A poem

liberal japonicus
1914
by Wilfred Owen
War broke: and now the Winter of the world
With perishing great darkness closes in.
The foul tornado, centred at Berlin,
Is over all the width of Europe whirled,
Rending the sails of progress. Rent or furled
Are all Art's ensigns. Verse wails. Now begin
Famines of thought and feeling. Love's wine's thin.
The grain of human Autumn rots, down-hurled.

For after Spring had bloomed in early Greece,
And Summer blazed her glory out with Rome,
An Autumn softly fell, a harvest home,
A slow grand age, and rich with all increase.
But now, for us, wild Winter, and the need
Of sowings for a new Spring, and blood for seed.

Comments

[novakant]

Thank you, lj.

[wj]

Also this: In Flanders Fields

I wonder if any of the Russian soldiers in Ukraine have been, or will br, creating poetry in a similar vein.

[Hartmut]

Not to forget:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dulce_et_Decorum_est

[GftNC]

Hartmut: it is never forgotten.

[nous]

I read a lot of war poetry during the research phase for my dissertation. There's a lot of excellent, moving poetry to have come out of veterans experience.

After the dissertation was done, I started teaching classes that were more centered on the side of war that is less easy to mythologize and idealize and abstract into an anodyne "sacrificial service" framework, and spent time looking for poetry that was about civilian experience, like:

Yara’s Grandfather’s Garden

Yara knows the type of weapon being used
from its sound. She paints the flowers
she remembers in her grandfather’s garden:
lilacs pecked at by hummingbirds
like dead bodies are pecked at by jackals,
red roses like the soldier
who coughs up blood from the smoke
in the scorched wheat fields of Hama
and jasmines white like the helmets
of the men who come to save
the children from the war....

https://thepedestalmagazine.com/seif-eldeine-yaras-grandfathers-garden/

[GftNC]

And this ambiguous (for our purposes) poem by A E Housman is about those very "children ardent for some desperate glory" who bought the old lie:

Here dead lie we because we did not choose
To live and shame the land from which we sprung.
Life, to be sure, is nothing much to lose;
But young men think it is, and we were young.

[russell]

here's my poem.

fuck war

[russell]

Sorry about that, I didn't want to crap all over everybody's very thoughtful offerings.

Just kind of wiped out. Been ill for a bit (ok now, just tired) andTrump II is wearing me right down.

Kindly ignore my rude outbursts. :(

[JanieM]

russell -- sorry you've been ill for as long as you have. I don't blame you for being cranky...the Clickbait Effect is wearing us all down, and when you're sick you don't have much in the way of reserves. I hope the tiredness goes awaysoon too.

I seem to know (or vaguely remember) a lot more poetry from WWI than from later eras. But I think that's largely because my grandfather fought in WWI, and his death at a day shy of 35 years old was related to his having been gassed several times during the war. My grandmother revered his memory -- she never remarried -- AND she loved poems, which she would sometimes share with me.

Just for the hell of it I searched on "poetry of WWII" and found this -- a long list.

Another poem from the WWI era: The Man He Killed, by Thomas Hardy.

[nous]

JanieM - that list of WWII poems is good, but it's missing one of my favorites by Louis Simpson, about the Battle of the Bulge at which he served:

The Battle

Helmet and rifle, pack and overcoat
Marched through a forest. Somewhere up ahead
Guns thudded. Like the circle of a throat
The night on every side was turning red.

They halted and they dug. They sank like moles
Into the clammy earth between the trees.
And soon the sentries, standing in their holes,
Felt the first snow. Their feet began to freeze.

At dawn the first shell landed with a crack.
Then shells and bullets swept the icy woods.
This lasted many days. The snow was black.
The corpses stiffened in their scarlet hoods.

Most clearly of that battle I remember
The tiredness in eyes, how hands looked thin
Around a cigarette, and the bright ember
Would pulse with all the life there was within.

[Hartmut]

My guess would have been that there is actually less (contemporary) about WW2 because the mentality had changed as a result of WW1.
In Germany a broad debate got provoked after a well-known philosopher claimed (in 1949) that to write a poem after Auschwitz was barbaric.
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nach_Auschwitz_ein_Gedicht_zu_schreiben,_ist_barbarisch
It was in the context of the general discussion that culture and literature had failed to prevent what had happened and whether that meant that they had forfeit the right to their eminent position. The (much older) bonmot of the nation of poets and thinkers (Dichter und Denker) having become that of judges and hangmen (Richter und Henker) became popular at that time too.
What more or less completely disappeared was rhymed glorification and pro-war propaganda. Good riddance! Prose is bad enough.

