Move if in the wrong forum. Exit wounds: Poets, from ancient times, have written about war. It is the poet's obligation, wrote Plato, to bear witness. In modern times, the young soldiers of the first world war turned the horrors they endured and witnessed in trench combat - which slaughtered them in their millions - into a vividly new kind of poetry, and most of us, when we think of "war poetry" will find the names of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon coming first to our lips, with Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Rupert Brooke ... British poets in our early 21st century do not go to war, as Keith Douglas did and Edward Thomas before him. They might be poet-journalists like James Fenton, the last foreign correspondent to leave Saigon after it fell to the Viet Cong in 1975, or electrifying anti-war performance poets, like the late Adrian Mitchell, or brilliant retellers of Homer's Trojan wars, like Christopher Logue. War, it seems, makes poets of soldiers and not the other way round. Today, as most of us do, poets largely experience war - wherever it rages - through emails or texts from friends or colleagues in war zones, through radio or newsprint or television, through blogs or tweets or interviews. With the official inquiry into Iraq imminent and the war in Afghanistan returning dead teenagers to the streets of Wootton Bassett, I invited a range of my fellow poets to bear witness, each in their own way, to these matters of war. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/jul/25/war-poetry-carol-ann-duffy War is hell, right? Terrible! People die. BUT, people also LIVE. People also do great things in war. So, my question is...why are the poems of war so bloody depressing and bang on about the futility of war blah blah blah. What about the glory of a kill and the winning of hearts and minds etc etc etc?
i've read quite alot ww1 poetry. owen and sassoon come to mind....robert service wrote some very moving poems about the war.the one i remember best by service is called "the stretcher bearer"....american joyce kilmer wrote some poems about it also...writers of every nation have written poems and stories of war...when the battle is done it's probably hard to find the glory in it.
I write poetry. Here's one on the subject. ___________ Fight From Kingdom An eagle soars High and smooth Moving quite impressively I hear it's call It's calling me To join it's fight For parity The sky is thick and right for flight I soar off to a righteous fight Fight from kingdom Flight for freedom My spirit floats This leap I make I can Feel the beating heart Of My Soul ~ JusSumguy -
I was going a tad over the top there. I just meant ones that were not so macabre or anti-war. Not so much warmongering just not so...^ ^ My stretcher is one scarlet stain, And as I tries to scrape it clean, I tell you what - I'm sick of pain, For all I've heard, for all I've seen; Around me is the hellish night, And as the war's red rim I trace, I wonder if in Heaven's height Our God don't turn away his face. I don't care whose the crime may be, I hold no brief for kin or clan; I feel no hate, I only see As man destroys his brother man; I wave no flag, I only know As here beside the dead I wait, A million hearts are weighed with woe, A million homes are desolate. In dripping darkness far and near, All night I've sought those woeful ones. Dawn suddens up and still I hear The crimson chorus of the guns. Look, like a ball of blood the sun Hangs o'er the scene of wrath and wrong, "Quick! Stretcher-bearers on the run!", Oh Prince of Peace! How long, how long?" Poem by Robert William Service The exact type I like but have read too much of.
i didn't have anything new to add.i typed in something to look something else up.oh but i think the stretcher bearer is by service.
it seems i remember poetry by rudyard kipling being more optimistic.i remember in one poem i think it's called "tommy" he talks about how the soldiers are taken for granted until the fighting starts.i just went to reread the poem.it's a pretty good one.
Yeah: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nGClrsAN2aY that one is pretty timeless. I was looking for some contemporary ones too. I brought this topic up as well, because the poems in the OP link are new. They talk about the current conflicts - especially in Afghanistan. I was going to ask: Do we need new war poetry - but ofcourse we do. I wonder if it matters how the general public - as a whole - considers a war to how it is reflected in poems....mmm.
they're still being written.i've read some very good ones.i don't remember where.veteran's web sites i suppose.jussumguy i liked your poem.
http://war-poets.blogspot.com/2009/07/poems-about-iraq-and-afghanistan.html Today's Guardian carries a number of poems commissioned by Carol Ann Duffy about war in Iraq and Afghanistan. The cynical attitude to this exercise would read as follows: some of these poets had not thought to address the issue before, but a request from the Poet Laureate, together with a cheque and publication in the Guardian, are enough to provoke the obligatory hand-wringing. The usual suspects and the usual politics are out in force. (Ian Duhig's poem risks seeming to call the RAF 'Jihadists', but see the comments below.) Duffy says in her introduction that 'British poets in our early 21st century do not go to war'; no, they sit at home writing about it. (There are, contra Duffy, poets who have served in the warzones, but they are silently excluded.) Not one of these poems is news that will stay news; they are soon-to-be-forgotten froth. But the poems aren't really about the poetry; they aren't even about the wars.
That poem is really, really, really, really, really shitty. Seriously. Just shitty. Really shitty. Extremely fucking shitty. I cannot help but state this. That poem is crap. Here's a decent famous war poem, so that you could see what decent poetry is. "In Flanders fields the poppies blow Between the crosses, row on row, That mark our place; and in the sky The larks, still bravely singing, fly Scarce heard amid the guns below. We are the dead. Short days ago We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, Loved, and were loved, and now we lie In Flanders fields. Take up our quarrel with the foe: To you from failing hands we throw The torch; be yours to hold it high. If ye break faith with us who die We shall not sleep, though poppies grow In Flanders fields."
THE JEWISH CONSCRIPT They have dressed me up in a soldier's dress, With a rifle in my hand, And have sent me bravely forth to shoot My own in a foreign land. Oh, many shall die for the fields of their homes, And many in conquest wild, But I shall die for the fatherland That murdered my little child. How many hundreds of years ago -- The nations wax and cease! -- Did the God of our fathers doom us to bear The flaming message of peace! We are the mock and the sport of time! Yet why should I complain! -- For a Jew that they hung on the bloody cross, He also died in vain. -- Florence Kiper Frank.
This one has always been my favorite in the genre: "Bent double, like old beggars under sacks, Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge, Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs And towards our distant rest began to trudge. Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind; Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind. Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! -- An ecstasy of fumbling, Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time; But someone still was yelling out and stumbling And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . . Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light, As under I green sea, I saw him drowning. In all my dreams, before my helpless sight, He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. If in some smothering dreams you too could pace Behind the wagon that we flung him in, And watch the white eyes writhing in his face, His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin; If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs, Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -- My friend, you would not tell with such high zest To children ardent for some desperate glory, The old lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori" -Wilfred Owen
It wasn't mine, someone else wrote it. I didn't bother reading your posts in the thread, now please stop addressing me or I will start calling you a ****** again.
