During Jessie Pope’s “Who’s for the Game?”, the speaker reveals the use of propaganda during World War One to encourage young men to join the war. The speaker uses sports dialect to enhance the propaganda by comparing war to a sports game to appeal to the lower classes. Similarly, the speaker also focuses on how this propaganda appealed to their masculinity and to how women would look at them; thus, by alluring to the young men’s desire for women they could be exploited for the war. Pope's composition of the contemporary use of propaganda during World War One, exposes the strategic manipulation of young men and their masculinity to encourage them to participate in the game of war.
With the exploitive use of propaganda, the speaker shows the…show more content… By encouraging men to want to be able to carry a gun and show their strength, the propaganda encourages young men that they should not be scared and that a man in the war “eagerly shoulders a gun” (Pope 10). By encouraging a man’s toughness and using the idea of carrying a gun and defending their nation, propaganda can prompt men into joining the war. The speaker is also able to represent the idea that not joining the war showed the men as easily intimidated, similar to a man “who thinks he’d rather sit tight” (Pope 4). By just remaining on the sidelines and sitting on the bench, the men who do not enlist for the war are those who have little masculine compared to those who are on the battlefield. The use of propaganda by the speaker as well as the countries enlisting men could encourage men to gain the masculinity they desire and show how superior they were.
By using manipulative propaganda, Pope could represent how the contemporary countries and enlistees used persuasion by appealing to the young men’s masculinity and appeal for sports and women. In Pope’s poem of “Who’s for the Game?”, the speaker is able to show how by appealing to young men’s desire for women and masculinity they are encouraged to enlist for the war. With the use of manipulative propaganda, the speaker is able to reveal the manipulation used by countries in World War One to enlist young
