Poetry
In the early weeks of the war, British poets responded with an outpouring of literary production. Rudyard Kipling's For all we have and are aroused most comment. Robert Bridges, Poet Laureate, contributed a poem Wake Up, England! at the outbreak of war that he later wished suppressed., John Masefield, who later succeeded Bridges as Poet Laureate, wrote August, 1914, a poem that was widely admired.
Wilfred Owen was killed in battle; but poems created at the front did achieve popular attention after the war's end,.e.g., Dulce Et Decorum Est, Insensibility, Anthem for Doomed Youth, Futility and Strange Meeting. In preparing for the publication of his collected poems, Owen tried to explain:
| “ | This book is not about heroes. English poetry is not yet fit to speak of them. Nor is it about deeds, or lands, nor anything about glory, honour, might, majesty, dominion, or power, except War. Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War. The Poetry is in the pity.
This brief statement became the basis for a play based on the friendship between Owen and Siegfried Sassoon in 1917. |
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The poem In Flanders Fields, by John McCrae, continues to be one of the most popular wartime poems in Canada, and has achieved a status where it is recognized as one of the country's most notable unofficial symbols.
Read more about this topic: World War I In Literature
Famous quotes containing the word poetry:
“We tend to be so bombarded with information, and we move so quickly, that there’s a tendency to treat everything on the surface level and process things quickly. This is antithetical to the kind of openness and perception you have to have to be receptive to poetry. ... poetry seems to exist in a parallel universe outside daily life in America.”
—Rita Dove (b. 1952)
“The earth is not a mere fragment of dead history, stratum upon stratum like the leaves of a book, to be studied by geologists and antiquaries chiefly, but living poetry like the leaves of a tree, which precede flowers and fruit,—not a fossil earth, but a living earth; compared with whose great central life all animal and vegetable life is merely parasitic.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)