A war poet is a poet writing in time of and on the subject of war. The term, which is applied especially to those in military service during World War I,[1] was documented as early as 1848 in reference to German revolutionary poet,[2] Georg Herwegh.[3]
Contents
[hide] * 1 World War I * 1.1 In England * 1.2 In other countries * 2 The Spanish Civil War * 3 World War II * 3.1 In England * 3.2 In America * 4 Later American war poets * 5 References * 6 Notes * 7 External links
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World War I[edit]
See also category: World War I poets
In England[edit]
For the first time, a substantial number of important English poets were soldiers, writing about their experiences of war. A number of them died on the battlefield, most famously Edward Thomas,Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, and Charles Sorley. Others including Robert Graves,[4] Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon survived but were scarred by their experiences, and this was reflected in their poetry. Robert H. Ross[5] characterised the English "war poets" as a subgroup of the Georgian Poetry writers.
Many poems by British war poets were published in newspapers and then collected into anthologies. Several of these early anthologies were published during the war and were very popular, though the tone of the poetry changed as the war progressed. One of the wartime anthologies was The Muse in Arms, published in 1917. Several anthologies were also published in the years after the war had ended.
In November 1985, a slate memorial was unveiled in Poet's Corner commemorating 16 poets of the Great War: Richard Aldington, Laurence Binyon, Edmund Blunden, Rupert Brooke, Wilfrid Gibson, Robert Graves, Julian Grenfell, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, Robert Nichols, Wilfred Owen, Herbert Read, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Sorley and Edward Thomas.[6]
In other countries[edit]
Canadian war poets of this period included John McCrae, who wrote In Flanders Fields, and Robert W. Service who worked as an ambulance driver for the Canadian Red Cross and was a war correspondent for the Canadian government.
Russia also produced a number of significant war poets including Nikolay Gumilyov (whose war poems were assembled in the collection The Quiver (1916)), Alexander Blok, Ilya Ehrenburg (who published war poems in his book "On the Eve"), and Nikolay Semenovich Tikhonov (who published the book Orda (The horde) in 1922).[7]
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The Spanish Civil War[edit]
The Spanish Civil War produced a substantial volume[8] of poetry in English (as well as in Spanish). There were English-speaking poets serving in the Spanish Civil War on both sides. Among those fighting with the Republicans as volunteers in the International Brigades were Clive Branson, John Cornford, Charles Donnelly, Alex McDade and Tom Wintringham.[9] On the Nationalist side, the most famous English language poet of the Spanish Civil War remains South African bard Roy Campbell.
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World War II[edit]
See also category: World War II poets
In England[edit]
By World War II the role of "war poet" was so well-established in the public mind that "Where are the war poets?" became a topic of discussion.[citation needed]. Robert Graves gave a radio talk 'Why has this War produced no War Poets?' in October 1941 and Stephen Spender also addressed the question at about the same time (as did T. S. Eliot a year later). Alun Lewis and Keith Douglas are the standard critical choices amongst British war poets of this time.[citation needed]
In America[edit]
The American poet Karl Shapiro made a reputation based on poetry that he wrote during the war and published in his debut book of verse, V-Letter and Other Poems (1945). His book won the Pulitzer Prize that same year. Also, while serving in the U.S. Army, the American poet Randall Jarrell published his second book of poems, Little Friend, Little Friend (1945) based on his wartime experiences. The book includes one of Jarrell's best known war poems, "The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner." In his follow-up book, Losses (1948), he also focused on the war. The poet Robert Lowell stated publicly that he thought Jarrell had written "the best poetry in English about the Second World War."[10]
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Later American war poets[edit]
The Korean War produced the American war poets Rolando Hinojosa and William Wantling. [11]
The Vietnam war produced a number of war poets, including Michael Casey whose début collection, Obscenities, drew on his work as military police officer in Vietnam's Quang Nga province. The book won the 1972 Yale Younger Poets Award. Other prominent Vietnam War poets include W. D. Ehrhart, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Bruce Weigl.[12]
Most recently, the Iraq War has produced some notable war poets including Brian Turner whose début collection, Here, Bullet, is based on his experience as an infantry team leader with the 3rdStryker Brigade Combat Team from November 2003 until November 2004 in Iraq. The book won numerous awards including the 2005 Beatrice Hawley Award, the 2006 Maine Literary Award in Poetry, and the 2006 Northern California Book Award in Poetry.[13][14] The book also was an Editor's Choice in The New York Times and received significant attention from the press including reviews and notices on NPR and in The New Yorker, The Global and Mail, and the Library Journal. In The New Yorker, Dana Goodyear wrote that, "As a war poet, [Brian Turner] sidesteps the classic distinction between romance and irony, opting instead for the surreal." [15]
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References[edit]
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 ofVietnam 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.

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