Exploring Naturalistic Qualities in War Poetry: Language and its Use in English and Persian Literature, with a Focus on the Select Poetry of Qeysar Aminpour and Wilfred Owen

Abstract

Through using different vehicles and implements, poets and authors in the School of Naturalism could reflect life’s events and its circumstances in detail. Among the most significant subjects and topics propounded in this school are war, poverty, prostitution, bloodshed, and murder. Naturalists are poets and authors who reveal life as it is and insist on the ugly faces and aspects of life to indicate how human beings are useless creatures who are surrendered to genetics and the environment. This study uses naturalistic qualities and common themes found in War Poetry to compare the poetry of two renowned poets, Qeysar Aminpour from Iran and Wilfred Owen from England. For this, “A Poem for the War” composed between 1979 and 1984 by Aminpour and “Dulce et Decorum Est” (1920) by Owen are selected among others. The major qualities examined in this article are as follows: the descriptive details of war and its circumstances; the use of simple and colloquial language; cacophony, and harsh and tough language; and the picture of war’s indecencies, ugliness, and terrors. Results reveal that war poetry in England is basically anti-war, although some epic-tone and passionate poems were written by poets such as Robert Brook and Siegfried Sassoon at the beginning of the First World War, however, war poetry in Persian rests on mysticism and it is epic-tone. Nevertheless, in both poetry, war is viewed as cruel, painful, and full of Naturalistic qualities.

Keywords

• qeysar aminpour
• wilfred owen
• naturalism
• war poetry
• literature of resistance