The Old Testament
TheThe Trojan War
''The Iliad''
'' The Iliad'' is an epic poem in''Posthomerica''
The events between the cremation of Hector and the Fall of Troy are expanded upon in the 4th century epic poem '' Posthomerica'', byPre-Islamic Persia
''Ayadgar-i Zariran''
Although its author is unknown, ''''Shahnameh''
The Wars between the Welsh and the Saxons
King Arthur
Thomas Gwynn Jones' hugely influential awdl ''The Battle of Catraeth
The foundational masterpiece of Welsh poetry, '' Y Gododdin'', tells howThe Battle of Brunanburh
The Battle of Brunanburh was fought inMuslim conquest of Armenia
Viking Age
Egill Skallagrímsson
According to '' Egil's Saga'' byThe Battle of Ethandune
G.K. Chesterton's 1911 poem ''The Ballad of the White Horse'' retells the story of the Battle of Ethandune, in which an army from the Anglo-Saxon Kingdom of Wessex led by King Alfred the Great defeated the Great Heathen Army led by King Guthrum of Kingdom of East Anglia, East-Anglia on a date between 6 and 12 May 878.The Battle of Maldon
TheKing Brian Boru
The Brussels Manuscript of the ''Cogad Gáedel re Gallaib'', which is believed to have been written around 1635 by Franciscan friar and historian Mícheál Ó Cléirigh, contains many Irish war poems not found elsewhere. Like the other two surviving manuscripts, the Brussels Manuscript relates the wars between the Irish clans and the Hiberno-Norse, Norse and Danish invaders, and celebrates the ultimate rise to power of Brian Boru as High King of Ireland. The ''Cogad'' alleges that as the Hiberno-Norse King Ivar of Limerick attempted to extend his power into Thomond, the Dalcassians, Dál gCais Chief of the Name, Mathgamain mac Cennétig, and his younger brother, Brian Boru, "transported their people and chattels across the River Shannon, Shannon, westwards, where they dispersed themselves among the forests and woods of the country." Mathgamain, who had defeated King Ivar and claimed the List of kings of Munster, High Kingship of Munster at the Rock of Cashel, was captured and assassinated in 976 by Donnubán mac Cathail and Máel Muad mac Brain, who then reigned as King of Munster for the following two years. Brian, the Tanist of his Clan, was so moved by news of his brother's assassination, that he is said to have publicly cried out and vowed vengeance.Norman invasion of Ireland
''The Song of Dermot and the Earl'' is an anonymous Anglo-Norman language, Anglo-Norman verse chronicle written in the early 13th century in England. It retells the 1170 Anglo-Norman invasion of Ireland, invasion of Ireland by Diarmait Mac Murchada, the deposed Chief of the Name, Irish clan chief Kingdom of Leinster, King of Leinster, and Richard de Clare, 2nd Earl of Pembroke, Strongbow in 1170 (the "earl" in the title), the wars that followed between the invaders and Ascall mac Ragnaill, Haskulf Thorgilsson, the last Hiberno-Norse King of Dublin and Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair, the last High King of Ireland, and the subsequent visit to Ireland by King Henry II of England in 1172. The chronicle survived only in a single manuscript which was re-discovered in the 17th century at Lambeth Palace in London. The manuscript bears no title, but has been commonly dubbed ''The Song of Dermot and the Earl'' since Goddard Henry Orpen published a diplomatic edition under this title in 1892.Kievan Rus'
''The Tale of Igor's Campaign'' (''Слово о пълкѹ Игоревѣ''), an epic poem in Old East Slavic language, Old East Slavic, describes a failed raid made in the year 1185 by an army led by Kniaz, Prince Igor Svyatoslavich of Prince of Novgorod-Seversk, Novgorod-Seversk (in the Chernigov principality of Kievan Rus' in modern Ukraine) against the Polovtsians (Cumans), paganism, Pagan Turkic peoples, Turkic nomads living along the southern banks of the Don River, Russia, Don River. The Prince and his warriors witnessed the Solar eclipse of 1 May 1185, which was interpreted by the Rus' warriors as a message from the Christian God and as a very, very bad omen. According to ''The Lay'', Prince Igor gave a long speech to his warriors and managed to allay their fears. The poem then goes on to relate how the Prince's army was catastrophically defeated in battle by the Cumans upon the banks of the Don River and how only fifteen Rus' warriors were spared. The Cumans then went on a massive retaliatory invasion of Kievan Rus'. Meanwhile, Prince Igor and his son were the personal prisoners of Khan (title), Khan Könchek (Cuman), Konchak. Although closely guarded by his captors, Prince Igor was permitted considerable freedom and was allowed to falconry, hunt with a falcon. Ultimately, the Prince escaped with the assistance of one of his Cuman guards and returned to Christendom, to the joy of all the people of Kievan Rus'. The poem ends there, but the Prince's son, Vladimir III Igorevich, who had entered into an arranged marriage with the Khan's daughter, returned a few years later with Princess Svoboda, his Cuman bride. The Khan's daughter was baptized and their marriage was solemnized in a Byzantine Rite ceremony conducted inThe Edwardian Conquest of Wales
After the Edwardian Conquest of Wales, conquest of Wales by King Edward I of England and the death of Prince Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, who is often called "Llewellyn the Last," during an unsuccessful uprising in 1282, the Welsh poet Gruffudd ab yr Ynad Coch wrote in an elegy:The Scottish Wars of Independence
In 1375, Scottish Makar, or court poet, John Barbour (poet), John Barbour completed the epic poem ''The Brus'', which retells and celebrates the deeds of Robert the Bruce, who led the Scottish people in their Scottish Wars of Independence, Wars of Independence against Kings Edward I of England, Edward I and Edward II of England and who ultimately becameThe Battle of Kulikovo
The 15th century poem ''Zadonschina'', which draws upon the same tradition of Pre-Christian Slavic war poetry as ''The Tale of Igor'', was composed to glorify the victory of Dmitri Donskoi, Grand Duchy of Moscow, Great Prince of Moscow over Mamai and the Mongols of the Golden Horde at the Battle of Kulikovo along the Don River on 8 September 1380. The poem survives in six medieval manuscripts. The author of ''Zadonshchina'' is believed to have been a certain Sofonii (Russian: Софоний) from Ryazan’. His name as the author of the text is mentioned in two surviving manuscript copies. Sofonii was probably one of the courtiers of Vladimir the Bold, a cousin of Great Prince Dmitri Donskoi, the hero of the poem.The War of the League of Cambrai
The Battle of Flodden on 9 September 1513, in which an English army led by the Thomas Howard, 2nd Duke of Norfolk, Earl of Surrey defeated and killed King James IV of Scotland and gave no quarter to an estimated 12,000 Noblesse, nobles and commons recruited from both the Scottish Highlands and Lowlands, is sometimes considered the end of the Middle Ages in the British Isles. Even though King James was married to Margaret Tudor, the sister of King Henry VIII of England, the Scottish King's torn and bloodstained surcoat was sent as a trophy of war to King Henry, who was then invading France, by his wife, Queen Catherine of Aragon. The battle remains one of Scotland's horrific military defeats. The loss not only of the King, but also a large portion of the nobles, commons and princes of the Church, was a catastrophe for the kingdom. King James IV's one-year old son, James V of Scotland, James V, was crowned a mere three weeks after the death of his father, and his childhood was to prove fraught with political upheaval. By far the most famous war poem about the battle is the poem in Scots language, Scots, ''The Flowers of the Forest'' by Lady Jean Elliot. According to legend, Lady Jean was riding in the family coach one night during the 1750s when her brother Gilbert allegedly wagered a pair of gloves or set of ribbons that his sister could not write a ballad about the Battle of Flodden Field. When her brother saw the finished poem, he knew, 'that he had lost his wager and Scotland had gained a ballad which would never die.' In 1755, Lady Jean published the lyrics anonymously and ''The Flowers of the Forest'' was at first thought to be an ancient ballad. However, Robert Burns suspected it was an imitation, and together with Ramsay and Sir Walter Scott eventually identified the author. In his song ''The Green Fields of France'', which denounces the waste of an entire generation of young men in the trench warfare, trenches of theThe Siege of Szigetvár
The 1566 Battle of Szigetvár, in which a vastly outnumbered army of 2,300 Croatian and Hungarian soldiers in service to the Habsburg monarchy and under the command of Nikola IV Zrinski, the Ban (title), Ban of Croatia, defended the Hungarian Szigetvár, fortress of the same name against an enormous Ottoman Empire, Ottoman army under the command of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, has thrice been made the subject ofThe Battle of Lepanto
The Spanish novelist and poet Miguel de Cervantes served in combat during the Battle of Lepanto in 1571 and later retold his experiences in the sonnet form. G.K. Chesterton retold the story of the same battle in his poem ''Lepanto (poem), Lepanto'', which was written in 1911 and published in 1915.The Thirty Years War
The Thirty Years War, which took place largely within the Holy Roman Empire from 1618 to 1648, caused between 4.5 and 8 million deaths, while some areas of Germany experienced population decreases of more than 50%. It remains one of the most destructive wars in European history In her book ''The Real Personage of Mother Goose'', author Katherine Elwes Thomas alleges that the English nursery rhyme ''The Queen of Hearts (poem), The Queen of Hearts'' is about the events that caused the outbreak of the Thirty Years War. The King and Queen of Hearts are, according to Elwes Thomas, a thinly disguised description of Elector Palatine (german: Kurfürst von der Pfalz) Frederick V of the Palatinate, Friedrich V and his wife Elizabeth of Bohemia, Elizabeth Stuart. The Queen's decision to bake tarts refers to her persuasion of her German Reformed Church, Calvinist husband to accept the Czech nobility's offer of the throne of the Kingdom of Bohemia, after the local officials of "The Knave of Hearts", the Ferdinand II, Holy Roman Emperor, Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II, Bohemian Revolt, were overthrown in a palace coup known as the Third Defenestration of Prague. After accepting the offer, Friedrich and Elizabeth reigned as King and Queen of Bohemia until their defeat at the Battle of White Mountain on 8 November 1620 – only a year and four days after their coronation. Palatinate campaign, Imperial soldiers then invaded Friedrich's ancestral lands along the Rhine and drove him and his family into exile in the Dutch Republic. Elector Palatine Friedrich V and his heirs were then attainder, attainted in a decree by the Holy Roman Emperor and continued to live in exile. Friedrich and Elizabeth's son was restored to the Electoral Throne of the Electoral Palatinate, Palatinate only after the war was ended by the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. InThe Jacobite Uprising of 1715
In the song ''Là Sliabh an t-Siorraim'', Sìleas na Ceapaich, the daughter of the 15th Scottish clan chief, Chief of Clan MacDonald of Keppoch, sings of the joy upon the arrival of Prince James Francis Edward Stuart, the indecisive Battle of Sheriffmuir and the state of uneasy anticipation between the battle and the end of the Jacobite rising of 1715. The most iconic poem by Sìleas, however, inspired by the events of the Uprising was only completed many years later. When Ailean Dearg, the Chief of Clan Macdonald of Clanranald had been mortally wounded at the Battle of Sherrifmuir, Alasdair Dubh, 11th Chief of Clan MacDonald of Glengarry rallied the faltering warriors of Clan Donald by throwing up his Highland bonnet and crying ''Buillean an-diugh, tuiream a-màireach!'' ("Blows today, mourning tomorrow!"). Following Alasdair Dubh's death (c. 1721 or 1724), he was eulogized by Sìleas in the song-poem ''Alistair à Gleanna Garadh'', which hearkens back to the mythological poetry attributed to Amergin Glúingel and which remains an iconic and oft mimesis, imitated work of Scottish Gaelic literature.Jacobite Uprising of 1745
In Scottish Gaelic literature, the greatest war poet of the Jacobite rising of 1745 is Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair, a tacksman from the Clanranald branch of Clan Donald. Jacobitism, Jacobite songs penned by Alasdair such as: ''Òran Nuadh'' – "A New Song", ''Òran nam Fineachan Gaidhealach'' – "The Song of the Highland Clans" and ''Òran do'n Phrionnsa'' – "A Song to the Prince," serve as testament to the Bard's passionate loyalty to the House of Stuart. According to literary historian John Mackenzie (1806–1848), John MacKenzie, these poems were sent to Seven Men of Moidart#Aeneas MacDonald, Aeneas MacDonald, the brother of the Clanranald tacksman of Kinlochmoidart, who was a banker in Paris. Aeneas read the poems aloud to Prince Charles Edward Stuart in English translation and the poems played a major role in convincing the Prince to come to Scotland and to initiate the Jacobite Rising of 1745. Alasdair served as the Prince's tutor in Gaelic and as a captain of the Clanranald men from the raising of the Standard at Glenfinnan until the final defeat at the Battle of Culloden. Other poems about the Uprising were written in both Gaelic and English by John Roy Stewart, who served as colonel of the Edinburgh Regiment and a close and trusted confidant of Prince Charles Edward Stuart. The Irish poem ''Mo Ghile Mear'', which was composed by the County CorkAmerican Revolution