[GftNC]

nous, I loved that Louis Simpson poem, particularly the wonderful last verse. Thank you.

Also plenty of good stuff (with which I was completely unfamiliar) in Janie's list.

russell, these are dreadful times indeed, even without being ill. I hope full strength returns fast - no need to apologise for your "outburst", after all saeva indignatio, which is what Swift called it on his famous self-composed epitaph, is a perfectly understandable reaction to what we are living through:

Hic depositum est Corpus
IONATHAN SWIFT S.T.D.
Hujus Ecclesiæ Cathedralis
Decani.
Ubi sæva Indignatio
Ulterius
Cor lacerare nequit.
Abi Viator
Et imitare, si poteris,
Strenuum pro virili
Libertatis Vindicatorem.

Here is laid the body of Jonathan Swift, Doctor of Sacred Theology, Dean of this Cathedral Church, where savage indignation can no longer lacerate his heart. Go, traveller, and imitate, if you can, this strong defender, to the utmost of his powers, of liberty.

Or, since we are talking of poetry, Yeats's wonderful version:

Swift has sailed into his rest;
Savage indignation there
Cannot lacerate his breast.
Imitate him if you dare,
World-besotted traveller; he
Served human liberty.

[nous]

Here's one from Vietnam..."Burning Shit at An Khe" by Bruce Weigl:

Into that pit
I had to climb down
With a rake and matches; eventually,
You had to do something
Because it just kept piling up
And it wasn't our country, it wasn't
Our air thick with the sick smoke
So another soldier and I
Lifted the shelter off its blocks
To expose the homemade toilets:
Fifty-five gallon drums cut in half
With crude wood seats that splintered.
[etc.]

https://www.ronnowpoetry.com/contents/weigl/BurningShit.html

[liberal japonicus]

Nous' earlier comment about seeking out poetry about the civilian experience had me rooting around and I found this

https://academic.oup.com/book/2994

Drawing on original archival research, providing detailed, socio-historically attentive readings, and featuring new translations, this book offers a compelling model of comparative, transnational poetics scholarship. It charts a cross-cultural dilemma from the Spanish Civil War through World War II: how to write a war poem that acknowledges the civilian’s distance from war. Civilian witnessing is problematic within an epistemic framework that deems physical experience of combat a necessary warrant for knowledge of war. Acknowledging this dilemma spurred noncombatant poets writing in English, Spanish, and French to draw on both journalistic structures and classical rhetoric in their wartime writing. Galvin examines the work of W. H. Auden, César Vallejo, Wallace Stevens, Raymond Queneau, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein, who regularly wrote prose for periodicals in addition to poems inspired by press coverage of war. These poets developed what Galvin calls meta-rhetoric, or self-reflexive rhetorical tropes and schemes that reveal their own mechanisms. She argues that meta-rhetoric’s self-scrutiny and self-interference constitute a significant civilian poetics. By spotlighting the speaker’s distance from war and the problem of receiving war news via print journalism, such strategies make manifest problems of literary and moral authority. Ultimately, Galvin shows that the apparent impediment of limited access to firsthand experience actually proved highly generative for civilian poetics. An epilogue argues that U.S.-based noncombatant poets in the twenty-first century write about war using similar strategies, even as they cite and ironize poetry of the 1930s and 1940s.

Fortunately, I have some funds from the university that I could use, so was able to get it. Unfortunately, can't get it as an e-book, so am waiting for it now.

[wj]

Civilian witnessing is problematic within an epistemic framework that deems physical experience of combat a necessary warrant for knowledge of war.

Once upon a time, war was something that armies did with each other. Civilians were impacted by conquest, or by demands for (essentially logisical) support.

Now, however, civilian experience differs from combatants' experience mostly in that they do not have ready access to means to strike back. That is, they are targets (often deliberate targets). They absolutely do experience combat.

It is a very different world today than the one Galvin's sources discuss.

[JanieM]

Civilian witnessing is problematic within an epistemic framework that deems physical experience of combat a necessary warrant for knowledge of war.

This, but really the whole passage lj quotes, seems to rely on very narrow sampling of civilians who experience war, ignoring civilian victims of bombing, occupation, starvation, grief and loss of all sorts, etc. Did the citizens of London or Dresden not experience war?

