Up the Line to Death

Product Information

Excellent poem by poem, plus good resources on sections to allow students to compare poems as needed for the exams... Each poem has clear plot summery and discussion of techniquesused. B Privett, HoD & Customer Despite this, I can definitely appreciate the poems in here. I'm not a huge fan of long poems (of which there are a few), and obviously you're not going to like every single poem, but some really stand out for me and encapsulate the feeling of war and create such a realistic surrounding. Also, the gradual progression of patriotism to stoicism, to general criticism of the war is interesting as it portrays how blinded we were as a nation. I think reading this with the 21st Century hindsight we possess creates a huge irony in which Gardner attempts to further this with his choice of poems.

If I were fierce” is not a compliment. It merely describes the language and bluster of a general adept at saber rattling, letting raw recruits, some of them still boys, be marched off to the meat grinder of an insatiable war. It clearly reminds me of the general in Apocalypse Now who says “What a beautiful morning for a war.” The faces of “glum soldiers” serve as reminders of its nightmare and so, of course, the general wants to dismiss them from his sight - and from the world. A “puffy petulant” face describes one who has never seen, much less felt, the horrors of warfare, a coddled infant apt to hide behind his mother’s apron strings if ever forced to face a battle. Excellent. An extensive, highly-impressive and meticulously-researched piece of work which covers every conceivable angle on First World War poetry. Very thorough. I particularly liked the amount of insightful and detailed commentary notes with the poems.

Most of the soldiers writing poetry, of course, were educated men, which means that most of them were among the young officers, which means that most of them died. The end of the book consists of a potted biography of each of the contributors, some of whom survived the war and went on to publish professionally, but many of whom went on to other careers and so far as I know were never stirred to verse again. Those who were killed are marked with an asterisk, but their biographies are rarely any shorter. The collection includes familiar poems, like Wilfred Owen’s “ Anthem for Doomed Youth” and Rupert Brooke’s “ The Dead, ” and poets and poems almost forgotten, including C.H. Sorley, considered among the finest poets of his time. Their poetry, and the war it told the story of, had an enormous influence, including on the reluctance to engage Adolf Hitler until it was almost too late. Schuklenk, U. What healthcare professionals owe us: why their duty to treat during a pandemic is contingent on personal protective equipment (PPE). Journal of Medical Ethics. 2020; 46 7 http://dx.doi.org/10.1136/medethics-2020-106278

But there were other fronts—Turkey, Iraq, Germany, East Africa—and other poets, some of whose names are still quite well known: Rudyard Kipling, Robert Graves, e.e. cummings, Herbert Asquith (son of the prime minister), Thomas Hardy, Seigfried Sassoon, Robert Service, A.P. Herbert, A.E. Housman, William Butler Yeats, and even A.A. Milne. Sassoon was a conscientious objector in WW1, committed for a time in a hospital outside Edinborough. He seemed to sense the bare truth in war and was driven to write with an art that is so direct and compelling that it's easy to miss the fact that it's also eloquent. Base Detail’s is a satirical poem on the attitudes of the senior officers. The title is a pun, base meaning headquarters and the alternative despised or worthless.

Newest Up the Line to Death summaries

Years ago, one of my teachers spoke of the importance of five minute books. His point being that no time needed to be wasted. Waiting for a bus, read the book you carried with you for that purpose. Waiting in the dentist or doctor, the same book. In a traffic jam, don't get angry and road ragey, open your little escape volume and slip into somewhere better. This i have done for years but ironically it had never been a huge habit of mine to have books in the smallest room in the house but over the last five years or so various volumes of poetry, largely anthologies seem to have found their way to my downstairs loo by a series of secret moves known only to my literary guardian angel. As a result I have encountered a number of short moments of revelation which serve to enhance an otherwise necessary literary dry time. It was over the last seven or eight months that I have read this extraordinary collection of poems brought together by Brian Gardner and introduced with a short foreword by Edmund Blunden. And these poems do not take you to a better place but make you grateful for the courage of these men and sorrow for the waste of their sacrifice. In this collection the well known sit alongside the totally unknown, the brilliant and sparkling talents alongside the lost and wasted. It is an almost unbearable wading through the horror and tragedy of the 'Great War' expressed in hope, hell and humour in if not equal measure then certainly in notiecable presence. Absolutely fantastic! This is really well put together and informative. The level of detail is so comprehensive... The sheer level of detail isimpressive. S Alsop, Teacher & Peer Reviewer When he meets and falls in love with the 'marvelous transtemporal paradox called Pulcheria' - his own multi-great-grandmother - Jud succumbs to the lure of the past, creates irreparable paradoxes, and faces the inescapable clutches of the Time Patrol. I can't say that I've properly read this, since we analyse random poems from it throughout the book, yet I've read enough to get an overall idea for this anthology and to be honest it was bothering me that it was on my currently reading shelf when it wasn't exactly being read, more like being glanced at every Tuesday and Friday during class.

