WAR REPRESENTATION IN CHILDREN’S POETIC DISCOURSE: UKRAINIAN AND ENGLISH-LANGUAGE PERSPECTIVES

Abstract

The article analyses the representation of war in children’s poetic discourse based on contemporary Ukrainian and English-language poetry. The relevance of the study is determined by the need to examine linguistic means of representing wartime reality and the insufficient development of this issue in modern scholarship. The aim of the research is to identify and compare the main ways of war representation in Ukrainian and English-language children’s poetry.
The study applies linguistic, stylistic, and discourse analysis, which made it possible to distinguish four principal modes of war representation: direct nomination, metaphorisation, emotive verbalisation, and evaluative representation. Contemporary Ukrainian children’s poetry is dominated by direct nomination of wartime realities, reflecting the immediate experience of war and determining the documentary and therapeutic orientation of the texts. In contrast, the English-language poetic tradition tends toward implicit representation of war through allegory, symbolism, irony, and figurative imagery.
The findings reveal differences in the conceptualisation of war: Ukrainian children’s poetry reflects the real experience of contemporary war, whereas English-language poetry generalises it through historical memory. The study also emphasises the role of children’s poetry in shaping a child’s linguistic worldview under wartime conditions.