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's 1860 poem ''Paul Revere's Ride'' both retells and fictionalizes the efforts of Boston silversmith Paul Revere to warn Patriot (American Revolution), Patriot militia of an imminent attack by the British Army on the night before the Battles of Lexington and Concord in April 1775. Longfellow's poem was first published in the January 1861 issue of ''The Atlantic Monthly'' and later included as part of Longfellow's 1863 poetry collection ''Tales of a Wayside Inn''. Ralph Waldo Emerson's 1837 poem ''Concord Hymn'' pays tribute to the Patriot militia at the Battle of Concord and famously says that they fired, "The shot heard round the world." David Humphreys (soldier), David Humphreys wrote the first sonnet in American poetry in 1776, right before he left Yale College to fight as a colonel in the Continental Army during the American Revolutionary War. Colonel Humphreys' sonnet was titled ''Addressed to my Friends at Yale College, on my leaving them to join the Army''. Among the "earliest Scottish Gaelic poets in North America about whom we know anything", is Kintail-born Iain mac Mhurchaidh, a poet from Clan Macrae, who emigrated to Moore County, North Carolina, Moore County in the Colony of North Carolina around 1774, fought as a Loyalist (American Revolution), Loyalist during the American Revolution, and composed Gaelic war poetry there until his death around 1780. According to tradition he fought as a Loyalist under the command of Major Patrick Ferguson at the Battle of King's Mountain on October 7, 1780. Although this battle has traditionally, "been characterized as a confrontation between Loyalist Highlanders and Ulster Scots people, Scotch-Irish revolutionaries", there were in reality Gaelic-speakers fighting on both sides. According to one source, Iain mac Mhuirchaidh, in a revival of, "the diplomatic immunity of the ancient Celtic bards", walked between the opposing armies during the battle and, in an attempt to convert his fellow Gaels among the Patriot militia and the Overmountain Men, he sang the song, ''Nam faighte làmh-an-uachdar air luchd nan còta ruadha'' ("Even if the upper hand were gained against the Redcoats"). In the poem, Iain mac Mhurchaidh called the American Revolution against King George every bit as unnatural as disrespect against one's earthly or heavenly father. He also threatened that Patriots who did not submit to the British Monarchy would be treated like both real and suspected Jacobitism, Jacobites had been treated in the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, which is still referred to in the Highlands and Islands as ''Bliadhna nan Creach'' ("The Year of the Pillaging"). In may well have been in retaliation for this very poem that, according to one tradition, Iain mac Mhurchaidh, subsequently, "suffered an excruciating death", at Patriot hands. In 1783, the year that saw the end of the American Revolution and the beginning of the Highland Clearances in Inverness-shire, Cionneach MacCionnich (1758–1837), a poet from Clan MacKenzie who was born at Castle Leather near Inverness, composed the only surviving Gaelic poem of the era which takes up the Patriot, rather than the Loyalist, banner - ''The Lament of the North''. In the poem, MacCionnich mocks the Scottish clan chiefs for becoming absentee landlords, for both rackrenting and Highland Clearances, evicting their clansmen en masse in favor of sheep, and of "spending their wealth uselessly", in London. He accuses King George III of England both of tyranny and of steering the ship of state into shipwreck. MacCionnich also argues that truth is on the side of George Washington and the Continental Army and that the Gaels would do well to emigrate from the Highlands and Islands to the United States before the King and the landlords take every farthing they have left.''Ali Pashiad''
During the early 19th century, Albanians, Albanian Muslim bard Haxhi Shehreti composed the epic poem ''Alipashiad''. The work is inspired by and named after Ali Pasha of Ioannina, Ali Pasha, the governor of the Pashalik of Ioannina in Ottoman Greece, describing, in heroic style, his life, and his military campaigns. The poem is written in Dimotiki, Demotic Greek, which Shehreti considered a far more prestigious language than Turkish language, Turkish or Albanian language, Albanian. Historically, the ''Alipashiad'' is unique in Greek poetry due to its having been written from an Islamic point of view. The ''Alipashiad'', which consists of 15,000 lines, was written in the early 19th century, when Ali Pasha was at his height as the semi-independent ruler of much of Ottoman Greece. Apart from describing Ali's adventures the poem describes Ioannina, which was a center of Greek culture and Greek Enlightenment, renaissance that time, as well as the activities of the local mercenaries (Armatoles) and revolutionaries (Klephts) that Ali had to deal with. According to the ''Encyclopedia of Islam'', however, after his 1820 outlawry and 1822 death while leading an uprising against Sultan Mahmud II of the Ottoman Empire, Ali Pasha became, inThe Greek War of Independence
The Greek War of Independence raged from 1821 to 1830 and which resulted in the independence of the Greek people after more than four hundred years of rule by the Ottoman Empire. The uprising and its many predecessors also produced many great composers of war poetry. In English poetry, Lord Byron, who had fled England ahead of legal proceedings being filed by his many creditors and immediately following the very public breakup of his marriage to Lady Byron, is by far the most famous of these poets. Byron travelled to Greece during the fighting and joined the Greek rebels. Byron also glorified the Greek cause in many of his poems, which continued to be widely read. In 1824, Byron died at the age of 36 from a fever contracted after the First Siege of Missolonghi, First and Second Siege of Missolonghi. To this day, the Greek people revere him as a folk hero, national hero. Even though he was strangled inside Nebojša Tower in Belgrade by order of Sultan Selim III of the House of Osman in 1798 while planning a Greek uprising with the assistance of Napoleon Bonaparte, the nationalist verse of Rigas Feraios (1757–1798) helped inspire the Greek War of Independence and he remains a major figure in Greek poetry. In his poems, Feraios urged the Greek people to leave the cities for the mountains and to fight in the mountains to gain their independence. Feraios' last words are said to have been: "I have sown a rich seed; the hour is coming when my country will reap its glorious fruits". Dionysios Solomos (1798–1857), another poet of the Greek War of Independence, wrote the ''Hymn to Liberty'', which is now the Greek national anthem, in 1823, just two years after the Greeks rose against the Ottoman Empire.It is also the national anthem of Cyprus, which adopted it in 1966. Solomon's is considered to be the national poet of Greece. To this day, many songs are sung worldwide on 25 March by members of the Greek diaspora to Celebration of the Greek Revolution, celebrate Greek independence and showcase their respect for the many Greek lives that were lost during the more four hundred years of Ottoman rule.German Revolutions of 1848–49
Georg Herwegh who wrote during the German revolutions of 1848–49 is an example of a 19th-century German war poet.Herwegh, Georg, The Columbia Encyclopedia (2008)Hungarian Revolution of 1848
The Hungarian Revolution of 1848 was, in large part, inspired by the poetry of Sándor Petőfi, who is still considered Hungary's national poet. The uprising began on 15 March 1848, when Petőfi read his poem ''Nemzeti Dal'' ("National Song") aloud on the steps of the Hungarian National Museum in Budapest. The poem triggered a massive demonstration in the streets of the city, which forced the Emperor's representatives to accept the end of censorship and the release of all political prisoners. The Revolution eventually resulted in a civil war between a Hungarian Republicanism, Republican Government led by Lajos Kossuth and Hungarian Monarchism, Monarchists, many of whom were ethnic minorities, who remained loyal to the House of Hapsburg. In response, Tsar Nicholas I of Russia, who had been raised on stories of the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror, ordered the Imperial Russian Army to enter Hungary and to ally themselves with the monarchists. Despite efforts by General Józef Bem to keep him out of danger, Petőfi insisted on going into combat against the Monarchists and their Russian allies. Petőfi is believed to have either been killed in action during the Battle of Segesvár on 31 July 1849, or to have subsequently died in a Tsarist Katorga, penal colony near Barguzin (rural locality), Barguzin, in Siberia. At the time of his presumed death, Petőfi was only 26 years old. Despite the defeat of the uprising, Petőfi's poetry and nostalgia for the 1848 Revolution have become a major part of Hungary's national identity. According to Reg Gadney, the anti-communist Hungarian Revolution of 1956 began on 23 October 1956, when 20,000 student protesters gathered around the statue of Sándor Petőfi on the Pest, Hungary, Pest side of the Danube River. During the gathering, ''Nemzeti Dal'' was recited to the demonstrators by Imre Sinkovics, a young actor from the Budapest National Theater. The demonstrators then read out a list of sixteen demands to the Communist Government of Hungary, laid wreaths at the foot of the statue, and crossed the Danube to Buda, Hungary, Buda, where the demonstration continued before the statue of General Józef Bem. Like Petőfi's first reading of the poem on 15 March 1848, the demonstration grew into a city-wide affair, and then into a temporarily successful nationwide uprising against the existing regime, which was only quelled by the intervention of the Red Army, Russian Army.Crimean War
Probably the most famous 19th-century war poem is Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade (poem), The Charge of the Light Brigade", which he supposedly wrote in only a few minutes after reading an account of the battle in ''The Times''. As poet laureate, he often wrote verses about public events. It immediately became hugely popular, even reaching the troops in the Crimean War, Crimea, where it was distributed in pamphlet form. Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Last of the Light Brigade", written some forty years after the appearance of "The Charge of the Light Brigade", in 1891, focuses on the terrible hardships faced in old age by veterans of the Crimean War, as exemplified by the cavalry men of the Light Brigade, in an attempt to shame the British public into offering financial assistance. Various lines from the poem are randomly quoted by Mr. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf's ''To The Lighthouse''.American Civil War
As theBoer War
Rudyard Kipling wrote poetry in support of the British cause in the Second Boer War, Boer War, including the well known "Lichtenberg", which is about a combatant's death in a foreign land. Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and others wrote also poems relating to the Boer War. Hardy's poems include "Drummer Hodge", and "The Man He Killed". '"Swinburne regularly donated work to the papers to rouse the spirit, from 'Transvaal', with the infamous closing line, 'Strike, England, and strike home', to 'The Turning of the Tide'." During the last phase of the war in the former Orange Free State, the Afrikaner people of Winburg taunted the Scottish regiments in the local British Army garrison with a parody of the Jacobitism, Jacobite ballad ''Bonnie Dundee'', which was generally sung in English. The parody celebrated the guerrilla warfare of Boer Commando leader Christiaan De Wet. : De Wet he is mounted, he rides up the street : The English skedaddle an A1 retreat! : And the commander swore: They've got through the net : That's been spread with such care for Christiaan De Wet. : There are hills beyond Winburg and Boers on each hill : Sufficient to thwart ten generals' skill : There are stout-hearted burghers 10,000 men set : On following the Mausers of Christian De Wet. : Then away to the hills, to the veld, to the rocks : Ere we own a usurper we'll crouch with the fox : And tremble false Jingoes amidst all your glee : Ye have not seen the last of my Mausers and me!World War I
In a 2020 article for the ''St Austin Review'' about American WWI poet John Allan Wyeth (poet), John Allan Wyeth, Dana Gioia writes, "TheSerbia
Serbian World War I poets include: Milutin Bojić, Vladislav Petković Dis, Miloš Crnjanski, Dušan Vasiljev, Ljubomir Micić, Proka Jovkić, Rastko Petrović, Stanislav Vinaver, Branislav Milosavljević, Milosav Jelić, Vladimir Stanimirović. and others.Austria-Hungary
There were also war poets from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Géza Gyóni, a Hungarian poet with twin beliefs in socialism and anti-militarism, had unhappily served in the Austro-Hungarian Army prior to the outbreak of war in 1914. In response, Gyóni had written the great pacifist poem, ''Cézar, én nem megyek'' ("Caesar, I Will Not Go"). But after the police investigation into the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand revealed the involvement of Serbian Army military intelligence chief Colonel Dragutin Dimitrijević, Gyóni, like many other Austro-Hungarians, accepted the Imperial Government's allegations of, "a plot against us," and the necessity of fighting, "a defensive war." Some Hungarian intellectuals felt that World War I provided an excellent opportunity to pay back the House of Romanov for Nicholas I of Russia, Tsar Nicholas I's pivotal role in the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. Gyóni re-enlisted and seemed initially to enjoy the soldier's life, regularly writing poetry that was sent back home from the front for publication. According to Peter Sherwood, "Gyóni's first, still elated, poems from the Polish Front recall the 16th century Hungarian poet Bálint Balassi's soldiers' songs of the marches, written during the campaign against Janissaries, the Turks."Tim Cross (1988), ''The Lost Voices of World War I'', p. 349. During the Siege of Przemyśl, Gyóni wrote poems to encourage the city's defenders and these verses were published there, under the title, ''Lengyel mezőkön, tábortúz melett'' (''By Campfire on the Fields of Poland''). A copy reached Budapest by aeroplane, which was an unusual feat in those days.Erika Papp Faber (2012), ''A Sampler of Hungarian Poetry'', Romanika Kiadó, Budapest. p. 120. In Hungary, the politician Jenő Rákosi, used the popularity of Gyóni's collection to set up Gyóni as a brave soldier poet and as the paragon of the Hungarian poetic ideal, as opposed to Endre Ady, who was a pacifist. Meanwhile, Gyóni's poetry took an increasingly depressive turn. According to Erika Papp Faber, "His leaning toward Socialism and his anti-militarist attitude were, for a brief time, suspended, as he was caught up in the general patriotic fervor at the outbreak of World War I. But once he experienced the horrors of war first hand, he soon lost his romantic notions, and returned to the more radical positions of his youth, as it evident in his further volumes." One of his poems from this period, ''Csak egy éjszakára'' (''For Just One Night''), in which he calls for Hungary's war profiteers, industrialists, and armchair patriots to come and spend just one night in the trenches, became a prominent anti-war poem and its popularity has lasted well beyond the end of the First World War. Gyóni was ultimately captured by the Imperial Russian Army after the surrender of Przemyśl in 1915. Gyóni wrote a poem in captivity which represented his attitude to life entitled ''Magyar bárd sorsa'' (''A Hungarian bard's fate'').Germany
