War poetry

“ The passion of indignation flamed out as passion must. The war that had been welcomed as a relief bore down upon the land with an ever-increasing weight, became an ever-darkening shadow. Its romance and poetry did not fade out, but their colors were lost under the sable hues of reality. ”

“ But in less peculiar circumstances the men who write the poetry of war, the men who make the songs that soldiers love to sing, the men who irresistibly stir patriotism in the blood of youth, the men who embalm heroic deeds in thrilling verse, and touch all hearts to pity and all eyes to tears by the tender pathos of their [Pg 8] chronicles of suffering, are not the men who do the fighting. ”

“ The poet, trusting to primary instincts, luxuriates among the felicities of love and wine, and is enraptured while he describes the fairer aspects of war: nor does he shrink from the company of the passion of love though immoderate—from convivial pleasure though intemperate—nor from the presence of war though savage and recognised as the handmaid of desolation. ”

“ And poetry has aspired to sustain the nobler part of man’s nature during the confusion into which civilization has been plunged since the war began. The English people, who have been in the world’s vanguard practising democratic ideals, have, in their poets to-day, shattered the idol of war and are glorifying the ideals of peace.
The best poems in English directly inspired by the war have been produced by American poets. Of these I have gathered a representative group in this volume. ”

“ War is horrible, but still it is in a sense a privilege to have lived in time of war. The emotions are never so stirred as then. Imagination takes her highest flights, poetry blazes, song stirs the soul, and every noble attribute is brought into full play. ”

“ But the war poet has left the mere arguments to others. For himself, he has seen and felt. Envisaging war from various angles, now romantically, now realistically, now as the celebrating chronicler, now as the contemplative interpreter, but always in a spirit of catholic curiosity, he has sung, the fall of Troy, the Roman adventures, the mediaeval battles and crusades, the fields of Agincourt and Waterloo, and the more modern revolutions. ”

“ To a young man whose heart is truly enlisted in the issue of a great war, the mighty thrill of the soul is the ultimate experience of life. So is the banner of his country raised aloft. So are his arms consecrated by the deepest impulses of the spirit. Lyric poetry has often exhausted its meters and its music at the altar of the lesser loves. ”

“ They sang an old war-song, they were true to themselves, they were gay!
We might have thought they were going for a holiday—
Except for something in the air,
Except for the weeping of the ruddy old women of Finistère.
The younger women do not weep. They dream and stare.
They seem to be walking in dreams. They seem not to know
It is their homes, their happiness, vanishing so.
(Every strong man between twenty and forty must go.)
They sang an old war-song. I have heard it often in other days,
But never before when War was walking the world's highways. ”

“ The good poetry that is provoked by war is of a different character: it is personal, visual, and concrete. It never expresses any general aspect of war, but only such subjects as have been personally observed and felt by the poet. I would give as instances Rudyard Kipling and the German poet Liliencron, both of whom have written well about soldiers and fighting, but foolishly about War and Patriotism.
Yet any poet going about the streets today must see and feel a quantity of poetical things. ”

“ There was an immense amount of song-writing as well as of song-singing during the war, and under the stress of excitement and the gathering together of immense bodies of young and exuberant spirits the enthusiasm inevitably found a vent through the lungs. ”

“ That all base dreams thrust out at door,
We may in loftier aims excel
And, like men waking from a spell,
Grow stronger, nobler, than before,
When there is Peace.
Austin Dobson
A PRAYER IN TIME OF WAR [ The war will change many things in art and life, and among them, it is to be hoped, many of our own ideas as to what is, and what is not, "intellectual."]
Thou, whose deep ways are in the sea,
Whose footsteps are not known,
To-night a world that turned from Thee
Is waiting—at Thy Throne. ”

“ Into the stuff of his thought and utterance, whether he be on active service or not, the poet-interpreter of war weaves these intentions, and coöperates with his fellows in building up a little higher and better, from time to time, that edifice of truth for whose completion can be spared no human experience, no human hope. ”

“ The ruder poems are a trifle truculent now and then perhaps, but some little truculence may be allowed as a poetic license to the poet who sings of his countrymen's prowess in just wars. In preparing this little collection the editor has had occasion to read anew the entire body of American war poetry of the ballad and lyric class, and he ends the examination with a feeling of intense satisfaction in the knowledge that there is not an unmanly or a cowardly line in it and scarcely an ungenerous one. ”

“ There can be little doubt that these several minds and spirits, stirred by the passion and energy of war, and reacting sensitively both to its cruelties and to its pities, have experienced the kinship of quickened insight and finer unselfishness in the face of wide-ranging death. ”

“ In the vast catastrophe of the European war our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction. ”

“ They do not affect the traditions of English poetry by subject or by form. It will be found, as the years pass, that always fewer 'War poems' can still be read with pleasure, the incidents which gave rise to them having become dim in human memory. And these will not be read because of their association with the Great War, but for their qualities as poems and their power to stir enjoyment or surprise in the reader. ”

“ Certain kinds of poetry have become impossible; certain others are rapidly being exhausted. Can any one conceive that an epic poem could be written in this age? The epic turned upon the fortunes of society—the dramatic incidents of war or travel—in days when the individual could really incline the balance of a battle or an adventure by his own prowess. Modern war is a series of scientific problems, in which masses are manoeuvred and the individual hardly emerges ”

“ Soldiers in the trenches have developed a hitherto latent taste for poetry, just as they have shown a resurgence of religious feeling.” In other words, the heart is open, and must be fed. And I would quote another passage, since it expresses better than I can precisely what I feel about this particular anthology: “There are poems to suit many tastes, but there are none given over to vague, ill defined emotion or any merely fanciful sentimentality. There are poems for today of ‘the lads who have gone to the war,’ and of those who will come back no more. ”

