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The key factor by the period this poem was released, October, 1915, is the World War I (1914-1918). Then, all the despair, fear and death were the reality at that time. The future, and the hope of it, was uncertain.

Thomas Stearns Eliot (1888-1965) was an American-English poet, playwright, literary critic, and editor, a leader of the Modernist movement in poetry. Eliot exercised a strong influence on Anglo-American culture from the 1920s until late in the century. His main works are Ash-Wednesday (1930) and Four Quartets (1941). His main themes are death, isolation, uncertainty, religion, and love. His writing style helps depicting the modern life for the reader and reflects its status in real manner with the stream of conciousness, repetition and fragmentation. 

The poem is about Miss Helen Slingsly that died recently and its narrator is her nephew. The main theme in it is death, but love is also present. The main features are the use of repetition, allusion (how the world changes after Helen's death in the poem to represent the progression of time) and enjambment (this is when a phrase ends in the next line).

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The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
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- Historical Context: 
The poem was writen in 1919 and published in 1920. After World War I (1914-1918) and during the Anglo-Irish War (the author is Irish)

- About the Author:
William Yeats (1865 - 1939) was an Irish poet, dramatist and writer. He was one of the heads of Irish Literary Revival.  He was a pillar of the Irish literary establishment and he also helped to found the Abbey Theatre.

-About the Poem:
A simple structure, based on pentametric but constantly breaking its own rule of construction, demonstrating a characteristic of modernism in the poem "breaking with tradition". The title makes reference to Parasodia, the second coming of Jesus Christ. An apocalyptic event that happens out of chaos. The first part of the poem contextualizes this chaos while the second part talks about the event, the arrival. When everyone would have a single conscience (Spiritus Mundi), citing other symbologies such as the sphinx (demonstrating the inclusion of cultures other than Christianity in the post-war period). The allegories of the text culminate in death and in the questioning of a possible rebirth.

-Our Considerations:
Some authors argue that the poem is a religious vision of the post-war period while others interpret the allegories as a satire on the thought of Christian resurrection (while everything is "falling apart). of the author, especially considering the Anglo-Irish war. As an Irishman, the author would have a culture focused on Christianity but seeing the situation of his country at war, he may have rethought some things. And perhaps the rebirth questioned at the end is a reference to the emergence of his own nation, stronger and more independent.

Happy are men who yet before they are killed

Can let their veins run cold.

Whom no compassion fleers

Or makes their feet

Sore on the alleys cobbled with their brothers.

The front line withers. 

But they are troops who fade, not flowers, 

For poets’ tearful fooling:

Men, gaps for filling:

Losses, who might have fought

Longer; but no one bothers.

                                     II

And some cease feeling

Even themselves or for themselves.

Dullness best solves

The tease and doubt of shelling,

And Chance’s strange arithmetic

Comes simpler than the reckoning of their shilling.

They keep no check on armies’ decimation.

                                     III

Happy are these who lose imagination:

They have enough to carry with ammunition.

Their spirit drags no pack.

Their old wounds, save with cold, can not more ache.

Having seen all things red,

Their eyes are rid

Of the hurt of the colour of blood for ever.

And terror’s first constriction over,

Their hearts remain small-drawn.

Their senses in some scorching cautery of battle

Now long since ironed,

Can laugh among the dying, unconcerned.

                                     IV

Happy the soldier home, with not a notion

How somewhere, every dawn, some men attack,

And many sighs are drained.

Happy the lad whose mind was never trained:

His days are worth forgetting more than not.

He sings along the march

Which we march taciturn, because of dusk,

The long, forlorn, relentless trend

From larger day to huger night.

                                     V

We wise, who with a thought besmirch

Blood over all our soul,

How should we see our task

But through his blunt and lashless eyes?

Alive, he is not vital overmuch;

Dying, not mortal overmuch;

Nor sad, nor proud,

Nor curious at all.

He cannot tell

Old men’s placidity from his.

                                     VI

But cursed are dullards whom no cannon stuns,

That they should be as stones. 

Wretched are they, and mean

With paucity that never was simplicity.

By choice they made themselves immune

To pity and whatever moans in man

Before the last sea and the hapless stars;

Whatever mourns when many leave these shores;

Whatever shares

The eternal reciprocity of tears.
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Historical Context: The poem was written around April 1918, and is one of Owen's longest poems. 
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About the author: Wilfred Owen was born on 1893 in Shropshire. He became interested in poetry and music at an early age. Owen began writing when he was a teenager. During his trajectory, he met several poetries who influenced his career.  Owen was an officer in British Army during WWI and he wrote several poems on the horror of warfare and the human body in relation to the landscapes. He was gay and often wrote about male beauty and friendships in his poems. He died when he was 25 years while trying to lead his men into war. The author is considered one of the most admired poets of WWI.
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About the Poem
The poem expresses sorrow through a narrative about a soldier who fought in the war. Thus, the main themes are the death of soldiers, sacrifices, and the barbarity of war. Also, it is explored The insensibility to fear and a lack of psychological sensation. 
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Our analyzes
The poem shocked us with the realistic visual narrative where is possible to imagine the battlefield. The symbolism supposes all the struggles and the terror with the deaths which give to us an uncomfortable sensation. 

