Poems
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, the then Poet Laureate, wrote evocatively about the battle in his poem "The Charge of the Light Brigade". Tennyson's poem, published six weeks after the event on 9 December 1854 in The Examiner, praises the Brigade ("When can their glory fade? O the wild charge they made!") while trenchantly mourning the appalling futility of the charge ("Not tho' the soldier knew, someone had blunder'd... Charging an army, while all the world wonder'd"). Tennyson wrote the poem inside only a few minutes after reading an account of the battle in The Times, according to his grandson Sir Charles Tennyson. It immediately became hugely popular, even reaching the troops in the Crimea, where it was distributed in pamphlet form.
Forty years later Kipling wrote "The Last of the Light Brigade", commemorating a visit by the last twenty survivors to Tennyson (then in his eightieth year) to reproach him gently for not writing a sequel about the way in which England was treating its old soldiers. Some sources treat the poem as an account of a real event, but other commentators class the destitute old soldiers as allegorical, with the visit invented by Kipling to draw attention to the poverty in which the real survivors were living, in the same way that he evoked Tommy Atkins in "The Absent Minded Beggar".
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“Our poems will have failed if our readers are not brought by them beyond the poems.”
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“I tell it stories now and then
and feed it images like honey.
I will not speculate today
with poems that think they’re money.”
—Anne Sexton (1928–1974)
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