I can't tell if I'm the one quibbling or the writer of the passage is. But I say a pox on that epistemic framework. ;-)

[JanieM]

Hiroshima and Nagasaki....

[Donald]

I think lj’s quoted passage is talking about civilians distant from war. Civilians have always experienced war if an invading army passed through their land, of course. At best there would be varying amounts of property destruction. Frequently there would be sexual violence and random killings and at worst, large scale massacres. And don’t forget the plagues and famine.

I should reread War and Peace. I forgot most of it. I read a big chunk of it stuck in Newark Airport because thunderstorms in other parts of the country had messed up flights everywhere. Being in an airport for a long time puts you in an apocalyptic frame of mind.

[JanieM]

I think lj’s quoted passage is talking about civilians distant from war.

Then it should say that instead of what it says.

"...the civilian's distance from war..." is what it says. Not "the distance from war of that subset of civilians who are distant from war."

It's a "how many angels can dance..." kind of navel-gazing. I guess maybe it's just as well I didn't become an academic.

I'll see myself out now....

[liberal japonicus]

Interesting points. I think the book concentrates on poetry, so it's not saying that civilians don't suffer, just saying that there isn't a lot of poetry from the civilian experience that has the resonance of war poetry.

The mention of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has me wonder if there is any poems not written by survivors that could clearly be identified or accepted as poetry that conveys the experience. (a brief plug, Chad Diehl, an exchange student here long ago, translated Tsutomu Yamaguchi's tanka about the bombings (both of them, after Hiroshima, he applied for leave to visit his family in Nagasaki and was there for the second bombing) and I can recommend it)

I'm thinking that with war poetry, you had the WWI generation, which emphasized the first hand encounter with war, which then has one thinking that war poetry can only really be done by soldiers (and it sort of has to be soldiers, I don't have poetry by sailors or aviators that readily comes to mind) This makes it so only people with first hand 'frontline' experience of war can write about it, though the experience of killing is difficult to write about directly, so you end up with it being sublimated as writing about death and dying. This blogpost
https://war-poets.blogspot.com/2009/03/short-post-about-killing.html

points to three about killing, Thomas Hardy's
The man he killed
https://www.bartleby.com/lit-hub/modern-british-poetry/the-man-he-killed-2/

Seigfried Sassoon's The Kiss
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57213/the-kiss-56d23a7c0343d

and Keith Douglas' poem How to Kill
https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/how-to-kill

The comments of the blogpost discuss a few others and the whole blog not only takes me back (ahh, that old blogger template), it's got discussion of a number of other poets and poems.

[Chamblee54]

I like to recycle old content at my blog. https://chamblee54.wordpress.com/2025/06/21/do-you-condemn-hamas/ quotes an Obsidian Wings story from 2009. Congratulations on still being in business.

[Donald]

JanieM

I wasn’t arguing with you.

[Donald]

In fact, I was saying what the quote seemed to be talking about and then agreeing with you on what it left out.

Like I don’t get into enough arguments with people I actually disagree with.

[JanieM]

Donald -- sorry, my response to you was meant to be lighthearted, and in any case it was aimed at the phenomenon of turgid academic prose, and not at you. Again, sorry if it came off otherwise. I seem to be bathing in crankiness (at best) these days.

[GftNC]

lj, one more, which I don't think anybody has linked yet, Strange Meeting by Wilfred Owen:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47395/strange-meeting

[nous]

It looks to me as if what Rachel Galvin is writing about is, at its heart, about the role of the poet and about mediation. Her subjects mostly seem to be established poets who find themselves writing in, and responding to, a time of war. That is a very different thing from the writer who turns to poetry as a means of trying to express something about their unmediated experience of the violence of war.

You can see a very similar sort of anxiety going on in the marketing of military shooter video games and their marketing of "realism." (I won't go into this much, but it's the heart of my dissertation.) There is a huge audience for media that takes on the violent sublime of war and makes it accessible to those on the other side of the veil, so to speak. The implicit promise of these texts is authenticity (whether through verisimilitude or through surrealism). A poet who does not have a claim to unmediated experience must find other ways to enter the conversation from a place of authenticity.

I don't think that Galvin is ignoring the existence of the non-combatant's experience, she's just focusing on the role of the (modernist) poet in wartime.

