SOURCE: Musolino, Walter. “Physics and Metaphysics: Capture and Escape. Two War Poems of Wilfred Owen and Giuseppe Ungaretti.” Forum Italicum 30, no. 2 (fall 1996): 311-19.

In the following essay, Musolino compares two anti-war poems, a subgenre emblematic of Ungaretti and poet Wilfred Owen.

The tradition of war has traditionally given rise to an equal imperative in power: the tradition of poetry about war. However, if, from Homer to the French songs of chivalry, from the “Romanzo cavalleresco” of the middle and late Renaissance to the nineteenth century European patriotic odes, the grandeur of military adventure was the vision advanced, then the First World War pared away the peripheral hordes, hosts and heroes to target the minutiae of frailty, solitary consciousness and the wounded mind. Between 1914 and 1918, English war poets undoubtedly composed the most sustained body of ‘new’ war poetry—“There had been nothing like poetry of the Great War before...