      That there’s some corner of a foreign field

That is for ever England. There shall be

      In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;

A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,

      Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam;

A body of England’s, breathing English air,

      Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

And think, this heart, all evil shed away,

      A pulse in the eternal mind, no less

            Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given;

Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day;

      And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness,

            In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.


Historical Context:
The Soldier is a poem written during the Great War. Patriot, Rupert tried to enlist militar service, but it was denied. The poem expresses the patriotism and love of a Soldier for England, his land, which is portrayed as a kind of paradise.

About Rupert Brooke:

Rupert Chawner Brooke, born in Rugby, Warwickshire, England ( 3 august, 1887). English poet, a wellborn, gifted, handsome youth whose early death in World War I contributed to his idealized image in the interwar period. His best-known work is the sonnet sequence 1914.
Died in 23 abril 1915.

Characteristics of his poems: love, death, immortality.
Main Works: The great lover, the desde heaven, the old vicarage, Grantchester.

Behind the poem:

If I die in the war, I want to be remembered in a particular way. Think of how the far-off land on which I die will have a small piece of England forever. That earth will be enriched by my dead body, because my body is made from dirt born in England. England created me and gave me consciousness, gave me her blooming plants to fall in love with, and gave me my sense of freedom. My body belongs to England, has always breathed English air. England's rivers cleansed me, and I was blessed by England's sun. Also consider the way in which my soul, through death, will be made pure. My consciousness will return to the immortal consciousness like a beating pulse, and return the beautiful thoughts that England gave me. I'll return the sights and sounds of my home country; to the beautiful dreams that were as happy as England's daytime; and to the laughter shared with English friends. And I'll return England's gentleness, which lives in the English minds that are at peace under the English sky (the English heaven where I will be at peace too when I die).


Characteristcs and symbols/language figures:

Alliteration - the use, especially in poetry, of the same sound or sounds, especially consonants, at the beginning of several words that are close together

Anaphora - a type of cohesive relation which points to an earlier reference in the text.

Caesura - a metrical pause or break in a verse where one phrase ends and another phrase begins.

Consonance - the repetition of the same consonant sounds in a line of text.


What we think about the poem: 

The poem shows the love of a Soldier for his land and how he is prepared to bleed for England. If he dies in a foreign country, a little piece of England Will remain there, because he is part of England, and England is part of him. It is a beautiful poem, but it seems as a kind of alienation, making boys enlist to military service with a feeling of patriotism, as it was worth during in the war. The poem does not show the reality of war, and how violent and brutal it was, and how many soldiers did not return home.

He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be
One against whom there was no official complaint,
And all the reports on his conduct agree
That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint,
For in everything he did he served the Greater Community.
Except for the War till the day he retired
He worked in a factory and never got fired,
But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc.
Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views,
For his Union reports that he paid his dues,
(Our report on his Union shows it was sound)
And our Social Psychology workers found
That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink.
The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day
And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way.
Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured,
And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured.
Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare
He was fully sensible to the advantages of the Instalment Plan
And had everything necessary to the Modern Man,
A phonograph, a radio, a car and a frigidaire.
Our researchers into Public Opinion are content
That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;
When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.
He was married and added five children to the population,
Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation.
And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education.
Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd:
Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard.

• Historical context
The Unknown Citizen - was written after Aunden moved from England to the United States. During this period the world was going through a great social change in the middle of the Second World War.

• About the author ¬
Wystan Hugh Auden - was an Anglo-American poet, born in 1907. His poetry was known for its stylistic and technical achievement, its involvement with politics, morals, love and religion.
Some of his best-known poems are about love, such as "Funeral Blues"; on political and social topics, such as "September 1, 1939" and "The Shield of Achilles"; on cultural and psychological topics such as The Age of Anxiety; and on religious themes like "For now". He died in 1973.
• About the poem
The main themes of this poem are conformity, standardization and loss of self-control, and the state and dominance of bureaucracy. He hated the insistence on conformity that was spread by the Nazis and he also hated the standardization happening in communist countries.
The poem is a parody of an elegy (melancholic and sad poetry, composed especially as a song for a funeral or mourning for the dead), and uses various literary devices such as irony, allusion and rhetorical question to emphasize that the poem is a satire.
In the poem, the speaker reflects on the life of an unknown dead man who was an exemplary citizen because he did everything correctly according to the government.

• Our analysis 
His life was difficult in reality, but all the state publicized were good things, as the state has full control over the press, among others.
The poem serves to warn that the individual can become voiceless by the System