War Poetry: World War 1 to Contemporary War Poetry

War Poetry: World War 1 to Contemporary War Poetry

The Battle Hymn of the Republic

  by Julia Ward Howe
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:  
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;  
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of his terrible swift sword:  
            His truth is marching on.  
  
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps;
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;  
I can read his righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:  
            His day is marching on.  
  
I have read a fiery gospel, writ in burnished rows of steel:  
"As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,  
            Since God is marching on."
  
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;  
He is sifting out the hearts of men before his judgment-seat:  
O, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
            Our God is marching on.  
  
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,  
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:  
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,  
            While God is marching on.




Poets have written about the experience of war since the Greeks, but the young soldier poets of the First World War established war poetry as a literary genre. Their combined voice has become one of the defining texts of Twentieth Century Europe.

In 1914 hundreds of young men in uniform took to writing poetry as a way of striving to express extreme emotion at the very edge of experience. The work of a handful of these, such as Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon, has endured to become what Andrew Motion has called ‘a sacred national text’.

Although ‘war poet’ tends traditionally to refer to active combatants, war poetry has been written by many ‘civilians’ caught up in conflict in other ways: Cesar Vallejo and WH Auden in the Spanish Civil War, Margaret Postgate Cole and Rose Macaulay in the First World War, James Fenton in Cambodia.

In the global, ‘total war’ of 1939-45, that saw the holocaust, the blitz and Hiroshima, virtually no poet was untouched by the experience of war. The same was true for the civil conflicts and revolutions in Spain and Eastern Europe. That does not mean, however, that every poet responded to war by writing directly about it. For some, the proper response of a poet was one of consciously (conscientiously) keeping silent.

War poetry is not necessarily ‘anti-war’. It is, however, about the very large questions of life: identity, innocence, guilt, loyalty, courage, compassion, humanity, duty, desire, death. Its response to these questions, and its relation of immediate personal experience to moments of national and international crisis, gives war poetry an extra-literary importance. Owen wrote that even Shakespeare seems ‘vapid’ after Sassoon: ‘not of course because Sassoon is a greater artist, but because of the subjects’.


War poetry is currently studied in every school in Britain. It has become part of the mythology of nationhood, and an expression of both historical consciousness and political conscience. The way we read – and perhaps revere – war poetry, says something about what we are, and what we want to be, as a nation.

Poetry of war

Poetry of war is of two kinds: poetry written about war by poets who may or may not have direct experience of it and poetry written by soldier-poets. The latter are very much a 20th-century phenomenon as whole societies were mobilized for total war. But poems about war are as old as poetry itself, beginning with the greatest poem in European culture, Homer's Iliad composed in the 8th century bc telling the legendary tales of Troy and war between Greek and Trojan.

As the features of modern ‘industrial’ war became discernible in the 19th century, so contemporary poets tried to clothe them in classical respectability. Tennyson's ‘six hundred’ were a modern-day equivalent to the Spartans at Thermopylae save that ‘someone had blundered’ and their sacrifice was unintentional. The fratricidal bloodshed of the American civil war was mourned by James Lowell and Walt Whitman. Time brought reconciliation and death united enemies, but as Julia Howe put it in The Battle Hymn of the Republic, God's purpose remained ‘to make men free’ after Christ's example.

Poets began to accept that war might be worth it when the cause was justified, which explains why the outbreak of war in 1914 was greeted with such apparent enthusiasm in verse. Rupert Brooke was not alone in seeing war as a consummation and it misrepresents his individual and often ironic poetry to view it as the result of naïve and youthful innocence. What is more, his generation, throughout Europe, had been prepared beforehand to describe their sentiments in poetic form. Catherine Reilly has identified details of 2, 225 published poets in English during this period. This can be matched by enormous poetic output across Europe. The nature of modern conscripted mass armies which faced each other provided the reason why it is WW I which sees the specific coining of the phrases ‘war poet’ and ‘war poetry’, as Robert Graves points out, himself one of the foremost ‘poets in arms’. On all sides soldier-poets could be found; men and women in the ranks (including army, navy, air, and support services) who were themselves poets or who used poetry as a medium for expression, as distinct from civilians who only wrote poetry about the war. The most famous and moving of the latter was W. B. Yeats.

A familiar list of British poets was given critical acclaim, mostly after the war, in the framework of a developing critique which saw a transition from youthful innocence in 1914 to knowing and outright condemnation in 1918. Beginning with Brooke, the roll passes through Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, and Siegfried Sassoon, and ends with Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen. Of these, only the middle three lived to tell the tale and could only escape from their post-war reputations in various forms of self-imposed exile. The public taste for ‘war poets’ was insatiable, especially for published collections of poets who had fallen in the war.

Their work had an oracular or prophetic immediacy for a civilian population generally starved of real news about the war. More recently, other poets have been ‘discovered’ and admitted to the roll, such as Edward Thomas and Ivor Gurney. Other European powers also produced war poets in their own right who became involved in the war. These included George Trakl and Yuan Goll writing in Germany, Guillaume Apollinaire in French, and Giuseppe Ungaretti and Gabiele d'Annunzio in Italian. It is possibly the nature of the war on the western front which produced such a volume of war poetry. The eastern front produced far less although the Russian poet Valery Brysov, working as a war correspondent, wrote a good deal. Other Russian war poets were Nikolai Gumilev and Velemir Khlebnikov. Russian poetry tended to the apocalyptic and visionary rather than preoccupation with the blood and ruin of the real war.

So strong was the desire for the insights of the soldier-poet that it inspired new outpourings in the 1930s during the Spanish civil war and, at the beginning of WW II, the question ‘where are the war poets?’ was answered in work of at least as high a standard as that of Owen and Sassoon, including the poetry of Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis, Frank Thompson, John Pudney, Henry Reed, and Alan Ross, to select only a small number. WW II produced little poetry of suffering in the West perhaps because of its nature, perhaps because it was seen as a ‘good war’. The greatest volume of poetry in this war came from the country which suffered most: Russia, notably the poetry of Anna Akhmatova and Aleksey Tvardovsky.

The lasting achievement of the ‘war poets’ in the 20th century is that they demonstrated that poetry should not follow blindly the political causes of the moment, should not serve the state or provide the new rallying cries, but should remain critical. Poetry about war since 1945 has embraced this rich and diverse legacy. From the therapeutic and popular poetry of Vietnam veterans, to be found in profusion on the internet, to the mannered criticisms of the Cold War and beyond in the work of the Liverpool Poets and Bob Dylan, or to the lyricism of Seamus Heaney's Requiem for the Croppies, the democratization of war poetry is sadly a reflection of the scale, frequency, and universality of the experience of war in our time.



http://www.warpoets.org/articles/what/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_poet