London Blitz

Poetry

The poet T.S.Eliot served as an air raid warden on night-watch during the London Blitz. Referring to the 1942 poem he would publish as the last poem of his Four Quartets, he wrote to his editor: "We had to watch the fires and report them as quickly as they occurred. You will be interested to know that the lines from Little Gidding came out of this experience." Stephen Spender served as a volunteer AFS fireman in north London during the war during which he wrote his poem Air Raid (1941). Ecco Homo by David Gascoyne and Brother Fire by Louis MacNeice have been cited as poetic responses to the experience of the Blitz reflecting apocalyptic religiosity and Marxist schadenfreude respectively. Hilda Doolittle, who wrote poetry as H.D., conveyed her experiences of the London Blitz in the poem The Walls Do Not Fall (1944) where they are set alongside historical examples of besieged cities. The Welsh poet Vernon Watkins wrote directly out of his experience of the Swansea Blitz of 1941 in poems such as The Spoils of War and The Broken Sea (Souls numbered their days/Between night and morning...).