2. The Five Stages of Grief: Margaret Cole, ‘The Leaves are Falling’

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About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we consider the idea that some of the poetry written during the First World War should be seen as a means of processing grief. Here, we make use of the influential Kübler-Ross model (also known as the Five Stages of Grief) alongside Margaret Cole’s ‘The Leaves are Falling’, focusing in particular on the lack of an enemy, the question of agency, and the significance of the word ‘strewn’ in the penultimate line of the poem.

Course

In this course, Dr Peter Howarth (Queen Mary University of London) explores the poetry of the First World War. We begin in the first module by providing a broad introduction to war poetry, thinking in particular about the basic conflict between war and poetry. In the following three modules, we consider the idea that some of the poetry written during the First World War might be seen as a means of processing grief, and we look in turn at three poems in relation to three of the five stages of grief – bargaining (Margaret Cole’s ‘The Leaves are Falling’), denial (Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’), and depression (Wilfred Owen’s ‘Futility’). In the fifth module, we consider two satires on the war – Siegfried Sassoon’s ‘The Hero’ and E. E. Cummings’ ‘Next to of course god america i’ – before turning in the sixth and seventh modules to two poems that stand as public protests to the war: Wilfrid Wilson Gibson’s ‘The Conscript’ and Wilfred Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’. In the eighth module, we think about the ‘conflict’ between the poets of the First World War with some the great poets of the past – looking in particular at the poetry of Wilfred Owen (‘Exposure’) and John Keats – before turning in the ninth and final module to consider the theme of guilt in one of Wilfred Owen’s most famous poems, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’.

Lecturer

Dr Peter Howarth came to Queen Mary in 2007, after lecturing at the University of Nottingham (2000-2007) and completing a PhD at Cambridge in 2000. His first book, British Poetry in the Age of Modernism (CUP, 2006) explored the poetics of non-modernism in the twentieth century, and his teaching and writing have continued to explore the relation of form, social setting and historical time ever since.