Despite the last-ditch efforts of Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, Wilhelm II and Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Nicholas II to avert the outbreak of the Great War through the Willy-Nicky Telegrams, the German people greeted the international crisis of August 1914 with patriotic euphoria. Hundreds of thousands of people filled the streets of Berlin, singing patriotic songs and loudly cheering the Austro-Hungarian Ambassador, the Kaiser, and their elected representatives. So great was the popular enthusiasm, that both the Kaiser and politicians from every political party concluded that if they did not go to war, they would never survive politically. A few anti-war rallies were organized by elements of the Social Democratic Party of Germany, but even that Party's far-left ultimately bowed to the popular will and agreed to support the war effort. Even though historians of World War I poetry have traditional focused on English poets, there were also many talented German war poets, such as Rudolf G. Binding and Heinrich Mann. August Stramm, who is considered the first of the expressionists, has been called by Jeremy Adler one of, "the most innovative poets of theFrance
Amongst French World War I poets are the following: Guillaume Apollinaire, Adrien Bertrand, Yvan Goll, and Charles Péguy. Upon the outbreak of war in 1914, Blaise Cendrars, a Francophone Swiss people, Swiss poet of partially Scottish diaspora, Scottish descent from La Chaux-de-Fonds, Canton of Neuchâtel, was living in Paris and playing a major role in modernist poetry. When it began, Cedrars and Italian writer Ricciotto Canudo appealed to other foreign artists, writers, and intellectuals to join the French Army. He joined the French Foreign Legion. He was sent to the front line in the Somme (department), Somme where from mid-December 1914 until February 1915, he was in the trenches at Frise, Somme, Frise (La Grenouillère and Bois de la Vache). During the Second Battle of Champagne in September 1915, Cendrars lost his right arm and was discharged from the French Army. Cendrars later described his war experiences in the books ''La Main coupée'' ("The Severed Hand") and ''J'ai tué'' ("I Have Killed"), and it is the subject of his poem "Orion" in ''Travel Notes'': :"It is my star :It is in the shape of a hand :It is my hand gone up to the sky..." The French Symbolist poet Louis Pergaud considered himself a Pacifism, Pacifist and, at the outbreak of war in 1914, he tried in vain to register as a conscientious objector. Instead, he was conscripted into the French Army and sent to the trenches of the Western Front (World War I), Western Front. On 7 April 1915, Pergaud's regiment attacked the Imperial German Army's trenches near Fresnes-en-Woëvre, during which he was wounded. Pergaud fell into barbed wire, where he became trapped. Several hours later, German soldiers rescued him and other wounded French soldiers and took them to a temporary field hospital behind German lines. On the morning of 8 April 1915, Pergaud and many other POWs were killed by friendly fire, when a French artillery barrage destroyed the hospital. Jean de La Ville de Mirmont, a Huguenot poet from Bourdeaux, was overjoyed by the outbreak of the war. According to Ian Higgins, "Although unfit for active service, Jean de La Ville de Mirmont volunteered immediately when the war broke out, but it was only after being repeatedly turned down that he finally managed to enlist."Tim Cross (1989), ''The Lost Voices of World War I: An International Anthology of Writers, Poets, and Playwrights'', p. 304. In 1914, he was called to the front with the rank of sergeant of the 57th Infantry Regiment. According to Ian Higgins, "It has been suggested that here at last was the great adventure he had been longing for. Certainly, the prelude to the war 'interested' him, and he was keen to witness and, if possible, take part in a war which was probably going to 'set the whole of Europe on fire.' His ''Lettres de guerre'' develop movingly from initial enthusiasm for the defense of Civilization and a conviction that the enemy was the entire German people, through a growing irritation with chauvinism, chauvinistic brainwashing and the flagrancy of what would now be called the 'disinformation' peddled through the French press (so much more heavily censored than the British, he said), to an eventual admiration, at the front, for the heroism and humanity often shown by the enemy." La Ville de Mirmont was mentioned in French Army dispatches on 4 November 1914. On 28 November, however, he was buried alive by a landmine explosion at Moussy-Verneuil, Verneuil, near Chemin des Dames. Sergeant de La Ville de Mirmont was still alive when his comrades dug him out, but the explosion had broken his spinal column and he died soon afterwards. One account alleges that he died after saying, ''Maman''. Other accounts, allege, however, that there were no last words. The Breton language, Breton poet and activist Yann-Ber Kalloc'h, a former Catholic seminarian from the island of Groix near Lorient, was best known by his Bardic name of ''Bleimor''. Even though he often used to say, "I am not in the least bit French",Tim Cross (1988), p. 270. Kalloc'h enlisted in the French Army upon the outbreak of war in 1914. According to Ian Higgins, "When the war came, [Kalloc'h], like so many others, saw it as a defense of civilization and Christianity, and immediately volunteered for the front. 'Only Ireland and Brittany', he writes in one poem, 'still help Christ carry the cross: in the fight to reinvigorate Christianity, the Celtic peoples are in the van'. In addition, now readily fighting for France, he saw the war as the great chance to affirm the national identity of Brittany and resurrect Breton language, its language and Breton culture, culture." Yann-Ber Kalloc'h, who wielded a sailor's axe formerly used in the French Navy for boarding enemy ships and was reportedly a terrible foe in hand-to-hand combat. His motto was "For God and Brittany". He was killed in action on 10 April 1917, when a German shell landed near his dugout near Urvillers/Cerizy (Aisne). Kalloc'h's last work was the poetry collection, ''Ar en Deulin'', which was published posthumously. According to Jelle Krol, "It is not merely a collection of poems by a major Breton poet: it is a symbol of homage to Yann-Ber Kalloc'h and all those Breton people, Bretons whose creative powers were cut short by their untimely deaths. Breton literature from the trenches is very rare. Only Yann-Ber Kalloc'h's poems, some war notes written by Auguste Bocher, the memoirs recounted by Ambroise Harel and Loeiz Herrieu's letters addressed to his wife survived the war."Russia
Russia also produced a number of significant war poets including 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). The Acmeist poet Nikolay Gumilyov served in the Imperial Russian Army during World War I. He saw combat in East Prussia, the Macedonian front, and with the Russian Expeditionary Force in France. He was also decorated twice with the Cross of St. George. Gumilyov's war poems were assembled in the collection ''The Quiver'' (1916). Gumilyov's wife, the poetess Anna Akhmatova, began writing poems during World War I that expressed the collective suffering of the Russian people as men were called up and the women in their lives bade them goodbye. For Akhmatova, writing such poems turned into her life's work and she continued writing similar poems about the suffering of the Russian people during the Bolshevik Revolution, the Russian Civil War, the Red Terror, and Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.British Empire and Commonwealth
Australia
Leon Gellert, an Australian poet of Hungarian diaspora, Hungarian descent, was born in Walkerville, South Australia, Walkerville, a suburb of Adelaide, South Australia. He enlisted in the First Australian Imperial Force's 10th Battalion within weeks of the outbreak of war and sailed for Cairo on 22 October 1914. He landed at ANZAC Cove, during the Gallipoli Campaign on 25 April 1915, was wounded and repatriated as medically unfit in June 1916. He attempted to re-enlist but was soon found out. During periods of inactivity he had been indulging his appetite for writing poetry. ''Songs of a Campaign'' (1917) was his first published book of verse, and was favourably reviewed by ''The Bulletin (Australian periodical), The Bulletin''. Angus & Robertson soon published a new edition, illustrated by Norman Lindsay. His second, ''The Isle of San'' (1919), also illustrated by Lindsay, was not so well received. John O'Donnell (poet), John O'Donnell was born in Tuam, County Galway, in 1890, and served in the First Australian Imperial Force, Australian Imperial Force during World War I. He arrived at Gallipoli campaign, Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 and later fought at the Battle of the Somme. In 1918 he was invalided back to Australia, during which time he wrote the last six poems of his only poetry collection, dealing with the war from the perspective of an Australian poet.Canada
John McCrae, a Scottish-Canadian poet and surgeon from Guelph, Ontario, had already served in the Canadian Light Artillery during the Second Anglo-Boer War. Upon the outbreak of World War I in 1914, McCrae joined the Canadian Expeditionary Force and was appointed as medical officer and major of the 1st Brigade CFA (Canadian Field Artillery). He treated the wounded during the Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, from a hastily dug, bunker dug in the back of the dyke along the Yser Canal about 2 miles north of Ypres.Bonfire – The Chestnut Gentleman by Susan Raby-Dunne, 2012 McCrae's friend and former militia pal, Lt. Alexis Helmer, was killed in the battle, and his burial inspired the poem, ''In Flanders Fields'', which was written on 3 May 1915, and first published in the magazine ''Punch (magazine), Punch''. From 1 June 1915, McCrae was ordered away from the artillery to set up No. 3 Canadian General Hospital at Dannes-Camiers near Boulogne-sur-Mer, northern France. C.L.C. Allinson reported that McCrae "most unmilitarily told [me] what he thought of being transferred to the medicals and being pulled away from his beloved guns. His last words to me were: 'Allinson, all the goddamn doctors in the world will not win this bloody war: what we need is more and more fighting men.'" ''In Flanders Fields'' appeared anonymously in ''Punch'' on 8 December 1915, but in the index, to that year McCrae was named as the author. The verses swiftly became one of the most popular poems of the war, used in countless fund-raising campaigns and frequently translated (a Latin version begins ''In agro belgico...''). "In Flanders Fields" was also extensively printed in the United States, whose government was contemplating joining the war, alongside a 'reply' by R. W. Lillard, ("...Fear not that you have died for naught, / The torch ye threw to us we caught..."). On 28 January 1918, while still commanding No. 3 Canadian General Hospital (McGill) at Boulogne, Lt.-Col. McCrae died of pneumonia with "extensive pneumococcus meningitis"Holt, pp. 54–62 at the British General Hospital in Wimereux, France. He was buried the following day in the Commonwealth War Graves Commission section of Wimereux Cemetery, just a couple of kilometres up the coast from Boulogne, with full military honours.Busch, p. 75; Holt, p. 62. Prescott, p. 129. His flag-draped coffin was borne on a Limbers and caissons, gun carriage and the mourners – who included Sir Arthur Currie and many of McCrae's friends and staff – were preceded by McCrae's charger, "Bonfire", with McCrae's boots reversed in the stirrups. Bonfire was with McCrae from Camp Valcartier, Valcartier, Quebec until his death and was much loved. McCrae's gravestone is placed flat, as are all the others in the section, because of the unstable sandy soil. Robert W. Service, an English-Canadian poet from Preston, Lancashire and who had already been dubbed, "The Canadian Rudyard Kipling, Kipling", was living in Paris when World War I broke out. He attempted to enlist, but was turned down for being overage at 41 and "due to varicose veins." Service was a war correspondent for the ''Toronto Star'' (from 11 December 1915, through 29 January 1916), but "was arrested and nearly executed in an outbreak of spy hysteria in Dunkirk." He then "worked as a Combat medic, stretcher bearer and Emergency medical technician, ambulance driver with the Ambulance Corps of the American Red Cross, until his health broke." Robert W. Service received three medals for his war service: 1914–15 Star, British War Medal and the Victory Medal. While recuperating in Paris, Service wrote a volume of war poems, ''s:Rhymes of a Red-Cross Man, Rhymes of a Red-Cross Man'', which was published in Toronto in 1916). The book was dedicated to the memory of Service's "brother, Lieutenant Albert Service, Canadian Infantry, Killed in Action, France, August 1916."Extended [Biography]England
