Shell shock, war poetry and psychological trauma

doi:N/A

International Journal of Arts, Humanities And Social Studies

2020, Volume 2, Issue 5

Research Article

Shell shock, war poetry and psychological trauma

Giuseppe Giordano

Abstract

Shell shock is a psychological disturbance whose first description appeared during World War I. As a medical condition, it was characterized by severe symptoms such as fatigue, tremor, confusion, nightmares and impaired sight and hearing. It took some time before the disorder could be related to the atrocities and brutalities that the soldiers experienced during the combats, especially during the bombings. While the genesis of the disorder was becoming clear to clinicians and governors, soldiers and civilians started to describe with memoirs, editorials, letters and particularly poetry, the suffering and the agony of the battlefields and the impact of the conflict on the casualties. The aim of the present article is to investigate the relationship between the clinical manifestations of this new mental disorder and the description that two war poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, made of the mental effects of war in their poems

Keywords

Shell shock

World War I

War poetry

Sassoon

Owen

Psychological trauma

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