Modernism

Siegfried Sassoon was born in 1886 in a wealthy family. He finished his education at Cambridge University, but had a greater interest for poetry. As World War I broke out Sassoon felt compelled to join the fight. He left the war having been wounded and receiving to medals for bravery. Sassoon became a war poet after experiencing the horrors of war up front. Upon his return to Britain he was strictly against war and wrote a letter to the war department stating his opposing position on war and the need to end it. His public letter led him to being committed for temporary insanity. There in the hospital is when he began writing his poems on the topic of war. His poems where easy to read for many due to his use of simple language and common rhythm scheme. One of his most influential poems is "Suicide in the Trenches", which expresses the seriousness and brutality of war.

Some of his other poems are:

• "They" (1917)
• "Memorial Tablet" (1918)

Ezra Pound was born in Idaho, United States in 1885. However he later moved to London to pursue a higher interest in the arts, where he became and editor and advocate of poetry. He had a major influence in modernism and especially imagism. Imagism was a sub- movement on modernism and like other poets who shared this belief Pound believed that perfection of poetry could be achieved through imagism . His perspective was that poetry was an intellectual and emotional experience in a short amount of time through the description of an image. This is why Pound infused artistic forms with vorticist ideas, abstract developments in art, in his imagism. His most famous work is an epic poem consisting of 120 parts called The Cantos. Pound worked on this piece of literature for nearly 50 years. This piece of work expresses Pounds use of concrete ideas and the formation of imagery in his writing. In all of his successes Pound was also a controversial figure. In the years of World War II has was a part of broadcasting Italian fascist ideas in the United States. He was charged with treason , but then declared mentally unfit for trial and so sent to a mental hospital in Washington DC. Due to his many artistic achievements the charges where dropped and he moved to Italy where he passed away in 1972.