The major novelist and poet Thomas Hardy (1840–1928) wrote a number of significant war poems that relate to the Napoleonic Wars, the Boer Wars and World War I, including "Drummer Hodge", "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations'", "The Man He Killed" and ‘"And there was a great calm" (on the signing of the Armistice, Nov.11, 1918)’: his work had a profound influence on other war poets such as Rupert Brooke and Siegfried Sassoon". Hardy in these poems often used the viewpoint of ordinary soldiers and their colloquial speech. A theme in the ''Wessex Poems'' (1898) is the long shadow that the Napoleonic Wars cast over the 19th century, as seen, for example, in "The Sergeant's Song" and "Leipzig". The Napoleonic War is the subject of Hardy's drama in verse ''The Dynasts'' (1904–08). At the beginning of World War I, like many other writers, Kipling wrote pamphlets and poems which enthusiastically supported the British war aims of restoring Belgium after that kingdom had been occupied by Germany together with more generalised statements that Britain was standing up for the cause of good. For the first time, a substantial number of important British poets were soldiers, writing about their experiences of war. A number of them died on the battlefield, most famously Edward Thomas (poet), Edward Thomas, Isaac Rosenberg, Wilfred Owen, and Charles Sorley. Others including Robert Graves, Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon survived but were scarred by their experiences, and this was reflected in their poetry. Robert H. Ross describes the British "war poets" as Georgian Poetry, Georgian poets. Many poems by British war poets were published in newspapers and then collected in 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, ''The Muse in Arms'', was published in 1917, and several were published in the years following the war. David Jones (poet), David Jones' epic poem of World War I ''In Parenthesis'' was first published in England in 1937, and is based on Jones's own experience as an infantryman in the War. ''In Parenthesis'' narrates the experiences of English Private John Ball in a mixed English-Welsh regiment starting with their leaving England and ending seven months later with the assault on Mametz Wood during the Battle of the Somme. The work employs a mixture of lyrical verse and prose, is highly allusive, and ranges in tone from formal to Cockney colloquial and military slang. The poem won the Hawthornden Prize and the admiration of writers such as W. B. Yeats and T. S. Eliot. 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 (artist-poet), David Jones, Robert Nichols (poet), Robert Nichols, Wilfred Owen, Herbert Read, Isaac Rosenberg, Siegfried Sassoon, Charles Sorley and Edward Thomas (poet), Edward Thomas. For much of the Great War, G.K. Chesterton supported the British Empire's war effort against Imperial Germany. By the end of the war, however, Chesterton was singing the same tune as anti-war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen. In his 1922 poem ''Elegy in a Country Courtyard'', Chesterton wrote: :The men that worked for England :They have their graves at home: :And birds and bees of England :About the cross can roam. :But they that fought for England, :Following a falling star, :Alas, alas for England :They have their graves afar. :And they that rule in England, :In stately conclave met, :Alas, alas for England, :They have no graves as yet.Ireland
The fact that 49,400 Irish soldiers in the British Army gave their lives fighting in the Great War remains controversial in Ireland. This is because the Easter Rising of 1916 took place during the war and the Irish War of Independence began only a few months after the Armistice of November 11, 1918, 11 November Armistice. For this reason, Irish republicanism has traditionally viewed Irishmen who serve in the British Armed Forces, British military as traitors. This view became even more prevalent after 1949, when Ireland voted to become a Irish Republic, Republic and to leave the Commonwealth of Nations, Commonwealth. For this reason, Ireland's war poets were long neglected.''Eire's WWI War Poet: F.E. Ledwidge'' by Miriam O'Gara Kilmurry M.A., Publisher: Amazon (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform; Lrg edition 23 February 2016), . One of them was Tom Kettle, a former member of the paramilitary Irish Volunteers and M.P. for the Irish Parliamentary Party. Despite his outrage over the Rape of Belgium, Kettle was very critical of the war at first. Comparing the Anglo-Irish landlord class to the German nobility, aristocratic big estate owners who similarly dominated the Kingdom of Prussia, Kettle wrote, "England goes to fight for liberty in Europe and for Junker (Prussia), Junkerdom in Ireland." Later, when he was serving as a Lieutenant with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers on the Western Front (World War I), Western Front, Kettle learned of the Easter Rising of 1916. After also learning of the executions of Roger Casement and sixteen of the Rising's other leaders, including every one of the signatories of the ''Proclamation of the Irish Republic'', Kettle wrote, "These men will go down in history as heroes and martyrs and I will go down – if I go down at all – as a bloody British officer." Mere months later, on 9 September 1916, Lieut. Kettle was shot in the chest during the Battle of Ginchy, in which the 16th (Irish) Division successfully captured and held the Ginchy, French village of the same name, which the Imperial German Army had been using as an artillery observation post during the Battle of the Somme. Lieut. Kettle's body was never found. G. K. Chesterton later wrote, "Thomas Michael Kettle was perhaps the greatest example of that greatness of spirit which was so ill rewarded on both sides of English Channel, the channel [...] He was a wit, a scholar, an orator, a man ambitious in all the arts of peace; and he fell fighting the barbarians because he was too good a European to use the barbarians against England, as England a hundred years before has used the barbarians against Ireland." Lieut. Kettle's best-known poem is a sonnet, ''To My Daughter Betty, the Gift of God'', which was written and mailed to his family just days before he was killed in action. It reads: :"In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown :To beauty proud as was your mother's prime, :In that desired, delayed, incredible time, :You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own, :And the dear heart that was your baby throne, :To dice with death. And oh! they'll give you rhyme :And reason: some will call the thing sublime, :And some decry it in a knowing tone. :So here, while the mad guns curse overhead, :And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor, :Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead, :Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor :But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed :And for the secret Scripture of the poor." When Francis Ledwidge, who was a member of the Irish Volunteers in Slane, County Meath, learned of the outbreak of the war, he decided against enlisting in the British Army. In response, the Unionist National Volunteers subjected Ledwidge to a show trial, during which they accused him of cowardice and of being Germanophilia, pro-German. Soon after, Ledwidge enlisted in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Despite his twin beliefs in socialism and Irish republicanism, Ledwidge later wrote, "I joined the British Army because she stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilisation and I would not have her say that she defended us while we did nothing at home but pass resolutions." Ledwidge published three volumes of poetry between 1916 and 1918, while he served at the Landing at Suvla Bay, on the Macedonian front and on the Western Front (World War I), Western Front. Like Kettle, Ledwidge was also deeply moved by the executions that followed the Easter Rising of 1916 and eulogized the 17 executed Republican leaders in his poems ''O’Connell Street'', ''Lament for Thomas MacDonagh'', ''Lament for the Poets of 1916'', and in the Aisling poem ''The Dead Kings''. During a major rainstorm on the early morning of 31 July 1917, Ledwidge's battalion was laying beech tree, beech-wood road planks in the boggy soil near the village of Boezinge, Belgium, in preparation for an imminent Allied offensive that would become known as the Battle of Passchendaele. Shortly after the Fusiliers, who were soaked to the skin, were permitted a short break and issued hot tea, a German long-range artillery shell landed next to Ledwidge, who was killed instantly. A Roman Catholic military chaplain, Father Devas, was the first on the scene. That night, Father Devas wrote in his diary, "Crowds at Eucharist in the Catholic Church, Holy Communion. Arranged for service but washed out by rain and fatigues. Walk in rain with dogs. Ledwidge killed, blown to bits; at Sacrament of Penance, Confession yesterday and Tridentine Mass, Mass and Holy Communion this morning. R.I.P." Francis Ledwidge was buried at Carrefour-de-Rose, and later re-interred in the nearby Artillery Wood Commonwealth War Graves Commission Cemetery, Artillery Wood Military Cemetery, near Boezinge, Belgium. A monument to him, topped by the Irish tricolour, now stands on the site of his death. A stone tablet in honour of Francis Ledwidge also stands at the Island of Ireland Peace Park, near Mesen, Messines, Belgium. William Butler Yeats' first war poem was "On being asked for a War Poem" written on 6 February 1915, in response to a request from Henry James for a political poem about World War I.Jeffares, Alexander Norman.''A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats''. Stanford University Press (1968) p. 189 Yeats changed the poem's title from "To a friend who has asked me to sign his manifesto to the neutral nations" to "A Reason for Keeping Silent" before sending it in a letter to James, which Yeats wrote at Coole Park on 20 August 1915.Yeats, William Butler. qtd. in ''A Commentary on the Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats''by Norman Alexander Jeffares. Stanford University Press (1968) p. 189 When it was later reprinted the title was changed to "On being asked for a War Poem".Haughey, Jim. ''The First World War in Irish Poetry'' Bucknell University Press (2002) p. 162 Yeats' most famous war poem is ''An Irish Airman Foresees His Death'', which is a soliloquy by Squadron leader, Major Robert Gregory (RFC officer), Robert Gregory, an Irish nationalist flying ace who was also a friend of Yeats, and the son of Anglo-Irish landlord Sir William Henry Gregory and Yeats' patroness Lady Augusta Gregory. Maj. Gregory, who had enlisted in the Connaught Rangers despite being overage and having three children, transferred to the Royal Flying Corps in 1916, where he was eventually credited with eight victories. Even though his fellow Irishmen Mick Mannock and George McElroy, with many more victories, have become much better known, Maj. Gregory was the first Irish pilot to achieve flying ace status in the RFC. The Third French Republic made him a Chevalier of the Legion d'Honneur in 1917, and he was awarded a Military Cross for "conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty."ObituaryScotland
Even though it's author died in 1905, Ronald Black has written that Fr. Allan MacDonald (poet), Allan MacDonald's poem ''Ceum nam Mìltean'' ("The March of Thousands"), which describes a vision of legions of young men marching away to a conflict from whence they will not return, deserves to be, "first in any anthology of the poetry of theWales
At the outbreak of World War I, the vast majority of the Welsh populace were against being involved in the war. Throughout World War I, voluntary enlistment by Welshmen remained low and conscription was ultimately enacted in Wales to ensure a steady supply of new recruits into the armed forces. The war particularly left Nonconformity in Wales, Welsh non-conformist chapels deeply divided. Traditionally, the Nonconformists had not been comfortable at all with the idea of warfare. The war saw a major clash within Welsh Nonconformism between those who backed military service and those who adopted Christian pacifism. The most famous Welsh language, Welsh-language war poet remains Private Ellis Humphrey Evans of the Royal Welch Fusiliers, who is best known under his bardic name of Hedd Wyn. Born in the village of Trawsfynydd, Wales, Evans wrote much of his poetry while working as aUnited States
