put the book down during the Isaac Rosenberg sections because #I love him #but you can just watch the cultural shift #from war as nationalistic glory to #oh fuck oh fuck oh fuck #By overlapping these three lives alone #the class difference and how it impacts their perspectives is also Stark #I’m excited for Siegfried Sassoon #And also just. Damn. This shit was so horrifying for absolutely no reason #Makes You Think Huh

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