2/29/2024 0 Comments War poet societyAnd I guess most people with their head screwed on would say the same thing. I mean, I - essentially, I'm with Picasso, who very bluntly said I'm against war. MOTION: I absolutely don't disagree with that. As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free.Īnd perhaps on Veterans Day, we should also note that there have been wars to defeat slavery or to destroy concentration camps, ethnic cleansing in Bosnia, that have been seen as righteous. Civil War winds up by saying, (reading) in the beauty of the lilies, Christ was born across the sea with a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me. SIMON: And famously, that song that rallied Union troops in the U.S. SIMON: I'm going to read another - really, a set of lyrics that you include here, Julia Ward Howe's "The Battle Hymn Of The Republic." These satires are not like anything else that have been written about war before, so it's easy to imagine the kind of shock impact that they had on the early audiences and, to a certain extent, still on us today. But he did for them both with his plan of attack. He's a cheery old card, grunted Harry to Jack as they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack. And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine. Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead. (Reading) Good morning, good morning, the general said, when we met him last week on our way to the line. This short poem is a good example of that - so "The General." And I think - I mean, for my money, the most successful poems that he writes are very often these shortish, squiblike-seeming poems which are savagely satirical, very often, of the people who are in charge of the war at the same time as they are very tenderly remembering or shielding those who are actually fighting in it. It's perhaps worth saying as a way of introducing this. MOTION: Well, Sassoon is one of the best two or three known poets of the First World War. SIMON: Let me ask you to read a Siegfried Sassoon's poem, "The General." And by the time that you get to Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Ivor Gurney and others writing in the second half of the First World War, that note of dissent is absolutely unignorable. You can even hear, I think, in one of the most famous war poems of all time, Tennyson's poem on "The Charge Of The Light Brigade," in its admission that someone had blundered, that there is some sort of fault line opening between the - how people are expected to respond on the homefront and what it's actually like up there on the front. And that remains more or less constant - I mean, with variations being played on that as a theme for centuries, honestly.īut as we come up to the beginning of the 20th century, the end of the 19th century, certain dissenting voices start to make themselves heard. And very often, that celebration of individual male valor is intended to combine with some sort of national or nationalistic impulse to defend the homeland, in other words, in some way or other. MOTION: Well, I think mainly what you see is a significant change in attitude over the centuries, I must say, because the poems written are very largely celebrations of male valor. SIMON: Across all these different civilizations and epochs and time and experiences in this book, what are some of the recurrent themes you see in war poetry? Thanks so much for being with us.ĪNDREW MOTION: It's my great pleasure. He joins us from Baltimore, where he's the Homewood Professor of Arts at Johns Hopkins University. "The Folio Book Of War Poetry" is edited by Sir Andrew Motion, the former poet laureate of the United Kingdom. For in the morning, you went out to battle. They died in the moors and were not buried. As a first-century poem from China puts it, they fought south of the ramparts. The new "Folio Book Of War Poetry" is a collection of works by great poets that depict - as maybe only poetry can - the losses and valor that can be borne by veterans throughout history. Veterans Day is next Thursday, November 11.
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