The United States only entered the Great War in May 1917. By that time, the mass mechanized slaughter at Battle of the Somme, the Somme, Battle of Verdun, Verdun, and Battle of Passchendaele, Passchendaele, which still haunt the other combatant nations, had already taken place. By the time large numbers of soldiers from the American Expeditionary Forces (A.E.F.) arrived in France, they faced an Imperial German Army that was starving, exhausted, and which had already been bled white by three years of war. Furthermore, the German people were being systematically starved by a Royal Navy blockade and were increasingly on the brink of German Revolution of 1918, overthrowing the Monarchy. Although American Doughboys helped stem the 1918 Spring Offensive, captured Chipilly Ridge during the Battle of Amiens (1918), Battle of Amiens, won the Meuse-Argonne Campaign, and saved the Allies (World War I), Allies from having to contract a negotiated peace with the Central Powers, America's losses were far fewer than those of the other combatant nations, which lost an entire generation of young men. For this reason, World War I is a forgotten war in America today. Although World War I in American literature is widely believed to begin and end with Ernest Hemingway's war novel ''A Farewell to Arms'', there were also American war poets. Alan Seeger, the uncle of songwriter Pete Seeger, enlisted in the French Foreign Legion while America was still neutral and became the first great American poet of the First World War. Seeger's poems, which passionately urged the American people to join the Allied cause, were widely publicized and remained popular. In the end, Seeger was killed in action on 4 July 1916, during the French Army's attack against the trenches of the Imperial German Army at Belloy-en-Santerre, during the Battle of the Somme. His fellow French Foreign Legion soldier, Rif Baer, later described Seeger's last moments: "His tall silhouette stood out on the green of the cornfield. He was the tallest man in his section. His head erect, and pride in his eye, I saw him running forward, with bayonet fixed. Soon he disappeared and that was the last time I saw my friend." As he lay mortally wounded in no man's land, Seeger cheered on the passing soldiers of the legion until he died of his injuries. In the United States, Alan Seeger's death was greeted with national mourning. Alan Seeger is sometimes called, "The American Rupert Brooke." According to former First Lady of the United States, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Jacqueline Kennedy, decades after Alan Seeger's death, his poem ''s:A treasury of war poetry, British and American poems of the world war, 1914-1919/Poets Militant#I Have a Rendezvous with Death, I Have a Rendezvous with Death,'' was a great favorite of her husband, U.S. President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who often asked her to read it aloud to him. Joyce Kilmer, who was widely considered America's leading Roman Catholic poet and apologist and who was often compared to G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, enlisted mere days after the United States entered World War I. In August 1917, Kilmer was transferred to the traditionally Irish-American regiment of the New York National Guard known as "165th Infantry Regiment, The Fighting 69th", of the 42nd Infantry Division (United States), 42nd "Rainbow" Division. Kilmer quickly rose to the rank of Sergeant#United States, sergeant. Though he was eligible for an officer's commission, Kilmer refused all offered promotions, saying that he would rather be a sergeant in the Fighting 69th than an officer in any other regiment.Hillis, John. ''Joyce Kilmer: A Bio-Bibliography''. Master of Science (Library Science) Thesis. Catholic University of America. (Washington, DC: 1962) Shortly before his deployment to Europe, Kilmer's daughter Rose died, and twelve days later, his son Christopher was born. Before his departure, Kilmer had contracted with publishers to write a book about the war, deciding upon the title ''Here and There with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth''. Kilmer never completed the book; however, toward the end of the year, he did find time to write prose sketches and war poetry. The most famous of Kilmer's war poems is "Rouge Bouquet (poem), Rouge Bouquet" (1918) which commemorates the victims of a German artillery barrage against American trenches in the Rouge Bouquet forest, near Baccarat, Meurthe-et-Moselle, Baccarat, on the afternoon of 7 March 1918. 21 Doughboys from Kilmer's Regiment were buried alive by the barrage and 19 were killed (of whom 14 remain entombed). On 30 July 1918, Sgt. Kilmer, whose coolness under enemy fire was legendary in the regiment, volunteered for a military intelligence mission led by Major William J. Donovan, the future head of the Office of Strategic Services, behind enemy lines during the Second Battle of the Marne. While leading a patrol that was attempting to locate a concealed German machine gun nest, Sgt. Kilmer was shot through the head by a German sniper at the Muercy Farm, beside the Ourcq River and near the village of Seringes-et-Nesles. Sgt. Joyce Kilmer was only 31-years old and was posthumously awarded the Croix de guerre 1914–1918 (France), Croix de Guerre by the Government of the Third French Republic. Sgt. Joyce Kilmer lies buried in the Oise-Aisne American Cemetery and Memorial, near Fere-en-Tardenois, Aisne, Picardy, which is located just across the road and stream from where he was killed. A Tridentine Mass, Tridentine Requiem Mass was offered for the repose of his soul at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York City on 14 October 1918. According to Dana Gioia, however, "None of Kilmer's wartime verses are read today; his reputation survives on poems written before he enlisted." In 1928, American poet and World War I veteran of the A.E.F. John Allan Wyeth (poet), John Allan Wyeth published ''This Man's Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets''. B.J. Omanson recalls of his first encounter with the collection, "Wyeth's sequence... was over fifty sonnets long and, reading through just a few of them at random, indicated that not only were they highly skilled, but unusually innovative as well. What was most exciting was that they were written, not in an elevated, formal tone, but in a cool, concise, dispassionate voice, spiced with slangy soldiers' dialogue, French villagers' ''patois'', and filled with as many small particulars of life as any of the finest soldier-diaries I had read." The collection, which is written in an experimental form truly unique in the 800-year history of the sonnet, traces Wyeth's service as a 2nd Lieutenant and military intelligence officer assigned to the 33rd Infantry Division (United States), 33rd U.S. Infantry Division from receiving orders at Camp Upton to embark on a troop transport bound for France, during the ocean voyage, and through his journey into the firing line. At the time of his enlistment, Wyeth fluently spoke and read several languages and was a recent graduate of Princeton University, where his circle of friends had included Edmund Wilson and F. Scott Fitzgerald. On 8 August 1918, the first day of the Battle of Amiens (1918), Battle of Amiens, was later described by General Erich Ludendorff as :de:Schwarzer Tag des deutschen Heeres, "Der Schwarzer Tag des deutschen Heeres" ("The blackest day of the German Army"). Enormous numbers of German enlisted men, whose will to continue fighting had been shattered, surrendered voluntarily or retreated en masse. German officers who tried to rally their men were showered with the kind of insults labor union, union members usually reserved for strikebreakers and were accused of trying to needlessly prolong the war. However, the otherwise rapid Allied advance ran into a very serious obstacle; "a bare seventy-five-foot-high ridge" in an oxbow bend of the Somme River near the village of Chipilly. The German soldiers on Chipilly Ridge were able to command a wide field to the south of the Somme River and poured forth devastating machine gun and artillery fire that kept the Australian Corps pinned down at Le Hamel, Somme, Le Hamel. The job of taking Chipilly Ridge was assigned to 3 Battalions of Doughboys from Wyeth's Division. According to B.J. Omanson, "Their attack took place at 5:30 p.m.and, despite heavy machine gun and artillery fire pouring down on them from Chipilly Ridge, the Americans could not be driven back. They repeatedly pressed the assault until the northern half of the ridge and southern end of nearby Gressaire Wood were taken. Continuing the assault the following day, they took the rest of Gressaire Wood and by day's end were in possession of seven hundred German prisoners, thirty artillery pieces, one aircraft, and more than one hundred machine guns." During the assault on Chipilly Ridge, Corporal Jake Allex, a Serbian American, Serbian immigrant from Kosovo, took command of his platoon after all the other officers had been killed. Corporal Allex led them in an attack against a German machine gun nest, during which he personally killed five enemy soldiers and took fifteen prisoners. For his actions during the assault on Chipilly Ridge, Corporal Allex became the second American soldier to be awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor during World War I. On the night of 8–9 August 1918, as the assault on Chipilly Ridge was just beginning, Lieuts. Wyeth and Thomas J. Cochrane were assigned to deliver sealed orders from Division HQ at Molliens-au-Bois to the Field Headquarters of all three Battalions engaged in the attack. The precise location of each Battalion was unknown, but they were believed to be somewhere along the northern bank of the Somme River, near the village of Sailly-le-Sec. In his 1928 poetry collection, Wyeth described every phase of the mission in his six interlinked "Chipilly Ridge sonnets." According to Bradley J. Omanson, "Lt. Wyeth, as it happened, was a cultured man, a recent Princeton University, Princeton graduate in languages and literature, and he rendered his experiences of that night into an accomplished, highly original cycle of six linked sonnets – part of a much longer cycle of over fifty sonnets which covered the entirety of his service in the war. But it is this self-contained six-sonnet sequence in particular – describing one soldier's stumblings through the metaphoric valley of death – which delves most memorably into the nature of war." On the afternoon of 14 September 1918, while the men of the 33rd U.S. Division were stationed at Fromereville near Verdun, Wyeth was taking a shower with a group of bickering Doughboys when he heard the cry, "Air Raid!" Like every other bather, Wyeth ran, naked and covered with soap, into the village square. There, he watched as a Fokker D VII, flown by Unteroffizier Hans Heinrich Marwede from Jasta 67's aerodrome at Marville, Meuse, Marville, attacked and balloon buster, set on fire three French observation balloons. Lieut. Wyeth later described Marwede's victory in his sonnet ''Fromereville: War in Heaven''. Although John Allan Wyeth's ''This Man's Army'' was highly praised by American literary critics, the 1929 Stock Market Crash soon followed its publication and, with the onset of the Great Depression, Wyeth's poetry was forgotten. When John Allan Wyeth died in Skillman, New Jersey on 11 May 1981, his obituary made no mention of the fact that he had been a poet. According to B.J. Omanson and Dana Gioia, who rescued Wyeth's poetry from oblivion during the early 21st century, Wyeth is the only American poet of the First World War who can withstand comparison with English war poets Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and Wilfred Owen. B.J. Omanson has also found that every event that Wyeth relates in his sonnets, down to the way he describes the weather, can be verified by other eyewitness accounts as completely accurate. In response to the 2008 re-publication of ''The Man's Army'', British literary critic Jon Stallworthy, the editor of ''The Oxford Book of War Poetry'' and the biographer of Wilfred Owen, wrote, "At long last, marking the ninetieth anniversary of the Armistice of 11 November 1918, Armistice, an American poet takes his place in the front rank of the War Poet's parade." Inspired by Canadian poet John McCrae's famous poem ''In Flanders Fields'', American poet Moina Michael resolved at Armistice of 11 November 1918, the war's conclusion in 1918 to wear a Papaver rhoeas, red poppy year-round to honour the millions of soldiers who had died in the Great War. She also wrote a poem in response called ''We Shall Keep the Faith''. She distributed silk poppies to her peers and campaigned to have them adopted by the American Legion as an official symbol of remembrance. At the 1920 convention, the American Legion formally adopted Michael's proposal of adopting Remembrance poppies as a national symbol.The Russian Civil War
During the Russian Civil War, the Russian Symbolist poet Vyacheslav Ivanov (poet), Vyacheslav Ivanov wrote the sonnet sequence "Poems for a Time of Troubles." Between 1917 and 1922, Russian poet Marina Tsvetaeva, whose husband Sergei Efron was serving as an officer in the anti-communist Volunteer Army, wrote the epic verse cycle ''Lebedinyi stan'' (''The Encampment of the Swans'') about the Russian Civil War, civil war, glorifying the anti-communist soldiers of the White Movement. The cycle of poems is in the style of a diary or journal and begins on the day of Tsar Nicholas II's abdication in March 1917, and ends late in 1920, when the Whites had been completely defeated. The 'swans' of the title refers to the volunteer soldiers of the White Army. In 1922, Tsvetaeva also published a lengthy monarchist fairy tale in verse, ''Tsar-devitsa'' ("Tsar-Maiden"). On the other side, Osip Mandelstam wrote many poems praising the Red Army and rebuking the Whites, whom he referred to in one poem as, "October's withered leaves." In the end, however, Mandelstam, who believed deeply in the tradition that poets are the conscience of the Russian people, died in the Gulag in 1938, after being arrested for composing an Stalin epigram, epigram that both attacked and mocked Stalin.The Spanish Civil War
TheWorld War II
Poland
