Ruptured Minds, Fractured Verses: The Psychodynamics of Madness in War Poetry

Abstract

The poetry of the First World War represents a unique confluence of aesthetic expression and psychological trauma, capturing the profound mental disintegration experienced by combatants subjected to the relentless horrors of modern warfare. This paper examines the psychodynamics of madness in war poetry, focusing on the works of Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, Isaac Rosenberg, and Ivor Gurney. Drawing upon the psychoanalytic frameworks of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, this study interrogates how these poets not only depict psychological rupture but also formally encode trauma within the linguistic and structural fabric of their verse. Freud’s theories of repression, melancholia, and the return of the repressed provide a foundational lens through which to interpret the compulsive recurrence of traumatic imagery in war poetry. Simultaneously, Lacan’s tripartite model of the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic offers insight into the ineffability of war trauma and its manifestation in poetic disruptions, such as fractured syntax and hallucinatory imagery. This paper contends that war poetry does not merely document trauma but enacts it through its very form, rendering the psychological breakdown of the soldier as an intrinsic feature of its aesthetic and linguistic composition. Through an in-depth analysis of “Repression of War Experience”, “Mental Cases”, “Dead Man’s Dump”, and “The Silent One”, this study elucidates how war poetry functions as both an artistic representation of psychological distress and a textual embodiment of the disintegration of the wartime psyche.