The word ‘detail’ is also a pun meaning precise and close information, but also a small group of soldiers with a specific task. So the Major’s function in this context is limited and without significance, no doubt suitable for the his minute brain. I was a conscientious objector too, in the (US) Vietnam War years -- and this very poem "Base Details" was one experience that pushed me in that direction. Berger, D. 26 July 2020. Please stop calling healthcare workers ‘heroes’. It’s killing us Sydney Morning Herald.

This must all be very English, as you say, Ed. I don't think that the Great War has the same cultural freight in the States, not least because American involvement amounted to 18 months. The moral injury of avoidable harm to health and social care workers cuts deep and the scars will persist, as the scars of the first world war lingered into the twenty-first century. Reflect on that when you are next tempted to prod “our healthcare heroes” into harm’s way with your self-serving cheers. In July 2020, I called for an immediate end in Australia to the rhetoric of “healthcare workers as heroes,” identifying it as a damaging distraction from the legal and moral imperative to accord healthcare workers the same standards of occupational safety enjoyed by workers in other industries, such as construction or mining. [14] That rhetoric has now largely abated in Australia, helped here by the extreme paucity of covid cases since October, though we are no nearer achieving a safe workplace for healthcare workers. When the play 'Oh What a Lovely War' was first presented in London in 1963, Vietnam was not an issue that engaged the attention of many in Britain and America. The previous September, however, the Cuban missile crisis had threatened to trigger a nuclear war. This, surely, is why so much of the first act is a farcical account of Europe being impelled towards war by idiot leaders who don't know what they are doing. A similar presentation is also found in the historical writings of A.J.P. Taylor at the same time. Glaze, B. 20 Jan 2021. Ministers under fresh pressure over PPE for NHS heroes on coronavirus frontline Daily Mirror.

Silverberg's interest in the Byzantine era of Roman history is put to use with a vivid description of Constantinople during the reign of Justinian, and the Nika riots of 532.The “new abnormal” is to believe that it is entirely reasonable for healthcare workers to go to work with the expectation that they will eventually contract a life-threatening illness. Almost everyone, from the public to the healthcare workers themselves, believes this. And why not? The self-serving organism of the NHS, with the connivance of the government, has engineered this torrent of individual sacrifice, ostensibly for the collective good. Let us speak plainly now, not just about the NHS, but about healthcare systems all over the world. They are top down, “command and control” bureaucracies, not dissimilar to military organisations. Though they brim over these days with fine words and caring mission statements, we all know they are rigid, unkind bureaucracies, the main purpose of whose management subunits is less to deliver healthcare, than to take and hold organisational territory. In such authoritarian, often bullying regimes, the pressure to conform need only be explicit occasionally. Fear of censure, and fear of letting others down, will do the rest. Up the Line (1969) is a time travel novel by American science fiction author Robert Silverberg. The plot revolves mainly around the paradoxes brought about by time travel and is considered an example of the more sexually-permissive era of late 1960s American science-fiction, a reflection of the counterculture of its day. [1] It was nominated for a Nebula Award for Best Novel in 1969 [2] and a Hugo Award for Best Novel in 1970 but lost to Ursula K. Le Guin's The Left Hand of Darkness both times. [3]