Eduqas Poetry Anthology — Key Poets and Poems

The WJEC Eduqas Anthology

Component 1, Section B includes a named-poet question — you answer about specific poems by one poet from the anthology. You need detailed knowledge of several poems, their context, and their techniques.

The Eduqas anthology spans a range of periods — from the Romantics through to contemporary poets. The following outlines the most commonly examined poets and their key poems.

Wilfred Owen — War Poetry

Context: Owen (1893–1918) served as an officer in WWI and was killed one week before the Armistice. He rejected the patriotic glorification of war and wrote to show the suffering of soldiers.

Key poems and techniques:

"Dulce et Decorum Est" — a gas attack, described with brutal physical realism. Title is ironic: "It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country" (Latin, Horace). Owen addresses Jessie Pope, a pro-war propagandist.

• Similes in opening: "like old beggars under sacks... like hags" — soldiers reduced to broken, elderly figures; destroys the heroic image
• "Guttering, choking, drowning" — participle tricolon; the soldier's suffering is physical, visceral, ongoing (present participle = continuous)
• "In all my dreams" — Owen's personal trauma; he cannot escape the experience
• Volta-like shift to direct address: "If you could hear... my friend, you would not tell..." — "friend" is bitterly ironic (directed at Jessie Pope)

"Exposure" — waiting in the trenches; the enemy is not the Germans but the cold. Structure mirrors the waiting: lines end with half-questions ("But nothing happens"); the circular structure traps the soldiers.

• "Our brains ache, in the merciless iced east winds that knive us" — weather as an active agent of violence; "knive" is a verb form of knife
• Repeated refrain "But nothing happens" — futility; the poem is about inaction and erosion
• Final stanza: soldiers dream of home and dawn — "half-dazed"; but even dreams offer no escape; the home fires are not lit for them

Carol Ann Duffy — Identity and Transformation

Context: Duffy (b.1955) was the UK Poet Laureate (2009–2019). She writes about identity, gender, language and power — often using dramatic monologue or persona.

"War Photographer" — a photographer develops images of war in a darkroom; he struggles to reconcile the horrors he witnessed with the indifference of the Sunday supplement reader.

• The darkroom as a liminal space: literal (developing photographs) and metaphorical (developing moral understanding)
• "Belfast. Beirut. Phnom Penh." — three place names as a list; no commentary needed; the stark list enacts the scope of human violence
• "A hundred agonies in black and white / from which his editor will pick out five or six" — the reduction of suffering to editorial selection; commercialisation of atrocity
• AO3: The role of photojournalism; the ethics of representing suffering; the distance between consumer and conflict

"Valentine" — the speaker gives an onion as a Valentine's gift instead of conventional roses or hearts. The onion is an extended metaphor for love: it makes you cry, it has layers, it can "blind" you.

• "Not a cute card or a kissogram" — rejects commercial sentimentality; opposes Hallmark love
• "Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips" — unexpected sensual metaphor; love as dangerous and persistent
• "Lethal. / Its scent will cling to your fingers" — the final stanza turns darker; possessiveness and threat in love

Simon Armitage — Ordinary Life and Moral Complexity

Context: Armitage (b.1963) is a contemporary poet and the current UK Poet Laureate. He writes in accessible, colloquial language about ordinary people and moral questions.

"Remains" (from The Not Dead) — a soldier's account of shooting a looter in Iraq. The soldier cannot forget or justify what he saw and did; the man he killed "comes back" in his dreams.

• Colloquial, soldier's voice: "so we let fly" — casual language for lethal action; the vernacular contrasts with the moral weight
• "Years later I am / in the same trench" — the past invades the present; PTSD as a theme
• "He's raking over the ashes / in my dreams and in my head" — the dead man is the one doing the haunting now; the killer is haunted by the killed
• AO3: The Iraq War; the experience of returning soldiers; moral responsibility in conflict

Ted Hughes — Nature and Power

Context: Hughes (1930–1998), UK Poet Laureate, wrote about nature with raw, unsentimental power. Nature for Hughes is not gentle and beautiful but violent, vital and amoral.

"Hawk Roosting" — a dramatic monologue from the perspective of a hawk, who describes its dominance and total lack of compassion or doubt. Often read as a portrait of a fascist or tyrant.

• "I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed" — authority, control, arrogant stillness
• "It took the whole of Creation / To produce my foot, my each feather" — the hawk's absolute egotism; the universe exists to serve it
• "My manners are tearing off heads" — chilling juxtaposition of polite word ("manners") with casual violence
• AO3: Nature as amoral power; the poem has been read as a portrait of dictatorship (Hitler, Stalin) — though Hughes denied this; Ted Hughes's relationship with Plath and public image

Comparing Poets in the Exam

When the question asks you to write about named poems by a specific poet:

1. Choose two or three poems and compare them within the poet's work — how does the poet develop their themes across different poems?
2. Use integrated comparison with connectives: "Similarly in..."; "In contrast to..."
3. Always include AO3: the poet's context, the time they wrote, and what they were responding to.
4. AO2 is essential: analyse specific language, form and structure choices — not just what the poem says.