Thanks to the Internet, Richard Zito got more than he bargained for when he enrolled in a course on the literature of World War I.
Instead of simply studying the poetry and writing of that period, Zito and his classmates were able to view the images and learn about the circumstances of that war which inspired such literature.
Drawing upon material from his English 354 class, "Remembrance and Mourning: Literature of the Great War," C. Stephen Finley, professor of English at Haverford College, created and developed a web site which directly links examples of the literature and poetry of World War I to actual images, newspaper reports and first-person accounts of that particular time and event.
The site not only provides students with the works of eloquent, but somewhat obscure poets, such as Edmund Blunden. In addition, it offers students access to the actual images of devastation that Blunden's poetry describes. Other links provide historical details of the war, including a description of what soldiers needed to know when engaging in trench warfare.
The site also provides links between students' essays on various poets and writers of the time and the works themselves. Thus, these pages are works in progress.
Since the creation of the web site, more English majors have been inspired to develop Internet projects instead of writing standard seminar papers. One student, for example, created a site called "Landscape and Mateship: Australia in the Great War," that focused on Australia's experience in World War I.
Professor Finley's creation of this detailed web site also has opened up new worlds to his students. In addition to displaying the work of Edmund Blunden, Finley and his students have created links to the writings of lesser-known female poets during World War I. The work of one such poet, Agnes Grozier Herbertson, was uncovered by a former student of Finley's in a library in London and became the subject of another student's web page.