The Second Polish Republic is sometimes referred to as the country that lost the Second World War twice: first to Adolf Hitler and then to Joseph Stalin. Not surprisingly, Poland's war, both in conventionial and guerrilla warfare, continued to inspire poetry long after all fighting had ceased. Czesław Miłosz has since written, "Before World War II, Polish poets did not differ much in their interests and problems from their colleagues in France and Holland. The specific features of Polish literature notwithstanding, Poland belonged to the same cultural circuit as other European countries. Thus one can say that what occurred in Poland was the encounter of a European poet with the hell of the twentieth century, not hell's first circle, but a much deeper one. This situation is something of a laboratory, in other words: it allows us to examine what happens to modern poetry in certain historical conditions." After Gruppenführer, SS General Jürgen Stroop suppressed the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943, anti-Nazi Polish people, Polish poet Czesław Miłosz wrote the poem ''Campo dei Fiore''. In the poem, Miłosz compared the burning of the Ghetto and its 60,0000 inhabitants to the burning at the stake of Giordano Bruno by the Roman Inquisition in 1600. Miłosz criticized the Polish people for just going on with their daily routines while the Ghetto was burning. He ended by urging his listeners and readers to feel outraged over the Holocaust in Poland and to join the Polish resistance movement in World War II, Polish Resistance in their fight against the Nazi Occupiers. Also in response to the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, poet Hirsh Glick, who was imprisoned in the Vilna Ghetto, wrote the Yiddish language, Yiddish poem ''Zog Nit Keynmol'', in which he urged his fellow Jews to take up arms against Nazi Germany, instead of dying peacefully like six-million lambs. Despite Glick's own murder by the SS in 1944, ''Zog Nit Keynmol'' was set to music and widely adopted by Jewish partisans as an anthem of resistance against the Holocaust. For this reason ''Zog Nit Keynmol'' is still sung at memorial services around the world on Yom HaShoah. In 1974, Anna Świrszczyńska published the poetry collection ''Budowałam barykadę'' ("Building the Barricade"), about her experiences as both a combatant and battlefield nurse during the 1944 Warsaw uprising, in which the ''Armia Krajowa'', acting under orders from the Polish Government in Exile in London, tried as part of Operation Tempest to liberate Poland's pre-war capital city from the occupying Germans before Joseph Stalin's Red Army could do so. Instead, Soviet soldiers waited across the Vistula River for more than two months and calmly watched as the Polish combatants were slaughtered en masse by the combined forces of the Wehrmacht, the Luftwaffe, and the Waffen SS. Then, by order of Adolf Hitler, the entire city of Destruction of Warsaw, Warsaw was burned to the ground. Czesław Miłosz later wrote about Świrszczyńska, "In August and September of 1944, she took part in the Warsaw Uprising. For sixty-three days she witnessed and participated in a battle waged by a city of one million people against tanks, planes, and heavy artillery. The city was destroyed gradually, street by street, and those who survived were deported. Many years later, Świrszczyńska tried to reconstruct that tragedy in her poems: the building of barricades, the basement hospitals, the bombed houses caving in burying the people in shelters, the lack of ammunition, food, and bandages, and her own adventures as a military nurse. Yet these attempts of hers did not succeed: they were too wordy, too pathetic, and she destroyed her manuscripts. (Also, for a long time the Uprising was a forbidden topic, in view of Soviet Union, Russia's role in crushing it). No less than thirty years after the event did she hit upon a style that satisfied her. Curiously enough, that was the style of miniature, which she had discovered in her youth, but this time not applied to paintings. Her book ''Building the Barricades'' consists of very short poems, without meter or rhyme, each one a microreport on a single incident or situation." About one Świrszczyńska poem set during the Uprising, Miłosz writes, "The small poem, ''A Woman Said to her Neighbor'', contains a whole way of life, the life in the basements of the incessantly bombed and shelled city. Those basements were connected by passages bored through the walls to form an underground city of catacombs. The motions and habits accepted in normal conditions were reevaluated there. Money meant less than food, which was usually obtained by expeditions to the firing line; considerable value was attached to cigarettes, used as a medium of exchange; human relations also departed from what we are used to considering the norm and were stripped of all appearances, reduced to their basest shape. It is possible that in this poem we are moved by the analogy with peacetime conditions, for men and women are often drawn together not from mutual affection but from their fear of loneliness: :"A woman said to her neighbor: :'Since my husband was killed I can't sleep, :I tremble all night long under the blanket. :I'll go crazy if I have to be alone today, :I have some cigarettes my husband left, please, :Do drop in tonight.'"Hungary
History of the Jews in Hungary, Hungarian Jewish poet and Roman Catholic convert Miklós Radnóti was a vocal critic of the Pro-German Governments of Admiral Miklós Horthy and of the Arrow Cross Party. According to Radnóti's English translator Frederick Turner (poet), Frederick Turner, "One day, one of Radnóti's friends saw him on the streets of Budapest, and the poet was mumbling something like, 'Du-duh-du-duh-du-duh,' and his friend said, 'Don't you understand?! Adolf Hitler, Hitler is Invasion of Poland, invading Poland!' And Radnóti supposedly answered, 'Yes, but this is the only thing I have to fight with.' As his poetry makes clear, Radnóti believed that Fascism was the destruction of order. It both destroyed and vulgarized civil society. It was as if you wanted to create an ideal cat, so you took your cat, killed it, removed its flesh, put it into some kind of mold, and then pressed it into the shape of a cat. That's what Fascism does, and that's what Communism does. They both destroy an intricate social order to set up a criminally simple-minded order." Like many other Hungarians of Jewish descent or "unreliable" political views, Radnóti was drafted into a Labour service in Hungary during World War II, forced labor battalion by the Royal Hungarian Army during World War II. During this experience of slave labor in the copper mines of Occupied Yugoslavia, Radnóti continued to compose new poems, which he wrote down in a small notebook that he had purchased. In the last days of the Second World War, Radnóti fell ill during a forced march from Bor, Serbia, Bor towards Nazi Austria. In early November 1944, along with 21 other sick and emaciated prisoners, Radnóti was separated from the march near the Hungarian city of Győr. They were taken in a cart by three Non-commissioned officer, NCOs of the Royal Hungarian Army first to a village hospital, and then to a school that housed refugees. Both the hospital and the school, however, insisted that they had no room for Jews. Between 6 and 10 November 1944, the three NCOs took the 22 Jewish prisoners to the dam near Abda, Hungary, Abda, where they were forced to dig their own mass grave. Each prisoner was then shot in the base of the neck and buried. After the end of the war, the mass grave was re-exhumed and Radnóti's last five poems were found in the dirty, bloodstained notebook in his pocket. Miklós Radnóti was reburied in Kerepesi Cemetery in Budapest. After the death of his wife in 2013, she was buried next to him. Since his murder, Radnóti has become widely recognized as one of the greatest Hungarian language, Hungarian-language poets of the 20th century. His English translator Zsuzsanna Ozsváth, who carried a volume of Radnóti's poems with her when she fled across the Austrian border after the defeat of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, has written that Radnóti's verses have been translated into Hebrew language, Hebrew, English, and many other European and Asian languages. His importance to 20th-century poetry, to Hungarian literature, and to the literature of the Holocaust in Hungary resulted in Oszsváth and Turner's own collaboration, which was assisted by the poet's widow, and which resulted in the 1992 collection ''Foamy Sky: The Major Poems of Miklós Radnóti''.Italy
The 2005 poem ''Cefalonia (poem), Cephalonia'', by Italian poet Luigi Ballerini, is about the 1943 Massacre of the Acqui Division, in which more than 5,000 officers and enlisted men of the Royal Italian Army were summary execution, shot without trial on the island of Cephalonia in Occupied Greece by German and Austrian soldiers of the Wehrmacht. After learning of King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy, Victor Emmanuel III's successful ''coup d'etat'' against dictator Benito Mussolini and the Armistice of Cassibile, Italian Armistice with the Allies, the Acqui Division had chosen to fight against their former allies under orders from the new Italian Government. In modern Greece, the Italian victims of the massacre, one of countless other un-prosecuted War crimes of the Wehrmacht, are referred to as, "The Martyrs of Cephalonia." The poet's father, Raffaele Costantino Edoardo Ballerini, known as Ettore, was a soldier in the Acqui Division who was killed in action fighting against the Wehrmacht in the battle that preceded the massacre.Soviet Union
During World War II, Anna Akhmatova witnessed the 900-day Siege of Leningrad and read her poems over the radio to encourage the city's defenders. In 1940, Akhmatova started her ''Poem without a Hero'', finishing a first draft in Tashkent, but working on "The Poem" for twenty years and considering it to be the major work of her life, dedicating it to "the memory of its first audience – my friends and fellow citizens who perished in Leningrad during the siege".Martin (2007) p. 10 After the war, Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin was stunned to see Akhmatova given a standing ovation by Russians who remembered her wartime broadcasts. Stalin gave orders to find out who organized the standing ovation and launched a campaign of blacklisting and defamation against the poetess, in which she was called, "Half harlot, half nun." In the 1974 poem ''Prussian Nights'', Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn, a former captain in the Red Army during World War II, graphically describes Soviet war crimes in East Prussia. The narrator, a Red Army officer, approves of his troops' looting and rapes against German civilians as revenge for German war crimes in the Soviet Union and he hopes to take part in the atrocities himself. The poem describes the gang-rape of a Poles, Polish woman whom the Red Army soldiers had mistaken for a German. According to a review for ''The New York Times'', Solzhenitsyn wrote the poem in trochaic tetrameter, "in imitation of, and argument with the most famous Russian war poem, Aleksandr Tvardovsky's ''Vasili Tyorkin''."Serbia
Amongst Serbian poets during World War II, the most notable is Desanka Maksimović. She is well known for "''Krvava bajka''" or "A Bloody Fairy Tale". The poem is about a group of schoolchildren in Occupied Yugoslavia who fall victim to the 1941 War crimes of the Wehrmacht, Wehrmacht war crime known as the Kragujevac massacre.Finland
Yrjö Jylhä published a poetry collection in 1951 about the Winter War, in which Finland fought against Joseph Stalin and the invading Red Army. The name of the collection was ''Kiirastuli'' (Purgatory).British Empire and Commonwealth
Canada
One of the most famous World War II poets in both Canadian poetry, Canadian and American poetry is John Gillespie Magee Jr., an American fighter pilot who had volunteered to fly for the Royal Canadian Air Force before America entered the Second World War. Gillespie wrote the iconic and oft-quoted sonnet ''High Flight'', a few months before his death in an accidental collision over Ruskington, Lincolnshire, on December 11, 1941. Originally published in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, ''High Flight'' was widely distributed after Pilot Officer Magee became one of the first post-Attack on Pearl Harbor, Pearl Harbor American citizens to die in the Second World War. Since 1941, Pilot Officer Maher's sonnet has been featured prominently in aviation memorials across the world, including that for the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.England
By World War II the role of "war poet" was so well-established in the public mind, and it was anticipated that the outbreak of war in 1939 would produce a literary response equal to that of the First World War. The Times Literary Supplement went so far as to pose the question in 1940: "Where are the war-poets?" Alun Lewis (poet), Alun Lewis and Keith Douglas are the standard critical choices amongst British war poets of this time. In 1942, Henry Reed (poet), Henry Reed published a collection of three poems about British infantry training entitled ''Lessons of the War''; three more were added after the war. Sidney Keyes was another important and prolific Second World War poet.Ireland
Despite nominally still being a Commonwealth country, Ireland's Taoiseach Éamon de Valera and the ruling Fianna Fail party chose to remain neutral during the Second World War. Although this decision has been called Ireland's second declaration of independence, it outraged Winston Churchill, who saw Ireland's neutrality as not only immoral but illegal. Although De Valera discreetly bent Irish neutrality in favour of the Western Allies, the British Foreign Office and the U.S. State Department secretly engaged in multiple unsuccessful intrigues aimed at weakening De Valera's popularity and bringing Ireland into the war. Despite Ireland's neutrality, the events and atrocities of that war did inspire Irish poetry as well. In his 1964 poetry collection ''Lux aeterna'', Eoghan Ó Tuairisc, an Irish-language poet from Ballinasloe, County Galway, included a long poem inspired by the Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, entitled ''Aifreann na marbh'' ("Mass for the Dead"). The poem is an mimesis, imitation of the Roman Catholic Requiem Mass, "with the significant omission of 'Nicene Creed, Credo' and 'Gloria.'" According to Louis De Paor, "In the course of the poem, the glories of Irish and European civilisation, of art, literature, science, commerce, philosophy, language, and religion are interrogated and found incapable of providing a meaningful response to the apparently unlimited human capacity for destruction. In the month of ''Lúnasa'', the Pagan Celtic Light, God of light, on the Christian Feast of the Transfiguration, feast day of the Transfiguration, ''Dé Luain'' (Monday) becomes ''Lá an Luain'' (Global catastrophic risk, Doomsday), as the destructive light of atomic annihilation replaces the natural light of the sun. The poem also draws on early Irish literature to articulate Ó Tuairisc's idea that the poet has a responsibility to intercede in the eternal struggle between love and violence through the unifying, healing, power of creative imagination. While everyone is culpable in the annihilation of Hiroshima, the poet, the word-priest, bears a particular burden of responsibility."New Zealand