Side note: most of the best known WWII veteran poets served in non-combat roles (Randall Jerrell springs to mind), but their status as veterans allowed them license to speak without having to foreground their own lack of first hand experience. My own research was specifically aimed at the work of combat veterans (Simpson, Eastlake, Bowman, etc.). From there I started reading the poetry of civilian survivors and the journalistic accounts of female war correspondents to try to find other first-hand points-of-view.

[GftNC]

Through the strange coincidence of mentioning Yeats, and then thinking about Pro Bono's point on whether it would be appropriate to invade and bomb Boston because of Irish American financing of the IRA, I remembered this. Some people have called it the only parody which is better than the original; this is a link to the original, Yeats's Song of Wandering Aengus:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/55687/the-song-of-wandering-aengus

and this is a piece I found on Medium about Roger Woddis's pastiche of it:

And this brings me back to Woddis. Because one poem of his I definitely remember is his pastiche of Yeats’s ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’, published after the Birmingham Pub Bombings in 1975. You know the history, I’m sure: from 1973 onward the IRA decided to embark upon a campaign of bombing and assassination in the UK mainland (as well as continuing hostilities in Northern Ireland). Mostly they attacked what they deemed military and political targets, but not always. For example, on the 21st November 1974 they left bombs in two Birmingham pubs, neither of which was, in the jargon, a ‘legitimate’ target. Warning calls were botched, the bombs exploded, 21 died and 186 were wounded.

What Woddis published in reaction is a brilliant poem that is, but is not only, a clever pastiche of Yeats.

I went out to the city streets,
Because a fire was in my head,
And saw the people passing by,
And wished the youngest of them dead,
And twisted by a bitter past,
And poisoned by a cold despair,
I found at last a resting-place
And left my hatred ticking there.

When I was fleeing from the night
And sweating in my room again,
I heard the old futilities
Exploding like a cry of pain;
But horror, should it touch the heart,
Would freeze my hand upon the fuse,
And I must shed no tears for those
Who merely have a life to lose.

Though I am sick with murdering,
Though killing is my native land,
I will find out where death has gone,
And kiss his lips and take his hand;
And hide among the withered grass,
And pluck, till love and life are done,
The shrivelled apples of the moon,
The cankered apples of the sun.

I wished the youngest of them dead. The youngest victim of the Birmingham pub bombs was 17 years old.

[Donald]

JanieM

No problem. I think I am a little cranky myself these days.

[liberal japonicus]

About the observation by nous, the blog by Tim Kendall has this
https://war-poets.blogspot.com/2012/11/wilfrid-gibson-breakfast.html

Not much among Gibson's vast oeuvre deserves to have new life breathed into it, but there is one book of his which belongs among the most significant of the First World War. Battle, published in 1915, has been credited as the first poetry to convey what Dominic Hibberd has called 'the actualities of the front line'; in doing so, it was admired by Rosenberg, Gurney and Sassoon, among others. Yet Gibson never saw active service. One of the oddities of First World War literary history is that it took a civilian to teach soldier-poets how to write realistically about their experiences.

I'm still waiting for the Galvin book, but the idea that it takes someone who wasn't there to teach the people who are there how to write about it is fascinating to me.

It seems to me that with modernity, there has been the challenge of deciding who gets to speak for whom. The WWI poets who are held up are, as the post notes, those who experienced the front lines. It's not difficult to draw a line from that, through to arguing if it is possible to write about the Holocaust and then to questions of cultural appropriation and AI writing papers for students. There is an uneasy balance between recognizing that some sort of experience is necessary and arguing that people who don't have enough of the 'right' experience can't/shouldn't write about these subjects.

I'm working thru Tim Kendall's blog, and he has this post
https://war-poets.blogspot.com/2009/04/combat-gnosticism-and-woman-poet-of.html

that points to this essay (updated link)
Combat Gnosticism: The Ideology of First World War Poetry Criticism
https://www.jstor.org/stable/20057530

which is an interesting read, though if you are allergic to academic prose, it may be a bit to wade thru.

[hairshirthedonist]

No problem. I think I am a little cranky myself these days.

*Insert me running for cover.* ;^)

[Donald]

Starting a war without Cnngressional authorization, Even a few decades ago I think there were enough Republicans with some sense of honor who would impeach for that,.Maybe I am wrong about the past.

Seymour Hersh was right. I subscribe and he said Trump would start bombing on the weekend. I was hoping he was wrong.

[russell]

Bombs away