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Stephen Crane's War Is Kind

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The poem War is Kind was written by Stephen Crane in 1889. It told a story like no one had ever seen with such power and emphasis towards how war is kind. He is making a ‘joke’ about war not being kind. He does this by naming the story and then telling a completely different story when you get into it. This story also talks about some universal themes that you would normally see in stories about World War One (WWI). The title “War is Kind”, is an ironic statement because war is not kind in any way, shape, or form. In WWI, most people understood what types of hardships the could face, so they told people that war will be kind to them. This would lead (along with many other things in the poem) to believe that this poem was based on WWI, but in fact, it was not based on either of the World Wars, it may had been based on a Civil War (Not known). The reason people should know that this wasn’t about the World Wars was because of the date. World War One was from 1914 - 1918 but, the story was written (and published) in 1899. This would make it impossible for him to be talking about WWI. This is normally mistaken with other poems about a civil war ‘near’ this time frame. …show more content…

Crane makes the reader think that they would be reading about one of the World Wars by the way he explains the warfare. He talks about how the trenches are filled with a yellow gas, “Because your father tumbles in the yellow trenches, Raged at his breast, gulped and died…” This makes the reader think about trench warfare and gaseous warfare from World War One, but in fact, he is talking about one of the Civil Wars. The yellow gas that he talks about could have been a type of mustard gas (that could have been Yellow Cross Gas, while it was reformed after World War One, they already discovered how to make it in 1878). The reason it couldn’t be mustard gas itself was because while it was made in 1822, no one knew that it was deadly and thought to use it in war until World War

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What role do we play in the universe? Do we even have agency over our own lives, or are we influenced by some larger entity? These profound questions have plagued humanity for centuries, resulting in perspectives ranging from religious fanaticism to the resigned Dadaist movement. In his 1895 novel, The Red Badge of Courage, author Stephen Crane provides a unique viewpoint of these concerns through the character of Henry, a private fighting in the 304th regiment in the Union army during the Civil War. Seminally, Crane addresses and interacts with the confusing-and as one can see in the text, paralyzing-existential fears that are precipitated by the raucous environment of the battlefield.

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