New Zealand's war poets include H. W. Gretton, whose poem ''Koru and Acanthus'' is a notable work in the genre. His war diary, made whilst serving with the 2NZEF in Italy, is also an important social-historical document.Scotland
Hamish Henderson a Scottish poet from Blairgowrie and Rattray, Blairgowrie, Perthshire, served as an officer in the British Army Intelligence Corps (United Kingdom), Intelligence Corps during the North African Campaign. During his service, Henderson collected the lyrics to "D-Day Dodgers," a satirical song to the tune of "Lili Marlene", attributed to Lance-Sergeant Harry Pynn, who had served in Italy. Henderson also wrote the lyrics to ''The 51st (Highland) Division's Farewell to Sicily'', set to a pipe tune called "Farewell to the Creeks". The book in which these were collected, ''Ballads of World War II'', was published "privately" to evade censorship, but still earned Henderson a ten-year ban from BBC radio. Henderson's 1948 poetry book about his experiences in the war, ''Elegies for the Dead in Cyrenaica'', received the Somerset Maugham Award. Scottish Gaelic poet Duncan Livingstone, a native of the Isle of Mull who had lived in Pretoria, South Africa, since 1903, published several poems in Gaelic about the war. They included an account of the Battle of the River Plate and also an mimesis, imitation of Sìleas na Ceapaich's early 18th century lament, ''Alasdair a Gleanna Garadh'', in honor of Livingstone's nephew, Pilot Officer Alasdair Ferguson Bruce of the Royal Air Force, who was shot down and killed during a mission over Nazi Germany in 1941. Scottish Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean was raised in the Free Presbyterian Church of Scotland, which he later described as "the strictest of Calvinist Christian fundamentalism, fundamentalism" on the Isle of Raasay. He had become, by the outbreak of World War II, a Communist Party of Great Britain, Communist-sympathiser. MacLean was also a soldier poet who wrote about his combat experiences with the Royal Corps of Signals during the Western Desert campaign. MacLean's time in the firing line ended after he was severely wounded at the Second Battle of El Alamein in 1941. MacLean's most famous Gaelic war poem is ''Glac a' Bhàis'' ("The Valley of Death"), which relates his thoughts on seeing a dead German soldier in North Africa. In the poem, MacLean ponders what role the dead man may have played in Nazi atrocities against both German Jews and members of the Communist Party of Germany. MacLean concludes, however, by saying that whatever the German soldier may or may not have done, he showed no pleasure in his death upon Ruweisat Ridge. Following the war, MacLean would go on to become a major figure in world literature. He was described by the Scottish Poetry Library as "one of the major Scottish poets of the modern era" because of his "mastery of his chosen medium and his engagement with the European poetic tradition and European politics". Northern Irish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature Seamus Heaney has credited MacLean with saving Scottish Gaelic literature, Scottish Gaelic poetry. Upon the outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939, North Uist war poet Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna composed the poem ''Òran dhan Dara Chogaidh'' ("A Song for World War II"). In the poem, Dòmhnall urged the young Scottish Gaels who were going off to fight to not be afraid and that victory over Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany would come by October 1939. On 16 November 1939, the British merchant ship ''S.S. Arlington Court'' was torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic Ocean by the German submarine U-43 (1939), German submarine U-43. In his poem ''Calum Moireasdan an Arlington Court'' ("Calum Morrison of the ''Arlington Court''"), Dòmhnall paid tribute to the courage shown by one of the survivors, a seventeen year old Gaelic-speaking merchant seaman from Calbost on the Isle of Lewis. Morrison had been the only survivor in his lifeboat who had known how to sail and had managed to pilot their lifeboat eastwards for five days, until he and his fellow survivors were rescued at the mouth of the English Channel. Also during the Second World War, Dòmhnall served in the Home Guard (United Kingdom), Home Guard, about which he composed the song ''Òran a' Home Guard'' ("The Song of the Home Guard"), which pokes fun at an exercise in which a platoon from North Uist was ordered to simulate taking the airfield at Benbecula from the invading Wehrmacht. At the same time, Dòmhnall's son Calum MacDonald served in the Merchant navy, and regularly sailed within sight of North Uist on his travels between the port of Glasgow and the United States. With this in mind, the Bard composed the poem ''Am Fianais Uibhist'' ("In Sight of Uist"). Aonghas Caimbeul (1903–1982), a Scottish Gaelic poet from Swainbost on the Isle of Lewis, had served during the Interwar Period with the Seaforth Highlanders in British Raj, British India. While there, Caimbeul had heard Mahatma Gandhi speak and had also seen the aviator Amy Johnson. Therefore, upon the outbreak of World War II in September 1939, Caimbeul rejoined his old regiment and saw combat against the invading Wehrmacht during the Fall of France. After the 51st (Highland) Division surrendered to Major-General Erwin Rommel at Saint-Valery-en-Caux on 12 June 1940, Caimbeul spent the rest of the war in POW camps in Occupied Poland, where he mostly did unpaid agricultural labor. In his award-winning memoir ''Suathadh ri Iomadh Rubha'',Ronald Black (1999), ''An Tuil: Anthology of 20th century Scottish Gaelic Verse'', p. 757. Caimbeul recalled the origins of his poem, ''Deargadan Phòland'' ("The Fleas of Poland"), "We called them the ''Freiceadan Dubh'' ('Black Watch'), and any man they didn't reduce to cursing and swearing deserved a place in the courts of the saints. I made a satirical poem about them at the time, but that didn't take the strength out of their frames or the sharpness out of their sting." Caimbeul composed other poems during his captivity, including ''Smuaintean am Braighdeanas am Pòland, 1944'' ("Thoughts on Bondage in Poland, 1944"). After a three-month-long forced march from Toruń, Thorn to Magdeburg which he graphically describes in his memoirs, Caimbeul was liberated from captivity on 11 April 1945. He returned to his native Swainbost and spent his life there as a shopkeeper until he died at Stornoway on 28 January 1982. Aonghas Caimbeul's collected poems, ''Moll is Cruithneachd'', were published at Glasgow in 1972 and were favorably reviewed. Caimbeul's memoirs, ''Suathadh ri Iomadh Rubha'', which won the £200 prize in a contest offered by the Gaelic Books Council, were also published at Glasgow in 1973. Of the memoir, Ronald Black has written, "It is a remarkable achievement consisting as it does of the memoirs of an exciting life, woven together with a forthright personal philosophy and much detailed ethnological commentary on tradition and change in island communities during the twentieth century, all steeped in a solution of anecdote, sometimes brilliantly funny. It is the twentieth century's leading work of Gaelic nonfictional prose." Calum MacNeacail (1902–1978), a Scottish Gaelic poet from Gedintailor, Isle of Skye, served in the Royal Air Force during the Second World War. In his 1946 poem ''Cùmhnantan Sìthe Pharis'' ("The Paris Peace Treaties"), MacNeacail praised the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and threatened the same fate against Joseph Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov if the continued refusing to cooperate with the Western Allies.South Africa
In South African poetry in English, Roy Campbell (poet), Roy Campbell wrote several poems in favor of the Allied cause during the Second World War. In one of them, Campbell expressed his elation and pride at seeing the Royal Navy aircraft carrier HMS Ark Royal (91), HMS Ark Royal being towed into Gibraltar for repairs following combat against the German battleships and . In Afrikaans literature, the main war poet of the Second World War is, like in theWales
Anglo-Welsh poet Alun Lewis (poet), Alun Lewis, who was born at Cwmaman, near Aberdare in the Cynon Valley of the South Wales Coalfield, remains one if the most well-known English-language poets of the Second World War. After the outbreak of World War II, the Second World War in September 1939, Lewis first joined the British Army Royal Engineers as an enlisted man because he was a pacifist, but still wished to aid the war effort. However, he then inexplicably sought and gained an officer's commission in an infantry battalion. In 1941 he collaborated with artists John Petts (artist), John Petts and Brenda Chamberlain (artist), Brenda Chamberlain on the "Caseg broadsheets". His first published book was the collection poetry ''Raider's Dawn and other poems'' (1942), which was followed up by a volume of short stories, ''The Last Inspection'' (1942). In 1942 he was sent to British India with the South Wales Borderers. Lewis' poems about his war experiences have been described as showing "his brooding over his army experiences and trying to catch and hold some vision that would illuminate its desolation with meaning" (see Ian Hamilton "Alun Lewis Selected Poetry and Prose) Lewis died on 5 March 1944, during the Burma campaign against the Imperial Japanese Army. He was found shot in the head, after shaving and washing, near the officers' latrines, and with his revolver in his hand. Alun Lewis died from his wound six hours later. A British Army court of inquiry later concluded that Lewis had tripped and that the shooting was an accident. Alun Lewis lies buried at Taukkyan War Cemetery, located near Yangon, Myanmar. Anglo-Welsh poet Dylan Thomas also wrote about the victims of Luftwaffe bombs during the Battle of Britain and about The Holocaust in his poem ''A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London''.United States
The mass slaughter and futility of World War I were so deeply ingrained upon the American people, that U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's efforts to bring the United States into the war against Nazi Germany were very unpopular. The America First Committee, of which Charles Lindbergh was the spokesman, and the Communist Party of the United States of America were both organizing protests against Roosevelt's foreign policies. Opposition to American involvement in the war vanished completely, after the Imperial Japanese Navy Attack on Pearl Harbor, attacked Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941. Although the Second World War is not usually thought of as a poet's war, there were American war poets. In an interview for the documentary ''The Muse of Fire'', U.S. Poet Laureate Richard Wilbur commented that there was a great difference between the war poets of World War I and those, like himself, who wrote and served during World War II. Wilbur explained that, unlike Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, American World War II poets believed themselves to be fighting a just war and that Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy (1922–1943), Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan were terrible enemies which needed to be confronted and destroyed. He did add that many World War II poets, including himself, felt sympathy for the plight of conscientious objectors. After being thrown out of signals training and busted back to the ranks for expressing sympathy for the Communist Party of the United States of America, Richard Wilbur was shipped overseas as an enlisted man and served in the European theatre of World War II, European theatre as a radio operator with the 36th Infantry Division (United States), 36th U.S. Infantry Division. He was in combat during the Italian campaign (World War II), Italian Campaign at the Battle of Anzio, the Battle of Monte Cassino, and in the Liberation of Rome. He was ultimately promoted to the ranks of sergeant. Sergeant Wilbur's war continued through the Operation Dragoon, Landings in Southern France and in the final invasion of Nazi Germany. During his war service and over the decades that followed, Richard Wilbur wrote many war poems. One of Wilbur's best-known war poems is ''Tywater'', about the combat death of Corporal Lloyd Tywater, a former Texas rodeo cowboy with a talent for rope tricks, knife throwing, and shooting swallows out of the sky with a pistol. Another famous war poem by Richard Wilbur is ''First Snow in Alsace'', which lyrically describes the horrors of a recent battlefield in Occupied France being covered up by the beautiful sight of new-fallen snow. Anthony Hecht, an American poet of Jews in Germany, German Jewish ancestry, served in the European Theater as a G.I. with the 97th Infantry Division (United States), 97th U.S. Infantry Division. Hecht not only saw combat in the Ruhr pocket and in Occupied Czechoslovakia, but also helped liberate Flossenbürg concentration camp. After the liberation, Hecht interviewed survivors to gather evidence for the prosecution of Nazi war crimes. Decades later, Hecht sought treatment for PTSD and used his war experiences as the subject of many of his poems. American poet Dunstan Thompson, a native of New London, Connecticut began publishing his poems while serving as a soldier in the European Theater during World War II. Thompson's poems depict military service through the eyes of a homosexual, who is engaged in casual encounters with soldiers and sailors in Blitzed London. Karl Shapiro, a stylish writer with a commendable regard for his craft, wrote poetry in the Pacific Ocean theater of World War II, Pacific Theater while he served there during World War II. His collection ''V-Letter and Other Poems'', written while Shapiro was stationed in New Guinea, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1945, while Shapiro was still in the military. Shapiro was American Poet Laureate in 1946 and 1947. (At the time this title was consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, which was changed by Congress in 1985 to Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress.). 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."Romania
