Poetry of war (see also literature and drama, the military in). 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. The poem is clearly based on much older oral forms. Virgil's Aeneid, written in the 1st century bc, tells the story of the Trojan Prince Aeneas and his adventures after the fall of Troy. Other civilizations also recorded war in poetic form from the earliest times.
The great Indian epic the Mahabharata tells of the futility of war between kin groups feuding over power and wealth. Among the earliest Hebrew poetry are poems on the wars of the Israelites. Early Celtic poems, although dating from the 6th century ad, refer to much older oral forms concerning their legendary wars in the heroic age. Poems such as the Welsh Gododdin testify to the celebration of the warrior ideal and its powerful attraction for poets.
Chinese civilization provides the earliest evidence of a continuous poetic tradition and from the 4th century bc poems about war are to be found. From ancient times, poets were fully aware of both the glories of heroic military action and its consequences in grief and destruction. Epic poems lauded both the warrior's courage and noble ideals as well as deploring the horror of war and its wastefulness. War poems were both reminders of past glories and awful warnings for the future.
The designs on the shield of Achilles, in Book XVIII of the Iliad, contrast scenes of peace and harmonious governance, harvest and the vintage with scenes of war and battle. The Roman poet Horace might, when prompted by his patron Caesar Augustus, construct odes to celebrate the ideal that to die for one's country is a ‘sweet and noble thing’ (‘dulce et decorum est pro patia mori’) but Roman poetry leaves us in no doubt that Cicero's peaceful good life is to be preferred.
Poetry in the heroic age established the ideal of the noble warrior. Beowulf, written in the 8th century ad, celebrated the achievements of a Scandinavian hero and his eventual death in combat with a dragon. The Anglo-Saxon fragment The Battle of Maldon, concerning a minor skirmish with the Vikings fought in ad 991 on the coast of Essex, makes personal loyalty the key quality of the warrior élite even in hopeless circumstances.
The full flowering of the ideals of knighthood and chivalry is found in poetry in the high Middle Ages. Chaucer's Knight in the Canterbury Tales embodies both martial valour and humility: ‘He loved chivalrye, Trouthe and honour, freedom and curteisye’. The revival and elaboration of Arthur's Camelot reach their most complete evocation in Sir Thomas Malory's great cycle Morte D'Arthur, first published by Caxton in 1485. How far chivalry can be interpreted as providing rules for war during European conflicts such as the Hundred Years War or in the many Crusades from the 11th century onwards is a matter of dispute among military historians, but among western poets the chivalric ideal was the main poetic convention during the Middle Ages. War poetry arose in similar feudal societies in the East such as Japan where the samurai code was also the subject for poets. Like their European counterparts samurai themselves were expected to be practised in the fine arts including poetry, composing five-line verses known as tanka when not actually fighting.
It might be suggested that the coming of gunpowder curtailed chivalric war poetry as the experience of the Thirty Years War and other conflicts in the 17th century provided evidence enough of the fearsome impact of firepower as an addition to war's grim reality. However, there is an exception: Tasso's Gerusalemme Liberata (Jerusalem Liberated), one of the most important works of Italian literature, deals with the Crusades and was written in 1581. Shakespeare's dissolute Falstaff condemned honour in war as merely a ‘word’ in King Henry IV, Part I, but the protagonist embodied it. The sentiments lingered in the verses of the cavalier poets in Britain and only fizzled out at the beginning of the 18th century, save in the descriptions of the Royal Navy's sea fights where the ideal of the noble warrior continued to be embodied in the deeds of Britain's sea captains. Professional soldiers of this age did not appear to have time for verse.
Poets in the age of Romanticism revived the ideal of the noble warrior especially when inspired by the defence of liberty or new nationalist or revolutionary fervour, although Wordsworth's ‘Happy Warrior’ is offset by Coleridge's reminder in ‘Fears in Solitude’, written in 1798, that no soldier who fell in battle ‘passed off to Heaven, translated and not killed’. To him war remained a horrific business and should make us tremble even if it is necessary for our self-defence.
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.
Bibliography
- Bowra, Sir Maurice, Poetry and the First World War: The Taylorian Lecture 1961 (Oxford, 1961).
- Cross, Tim, The Lost Voices of World War 1 (London, 1988).
- Featherstone, Simon, War Poetry: An Introductory Reader (London, 1995).
- Harrison, Michael, and Stuart-Clark, Christopher (eds.), Peace and War: A Collection of Poems (Oxford, 1989).
- Reilly, Catherine W. English Poetry of the First World War: A Bibliography (George, 1978).
- Stallworthy, John (ed.), The Oxford Book of War Poetry (Oxford, 1984)
— Bob Bushaway