“ There are times when the greatest victory seems small compared to the grief in one little home.'
To understand all the inner significance of the poetry of the war you must read the prose of it; such letters as Stephen's are the complement of much of the verse that the poets have written, and not infrequently they are as fine, in feeling and in phrase, as the poems they involuntarily interpret.
One of the first of Canada's soldier poets to fall in the war was Sergeant Frank Brown, and one of the last was Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. ”

“ It may be allowable to suggest, therefore, among the reasons for the prevailing dearth and scarcity of first-class heroic poetry, notwithstanding the universal demand for it, the impossibility of thus handling war on a great scale, and also the serious difficulty of giving this poetic form to contemporary events, which are not easily grouped in artistic perspective because they are so accurately described elsewhere. ”

“ The time is too near us, the motive too deep, the theme too vast. But out of the dark came many voices, voices of lamentation, of home and love and hope and heroism and loftiest ideality, of romance, of strange comedy. These had their inspiration from a gigantic spectacle of elemental passions in cross-play, from the thoughts and emotions not of a single people, but of all that were fighting for the life and light of civilization. Poets great and poets minor followed{6} the war or fought in it, and expressed its spirit with a personal, passionate fidelity impossible to historians. ”

“ Paint us a canvas, soldier, a picture of fire and flame!
Men, mad with the lust of killing, playing their grisly game!
Show us the dead-strewn hillsides, guarding the blood-drenched plain,
A picture of war’s grim horrors. And then, oh, soldier, then,
Draw us the white-capped nurses, doctors with skilful hands,
Counting their lives as nothing when human need demands
All that they have to offer. Paint us the women and men
Who bring the joy of living back to our hearts again.
Sing us a song, oh, soldier, chant in a martial strain,
Those who have died in battle, those who come home again. ”

“ Forward to stand in front of wars—and O, such wars!—what have you to do
with them?
With passions of demons, slaughter, premature death?
POET. Demons and death then I sing;
Put in all, aye all, will I—sword-shaped pennant for war, and banner so
broad and blue,
And a pleasure new and ecstatic, and the prattled yearning of children,
Blent with the sounds of the peaceful land, and the liquid wash of the sea;
And the icy cool of the far, far north, with rustling cedars and pines;
And the whirr of drums, and the sound of soldiers marching, and the hot sun
shining south ”

“ The golden opportunity for that effort is Now and Here; we may never have so great a chance again. For Now and Here, in the fair days of spring and summer, when singing, blossoming Nature breaks out in its Te Deum of thankfulness for yet another space of time wherein to express the gladness and glory of life, we are confronted with the hideous, ravaging spectacle of War; War, in its most cruel, pitiless, and appalling shape—War, to the grimmest death! ”

“ There is something in warfare, in its story and in its paraphernalia, which profoundly stirs the emotions and sends the blood tingling through the veins of the most peaceable of us, and appeals to I know not what remote instincts, to say nothing of our natural admiration for courage, our love of adventure, of intense movement and action. But this romantic fascination resides to no small extent in that very spectacular quality of which modern conditions are depriving war. ”

“ The artist of purest aim, sensitive to these emotions, withdraws naturally from the field of blood, confessing that no scene of battle finds a place in the highest Art,—that man, created in the image of God, can never be pictured degrading, profaning, violating that sacred image.
Were this sentiment adopted in literature as in Art, war would be shorn of its false glory. Poet, historian, orator, all should join with the Artist in saying, No battle-piece! ”

“ In the mean time, there is a remarkable and very significant tendency to praise all war songs, war stories, and war literature generally, in proportion to the discomfort and horror they excite, in proportion to their inartistic and unjustifiable realism. ”

“ If I have stressed this essentially human note, it is because it is so implicit and insistent in the songs that the soldier poets of this war have sung. They went into battle soberly or with a mystical exultation, prepared to die in it, but with a will to victory for the sake of peace and right and with a settled courage that nothing could shake. They descended into the pit and fought with beasts, but remained unconquerably human. ”

“ The main thing about them is just that they are extraordinary poems; by means of their psychology, no less and no more than by means of their metre, their rhyme, their intellectual form and their concrete imagery, they pierce us with flashing understanding of what the war is and means--not merely what it is to these individual pieces of ordinary human nature who are injured by it and who yet dominate it, but, by evident implication, what the war is in itself, as a grisly multitudinous whole. ”

“ One would say, standing upon an eminence, and surveying the smiling landscape, that this lovely plain was fashioned by the hand of the Creator as the abode of plenty and eternal peace. Yet a poet, remembering that it is not peace, but war that man loves, could not, in his dreams, picture to himself a more beautiful battle-field. ”

“ We know, or if any do not they may know it from what has been written by our soldiers themselves, that there is no glory and little romance in war except for those who can play with the thought of it from far off, or after the years have healed its wounds and hidden the hideous ruin it wrought, and the agony of it has dwindled to the glamorous sorrow of a tale that is told. ”

“ The language is direct and unaffected, soul-stirring, and free from exaggeration; every page, nay, every line, compels attention and evokes the most sympathetic interest. The book is alike authentic and restrained in tone, but what most strikes the reader is its extraordinary sincerity. No war book has yet appeared that gives so strong an impression of reality, or which, on its own sheer merits, is more worthy to survive the rage and tumult of battle. ”

“ What is incomparable in the war part of the romance are the descriptions of military customs, the scenes of camp-life, the impressions of certain hours of day and night, the reminiscences of evening conversations, the effects of groups lighted up by the weird light of the bivouac, the heart-rending aspects of the battle-field or the hospital-wards. The marvellous beauty of all this wealth of feelings felt and experienced adds its glory to the more commonplace and less valuable woof of the historical narration. ”