Comparative Analysis Between War Is Kind on Being Asked for a Warpoem

Comparative Analysis:



Both Stephen Crane’s poem “War is Kind” and William Butler Yeat’s “On Being Asked for a War Poem” have varied and different techniques and the two poems best illustrate to us the sub-theme of war: emotions aroused from war.

The influence of Cranes “War is Kind” was from his compassion and empathy for the everyday suffering of war victims.   Even though Crane never served in the United States military, he was a journalist that covered a number of conflicts for various newspapers and news services during the mid-to-late 1890s which was the Spanish-American War in which he based his poem from but the sufferers in \"War is Kind\" was written for the Americans but he also wrote it in entirety for the rest of the world to convey his emotions of war.

Yeats wrote his poem “On Being Asked for a War Poem” because of his mixed feelings towards war and the responsibilities of a poet during this dreadful time of pain and suffering. He was an Irishmen and wrote this last poem to take people’s minds away from war.

Both poems express two distinctly different themes. In Crane’s elegy, the main theme is the anger and agony suffered from the loved ones of the victims of war. The theme of Yeats’ poem is of the question he has in mind of ‘why write poetry on the war before or during it is happening because I am no statesman to put an opinion on this?’

Comparing the themes, both the poems essentially tell us about the negatives of war, especially the sufferings from people.

But first of all, Crane’s poem was intended to comfort the loved ones of those that died in war. Crane uses his words to show that there is these women, because there husbands, sons and fathers died for something as futile so died needlessly. This was brilliantly emphasised with the great use of paradox and irony. He uses it to accentuate the purpose of that technique; that something appears to be one thing when it reality, is the entire...