War & Poetry

I'll throw this one out there for my first follower. Since poetry is her thing I thought I would contribute a little something her way. The fascinating history of war and poetry.

Normally, when one thinks about poetry--you think about girly verse or maybe beatniks in black turtlenecks and berets snapping there fingers to bad jazz poetry. Well friends, this isn't necessarily so. In fact some of the most poignant image of warfare come from poetry. For example there is this classic from 1945:


The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
Randall Jarell

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Notice how the "S" in State is capitalized? Interesting, eh?

Go back in time a little further to WWI and we get a whole generation of war poets. It is here that Wilfred Owen displays his mastery of imagery as he relates the horrors of chlorine gas in Dulce Et Decorum Est.

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 cud¹²
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest¹³
To children ardent¹⁴ for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.¹⁵


Soldiers write poetry too... here is one example.

The power of poetry is obvious if you take a look at the US Army Soldier's Creed, it is written as poetry. It has also been set to music and used relentlessly in recruitment advertisments.

When you read the pieces what do you see in your mind's eye? What you feel in your gut? And what do you think the author meant to communicate to you?