war poem

A war poet is a poet who participates in a war and writes about their experiences, or a non-combatant who writes poems about war. While the term is applied especially to those who served during the First World War, the term can be applied to a poet of any nationality writing about any war, including Homer's ''Iliad'', from around the 8th century BC as well as poetry of the American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Crimean War and other wars.

The Old Testament

The Book of Psalms contains many works of Hebrew poetry about war, many of which are attributed to King David, the second monarch of the Kingdom of Israel, who is said to have reigned c. 1010–970 BC.

The story of David's rise from shepherd to King also inspired the ''Davidiad'', which is a 1517 heroic epic poem in Renaissance Latin by lawyer, judge, and Renaissance humanist Marko Marulić, who spent his life in Split, Croatia, which was under the rule of the Republic of Venice.

In addition to the small portions that attempt to recall the epics of Homer, Marulic's ''The Davidiad'' is heavily modeled upon Virgil's ''Aeneid''. This is so much the case that Marulić's contemporaries called him the "Christian Virgil from Split." The late Serbian-American philologist Miroslav Marcovich also detected, "the influence of Ovid, Lucan, and Statius" in the work.

Marulić also wrote the epic poem ''Judita'', which retells the events of the ''Book of Judith'', while subtly depicting the soldiers of the Assyrian Empire as the Pre-Christian equivalent to the Turkish Janissaries and making multiple references and allusions to Classical mythology. The poem contains 2126 dodecasyllabic lines, with caesurae after the sixth syllable, composed in six books (''libar''s). The linguistic basis of the book is the Split or Čakavian dialect the Štokavian lexis, combined with many words from the Old Church Slavonic translation of the Christian Bible. ''Judita'' thus foreshadows the creation of modern Croatian.

The Trojan War

''The Iliad''

''The Iliad