The Romanian-born poet Paul Celan wrote war poetry including "Todesfuge" (translated into English as "Death Fugue", and "Fugue of Death",) a German poem written by probably around 1945 and first published in 1948. It is "among Celan's most well-known and often-anthologized poems". The is regarded as a "masterful description of horror and death in a concentration camp". Celan was born to a Jewish family in Chernivtsi, Cernauti, Romania; his parents were murdered during the Holocaust, and Celan himself was a prisoner for a time in a concentration camp. Tristan Tzara was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist, and performance artist, best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. During the final part of his career, Tzara combined his Humanism, humanist and Anti-fascism, anti-fascist perspective with a communist vision, joining the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War and the French Resistance during World War II, and serving a term in the National Assembly of France, National Assembly. Having spoken in favor of liberalization in the People's Republic of Hungary just before the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Revolution of 1956, he distanced himself from the French Communist Party, of which he was by then a member. In 1960, he was among the intellectuals who protested against French war crimes in the Algerian War.Japan
Ryuichi Tamura (1923–98) who served in the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II is a major Japanese war poet. Following the war, he "helped begin a poetry magazine, ''The Waste Land''" and those poets who contributed to it were "the Waste Land Poets." The work of these writers was especially influenced by T. S. Eliot, Stephen Spender, Cecil Day-Lewis, C. Day-Lewis and W. H. Auden. Tamura's first book of poems, ''Four Thousand Days and Nights'' was published in 1956.Voices of Education, "WWII Japanese Poets"Later wars
Korean War
The Korean War inspired the war poetry of Rolando Hinojosa, a Mexican-American poet from Mercedes, Texas, and of William Wantling, a Beat poet who is now known to have lied about the fact that he never actually served in combat. (See Stolen Valor). On 28 March 1956, when BBC Scotland played a recording of a Scottish Gaelic language ceilidh by the soldiers of the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders, King's Own Cameron Highlanders during the Korean War, Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna, who has served in the same regiment during World War I, was listening. He later composed the poem ''Gillean Chorea'' ("The Lads in Korea"), in which he declared that the recording had brought back his youth.Cold War
On 1 November 1952, the United States successfully detonated "Ivy Mike", the first hydrogen bomb, on the island of Elugelab in Enewetak Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, as part of Operation Ivy. On 22 November 1955, the Soviet Union followed suit with the successful testing of RDS-37, which had been developed by Andrei Sakharov, Vitaly Ginzburg, and Yakov Borisovich Zel'dovich, Yakov Zel'dovich, at the Semipalatinsk Test Site in northeastern Kazakhstan. In his poem ''Òran an H-Bomb'' ("The Song of the H-Bomb"), North Uist poet Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna commented on how, after an attack against German trenches during World War I, the stretcher-bearers would come by sunset to pick up the wounded. But now, due to weapons like the hydrogen bomb, he continued, nothing would be spared, neither man nor beast, neither the beaches nor the mountaintops. Only one or two such bombs would suffice, he said, to completely wipe out the islands where Gaelic is spoken and everyone and everything in them. But Dòmhnall urged his listeners to trust that Jesus Christ, who Crucifixion of Jesus, died on the Cross out of love for the human race, would never permit such a terrible destruction to fall on those whose sins he redeemed through his blood and the wounds in his hands and his side.Vietnam War
The Vietnam War also produced war poets, including Armenian-American poet Michael Casey (poet), Michael Casey whose début collection, ''Obscenities'', drew on his service with the Military Police Corps (United States Army), Military Police Corps in the Quảng Ngãi Province of South Vietnam. The book won the 1972 Yale Younger Poets Award. W. D. Ehrhart, a United States Marine Corps Sergeant who won the Purple Heart in the Battle of Huế during the Tet Offensive, has since been dubbed "the Dean of Vietnam War poetry." At the height of the Vietnam War in 1967, American poet Richard Wilbur composed ''A Miltonic Sonnet for Mr. Johnson on His Refusal of Peter Hurd's Official Portrait''. In a clear cut case of "criticism from the Right", Wilbur compares U.S. President Lyndon Baines Johnson with Thomas Jefferson and finds the former to be greatly wanting. Commenting that Jefferson "would have wept to see small nations dread/ The imposition of our cattle brand," and that in Jefferson's term, "no army's blood was shed", Wilbur urges President Johnson to seriously consider how history will judge him and his Administration. Rob Jacques, a Vietnam-Era United States Navy veteran, has explored the tension between love and violence in war from the perspective of homosexual servicemen in his collection, ''War Poet'', published by Sibling Rivalry Press. Yusef Komunyakaa (formerly James Willie Brown, Jr.), an African-American poet from Bogalusa, Louisiana, served in the United States Army during the Vietnam War as an editor for the military newspaper ''Southern Cross'' and was awarded a Bronze Star. He has since used his war experiences as the source of his poetry collections ''Toys in a Field'' (1986) and ''Dien Cau Dau'' (1988). Komunyakaa has said that following his return to the United States, he found the American people's rejection of Vietnam veterans to be every bit as painful as the racism he had experienced while growing up the American South before the Civil Rights Movement. Komyunakaa went on, however, to become the first African-American poet whose verse won a Pulitzer Prize.Edited by Dana Gioia, David Mason, Meg Schoerke, and D.C. Stone (2004), ''Twentieth Century American Poetry'', McGraw Hill. Pages 952-953. Another poet of the Vietnam War is Bruce Weigl. Caitlín Maude, an Irish-language poet, actress, and sean-nós singing, sean-nós singer from Casla in the Connemara Gaeltacht, composed the poem ''Amhrán grá Vietnam'' ("Vietnamese Love Song"), which tells a story of love and hope amidst the fighting and the destruction caused by both sides.War on Terror
Most recently, the Iraq War has produced war poets including Brian Turner (American poet), Brian Turner whose début collection, ''Here, Bullet'', is based on his experience as an infantry team leader with the 3rd Stryker Brigade Combat Team from November 2003 until November 2004 in Iraq War, 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. 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." Erika Renee Land is an American 21st-century war poet, MacDowell (artists' residency and workshop), 2021MacDowell Fellow and author, that served in Mosul, Iraq from 2005-2006. She has published two poetry collections that chronicle her experiences as a pharmacy technician while helping the War on Terror, Global War on Terrorism efforts. She has also written and performed a one-woman play titleIn popular culture
Music
* The 1876 opera ''Nikola Šubić Zrinski (opera), Nikola Šubić Zrinski'' by Croatian composer Ivan Zajc, is based on Brne Karnarutić's epic poem ''Vazetje Sigeta grada'', about the Battle of Szigetvár. * The 1887 opera ''Prince Igor'', by Russian composer Alexander Borodin, is based on ''The Tale of Igor's Campaign'' (''Слово о пълкѹ Игоревѣ''). * The 1951 Edinburgh People's Festival Ceilidh brought Scottish traditional music to a large public stage for the first time and is now considered to be one of the beginnings of the British folk revival. The concert took place inside Edinburgh's Oddfellows Hall and continued long afterwards at St Columba's-by-the-Castle, St. Columba's Church Hall on Friday August 26, 1951. The Gàidhealtachd of Scotland was represented by Gaelic singers Flora MacNeil, Calum Johnston, and by bagpiper John Burgess (bagpiper), John Burgess. During the concert, two Gaelic war poems of the Jacobite rising of 1745 were performed. Barra-native Calum Johnston, who was "keen to show his own admiration for [the] poet and for the Highlanders who fought for Charlie", performed Alasdair Mac Mhaighstir Alasdair's ''Òran Eile don Phrionnsa''. Flora MacNeil, a fellow native of Barra who would go on to become a legendary Gaelic singer, then performed, ''Mo rùn geal òg'', Christine Ferguson's lament for the death of her husband, who fell while bearing the standard for the Scottish clan chief, Chief of Clan Chisholm at the Battle of Culloden in 1746. * English composer Benjamin Britten incorporated eight of Wilfred Owen's war poems into ''War Requiem'', along with words from the Tridentine Mass, Tridentine Requiem Mass (''Missa pro Defunctis''). ''War Requiem'' was commissioned for the reconsecration of Coventry Cathedral and was first performed there on 30 May 1962. * Several poems from Yusef Komunyakaa's Vietnam War collection ''Dien Cai Dau'' (1988), the title of which derives from a derogatory term in Vietnamese language, Vietnamese for American soldiers, were set to music by composer Elliot Goldenthan as part of ''Fire Water Paper: A Vietnam Oratorio''. * In the 2008 album ''Dual (album), Dual'', a collaboration between Irish and Scottish folk musicians Danú, Éamonn Doorley, Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, Ross Martin (Scottish musician), Ross Martin, and Julie Fowlis, Fowlis recorded ''An Eala Bhàn'', an iconic Scottish Gaelic love song by World War I poet Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna. In her 2009 album ''Uam'', Scottish folk singer Fowlis recorded Breton World War I poet Yann-Ber Kalloc'h's most famous song, ''Me 'zo Ganet kreiz ar e mor'' ("I was Born in the Middle of the Sea"). The lyrics were first translated from the original Breton language into Fowlis' native Scottish Gaelic. On the 2018 album ''Allt (album), Allt'', Fowlis performs Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna's war poem, ''Air an Somme'' ("The Song of the Somme") with Éamonn Doorley, Zoë Conway and John McIntyre (musician), John McIntyre. * In 2012, New Zealand people, New Zealander and Classical composer Richard Oswin set to music Australian war poet Leon Gellert's poem ''The Last to Leave'' as part of ''Three Gallipoli Settings'', a choral work commissioned by the New Zealand Secondary Students' Choir. * American composer Patrick Zimmerli's oratorio ''Alan Seeger: Instrument of Destiny'', which combines European opera and American jazz music, sets to music the poems, letters, and diary entries of American war poet Alan Seeger. The oratorio was first performed in 2017 at St. John the Divine Cathedral in New York City.In film
* In the 1940 film ''The Fighting 69th'', which tells the story of the Irish-American Doughboys from New York City who served in the 69th Infantry Regiment (New York), regiment of the same name during World War I, American war poet Joyce Kilmer (Jeffrey Lynn) appears onscreen. The live burial of 21 American Doughboys by a German artillery barrage in the Rouge-Bouquet forest, about which Kilmer wrote his most famous war poem, is also shown onscreen. * At the beginning of the 1990 film ''Memphis Belle (film), Memphis Belle'', directed by Michael Caton-Jones, Sgt. Daniel Daly (Eric Stoltz), a proudly Irish-American radio operator in the United States Army Air Forces, United States Army Air Force during World War II, recites William Butler Yeats' ''An Irish Airman Foresees His Death'' to his fellow crewmembers of a Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress, B-17 Flying Fortress. * The 1992 Welsh language anti-war film, anti-war biographical film ''Hedd Wyn (film), Hedd Wyn'' depicts war poet Hedd Wyn, Ellis Humphrey Evans (Huw Garmon) as a tragic hero, with an intense dislike of the jingoism, ultranationalism, militarism, Anglophilia, and Germanophobia that surrounds him. The film also focuses on Evans' pursuit of his lifelong dream of winning the Bardic Chair at the National Eisteddfod of Wales and on his three-year-long battle against overwhelming pressure to, "join up," during theIn television
* In the 1984 ''Peanuts'' television special ''What Have We Learned, Charlie Brown?'', Lieutenant-colonel (Canada), Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae's ''In Flanders' Fields'' is read aloud at a World War I cemetery in France by Linus van Pelt (Jeremy Schoenberg). * The 1989 BBC sitcom ''Blackadder Goes Forth'', which is set in the trench warfare, trenches of the Western Front (World War I), Western Front during World War I, repeatedly lampoons the absurdity of, "the mud, the death, the endless poetry", and particularly takes swipes at the romantic idealism found in the war poems of Rupert Brooke.See also
* Epic poetry * War novelReferences
Bibliography
*Ghosal, Sukriti. War Poetry – The New Sensibilities. Kindle Edition, 2015. ASIN: B00XH4O74Q. *Paul O'Prey, O'Prey, Paul (ed).External links
*BBudgen, David