Views of War in Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade and Whitman’s Dr

Views of War in Tennysons Charge of the Light brigade and Whitmans Drum-Taps Even though Walt Whitman and Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote with different styles and ideals, the common head of war gave them the similar purpose of exposing the destructive nature of battle sequence remaining inspiring and even optimistic. Tennysons The Charge of the Light brigade reveals a fatal blunder that cost the lives of many incline soldiers, season asserting that the unquestioning loyalty of the British troops causes tremendous pride. Whitmans Drum-Taps series of poems, especially Beat Beat Drums, documents the tragedies that occurred during the Civil War, yet maintains a feeling of hope that the war will help to cleanse the tribe and revitalize it. Despite the outward similarities between Light Brigade and Drum-Taps, insidious differences exist between the respective authors attitudes towards war and the tones that carry over into the poems. The primitive pride Tennyson felt for England as B ritains poet laureate swayed his writing, and critics have since attacked the prodigal jingoism that seeps into Light Brigade (Marshall 135), since he was unable to capture the enormous suffering of battle that could only be seen on the front lines, where he never set foot. Conversely, Whitman was able to grasp the darkest of emotions that war generated in his poems because of the lengthened experience he had caring for the wounded and mourning the dead (Golden 106). Tennysons The Charge of the Light Brigade and Whitmans Beat Beat Drums get along to be nationalistic poems glorifying war, but while Tennyson paints a heroic look-alike of valiant soldiers fighting a just war, Whitman employs a mixture of sarcasm and grim reality to portr... ...Jr. A Tennyson Handbook. new(a) York Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1963 110-135. Shaw, W. David. Alfred Lord Tennyson the Poet in an while of Theory. New York Twayne Publishers, Inc., 1996 25-35. Sweet, Timothy. Whitmans Drum-Taps and the Rhet oric of War. Traces of War Poetry, Photography, and the Crisis of the Union. Baltimore The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990 11-45. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. The Charge of the Light Brigade. The Norton Anthology English Literature. New York W. W. Norton & Company, 1996 1954-1955. Thomas, M. Wynn. Fratricide and Brotherly Love Whitman and the Civil War. ed. Ezra Greenspan. The Cambridge Companion to Walt Whitman. New York Cambridge University Press, 1995 27-44. Whitman, Walt. Beat Beat Drums The Norton Anthology American Literature. New York W. W. Norton & Company, 1995 1004-1005.