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:
“Much poetry seems to be aware of its situation in time and of its relation to the metronome, the clock, and the calendar. ... The season or month is there to be felt; the day is there to be seized. Poems beginning “When” are much more numerous than those beginning “Where” of “If.” As the meter is running, the recurrent message tapped out by the passing of measured time is mortality.”
—William Harmon (b. 1938)
“I owe everything to a system that made me learn by heart till I wept. As a result I have thousands of lines of poetry by heart. I owe everything to this.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“The base of all artistic genius is the power of conceiving humanity in a new, striking, rejoicing way, of putting a happy world of its own creation in place of the meaner world of common days, of generating around itself an atmosphere with a novel power of refraction, selecting, transforming, recombining the images it transmits, according to the choice of the imaginative intellect. In exercising this power, painting and poetry have a choice of subject almost unlimited.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)