Wallace Stevens Poem The Death of a Soldier and William...

Read Wallace Stevens poem The Death of a Soldier and E.E. Cummings poem my sweet old etcetera in your textbook, Select Writers of the Twentieth Century. Select either poem and analyze the view of war in the poem with the view of war in Faulkners story Two Soldiers. The essay should be well- developed and well-supported with the texts. Wallace Stevens The Death of a Soldier honors the common, unremarkable death of an ordinary soldier. War is portrayed as inevitable in the Stevens poem, like the seasons. As in a season of autumn. / The soldier falls. The soldier is portrayed as acting like a leaf, falling to the ground. Unlike a famous general, there is no pomp and circumstance to the soldiers death, no memorial or extensive period of mourning. Metaphors of the natural world also used to describe the soldier include the wind ceasing to blow. Without dwelling upon the reasons for warfare and the injustices of war, Stevens makes it seem as if there is nothing humans can do to prevent the carnage caused by war. Humans are, in effect, caught in the states machinery of power that is bigger than the individual will. This sense of wars inevitability is also present in Faulkners short story Two Soldiers, in which the unnamed narrator idealizes his brother Pete. Unlike the Stevens poem, the short story is about a specific w ar and a specific family. The older brother, Pete, does not have a romantic view of war but he must surrender to the states need that