Since being injured while serving in the British military in Iraq I have explored and written poetry as a way of making sense of my combat experiences. In this PhD by practice I situate my own poetic work alongside a thesis which explores Wittgenstein’s own 1919 philosophical work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, as a work of war poetry. I use reflections on my own life experience to direct a comparative literary analysis of work by myself and other poets in order to shed light on how Wittgenstein’s war poetry operates and what it might tell us about the experiences he found impossible to communicate through words. In doing this I situate my thesis as a contribution to Marjorie Perloff’s explorations of Wittgenstein’s poetics. In addition to this textual focus, this thesis also aims to make two further theoretical contributions to the discourse concerning war literature more generally: first, it aims to outline the contours of a radical reimagining of how war literature should be considered and studied, broadening its current position within an orbit of literature which is written descriptively about war or contemporaneously alongside war, as evident, for example, in Kate McLoughlin’s scholarly analyses, to also include other works which demonstrate novel types of combat poetics which, I argue, emerge as psychological responses to combat experience and which lie latent within literary works that have not previously been considered as war literature. Second, by making these contributions, and by doing so as a scholar who has been both an academic and a soldier, I also aim to shed light upon, and to some extent challenge, a proposed division between an older ‘first wave’ (Das, 2006, ‘Introduction’) tradition of scholarship, which exclusively discusses the literature of combatants, and a newer and contemporary ‘second wave’ tradition, which ascribes no privileged insight to literature written by combatants. In this vein, and to illustrate how an experientially informed analysis may offer valuable new perspectives, throughout this thesis I juxtapose my own experiences with the analyses of Santanu Das and Kate McLoughlin. The first chapter begins with an introduction to the themes, methods, and primary material of the thesis. It proceeds to a literature review, which contextualises the thesis within the discourse concerning the study of war literature. There follows a section which situates the thesis within scholarship concerning the Tractatus in relation to both poetry as a literary form and Wittgenstein’s war experience, establishing that the Tractatus is recognised as war poetry but that this poetry remains poorly understood. A methodology for analysing Wittgenstein’s poetics which employs a combination of biographically informed self-reflexive empathy and comparative literary analysis is then proposed, before this first chapter concludes with an introductory textual analysis. The methodology of the thesis is then applied in exploring three aspects of the poetics of the Tractatus. Chapters titled ‘Structure’, ‘Compression’, and ‘Abstraction’ explore different aesthetic responses to the experience of combat, and particularly the combat experience of the active vocational pursuit of imminent death. ‘Structure’ explores how a writer may need to rebuild a stable ideological anchoring architecture into their life and work and suggests that this need poetically expresses the unstructured and destabilising experience of its opposite. In this chapter I explore both my work and the work of the First World War Dada poet Jacques Vaché to shed light on the Tractatus. ‘Compression’ explores the techniques, some mathematical, which poets may employ to compactly represent the immense scales of unprecedented experience which warfare engenders and suggests that this urge to contain the reality of war aesthetically also implies an external and infinite perspective beyond that reality. I focus on the poetry of Tristan Tzara and the Oulipo writers’ group to explore this theme within the Tractatus. ‘Abstraction’, the concluding chapter, explores the unique challenge of descriptively expressing imminent death, and the methods for doing so, and suggests that aesthetic abstraction at the moment of linguistic failure becomes itself the poetic index of the inexpressible. This chapter begins by juxtaposing my reading of Wilfred Owen’s final poem, ‘Spring Offensive’ with that by Das. The thesis concludes with reference to a work of philosophy-poetry of my own, which evidences notions of structure, compression, and abstraction. It provides an opportunity for some closing reflections on what may have changed and what may have remained the same within the experience of combat over the last century, and how considerations of these stases and evolutions may prove useful in helping us to think about how war poetry should be understood as a category. In the light of this I posit that many of the very technologies which have changed the experience of war over time may themselves bear the poetic trace of the combat experiences from which they emerged and may therefore themselves be considered as war poetry.