Taking It Like a Man: Suffering, Sexuality and the War Poets : Brooke, Sassoon, Owen, Graves

by Adrian Caesar

This study sets out to investigate the place of suffering in the lives and work of Brooke, Owen, Sassoon and Graves. By an unfolding of their attitudes towards suffering we may come to a fuller and deeper understanding of their work and its appropriate place in our culture. The author suggests that, whilst we have been taught that writers such as Owen and Sassoon were noble in their expression of grief, pity, indignation and anti-war sentiment, we have neglected their positive responses to war and our own positive responses to their war writing. He argues that their work has been read and taught in particular ideological ways that elide a consideration of the psychological and cultural complexities involved in both poetry and our response to it. As well as communicating to the reader that war is wasteful, absurd, horrific, appalling, the work also celebrates war as a vehicle of pain and suffering, which is shared by the voyeuristic reader who peeps in horror through parted fingers and is consciously or subconsciously thrilled and excited by it.

246 pages, Hardcover

First published July 1, 1993

About the author

Adrian Caesar is an Australian author and poet. Born in the United Kingdom, he emigrated to Australia in 1982. He studied at Reading University and has held appointments at various Australian universities, including the Australian National University and the University of New South Wales at Canberra’s School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

Caesar is the author of several books, including the prize-winning non-fiction novel THE WHITE based on the Antarctic exploration of Robert F. Scott and Douglas Mawson from 1911 to 1913. His poems have been widely published and his 2005 poetry collection HIGH WIRE was shortlisted for the 2007 Judith Wright Prize.