Battle-poetry by combat veterans

[BrainGlutton]

In his classic essay on Kipling, George Orwell noted that “Like most people capable of writing battle poetry, Kipling had never been in battle . . .” One of those obvious and important things that seems to escape general notice until someone almost offhandedly points it out. The only counter-example I can think of is “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” which is, not to put too fine a point on it, crap. Are there any more worthwhile examples?

[well_he_s_back]

Whoa. I know this sounds presumptious, but I’m disagreeing with the great Orwell. Have you read any of the famed English WWI poets? Nearly all had seen terrible combat in the trenches. Check out any anthology of War Poetry (we have 3 different ones in our high school library alone) and there you will find many many poems about warfare written by men [probably women too] that have indeed seen combat.

Maybe I misread your post.

[BrainGlutton]

@well he's back

Whoa. I know this sounds presumptious, but I’m disagreeing with the great Orwell. Have you read any of the famed English WWI poets? Nearly all had seen terrible combat in the trenches. Check out any anthology of War Poetry (we have 3 different ones in our high school library alone) and there you will find many many poems about warfare written by men [probably women too] that have indeed seen combat.

Maybe I misread your post.

No, I just don’t know about the poets to whom you’re referring. Any quotes (of lengths acceptable to the Mods)?

[Ogre]

This may not count, but JRRT had a few battle-poems in LoTR, and he was a combat vet in WW1.

[pravnik]

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen, combat casualty of WWI.

[An_Arky]

Good one! I love Wilfred Owen. Anthem For Doomed Youth (thanks for the linky!) is another favorite of mine.

[pravnik]

Joyce Kilmer, best known for “Trees,” wrote a couple of poems that could be considered battle-poems; The White Ships and the Red for a friend who died aboard the Lusitania and Mid Ocean in Wartime as he was being shipped to Europe for combat in WWI with the original “Rainbow” division. He would likely have written more, but was killed in the Second Battle of the Marne.

[Larry_Borgia]

Orwell is normally an insightful writer, but he must have had some sort of lapse when he wrote that. The site pravnik links to has brief bios of many talented veteran war poets, like Owen and Siegfried_Sassoon among others. I can’t believe Orwell overlooked them.

[Captain_Amazing]

@BrainGlutton

No, I just don’t know about the poets to whom you’re referring. Any quotes (of lengths acceptable to the Mods)?

Wilifred Owen, as mentioned. Sigfried Sassoon:

ALL night the flares go up; the Dragon sings
And beats upon the dark with furious wings;
And, stung to rage by his own darting fires,
Reaches with grappling coils from town to town;
He lusts to break the loveliness of spires,
And hurls their martyred music toppling down.

Hodgson:

I, that on my familiar hill
Saw with uncomprehending eyes
A hundred of Thy sunsets spill
Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,
Ere the sun swings his noonday sword
Must say goodbye to all of this;–
By all delights that I shall miss,
Help me to die, O Lord.

Then there’s John McCrae, the Canadian Army surgeon who wrote probably the most famous of the World War I poems…

In Flanders fields, the poppies blow
between the crosses, row by row…

[Maeglin]

Bertran de Born was a twelfth century troubadour and feudal warlord. He had quite a bit to say about battle. From Pound’s translation of Be.m platz lo gais temps de pascor:

…We shall see battle axes and swords, a-battering colored haumes and a-hacking through shields at entering melee; and many vassals smiting together, whence there run free the horses of the dead and wrecked. And when each man of prowess shall be come into the fray he thinks no more of (merely) breaking heads and arms, for a dead man is worth more than one taken alive.
I tell you that I find no such savor in eating butter and sleeping, as when I hear cried “On them!” and from both sides hear horses neighing through their head-guards, and hear shouted “To aid! To aid!” and see the dead with lance truncheons, the pennants still on them, piercing their sides.

Barons! put in pawn castles, and towns, and cities before anyone makes war on us.

Papiol, be glad to go speedily to “Yea and Nay”, and tell him there’s too much peace about.

[Sunrazor]

It’s possible Orwell was putting Kipling in a different class of poets from the war veterans. One of the reasons I’m avoiding poetry whenever possible in my graduate work (MA, English Lit) is that I just don’t “get” poetry. The one time I submitted a paper on close reading of a poem, I submitted an 8-page critique of a 17th century sonnet and failed miserably. Orwell, who was a first-class literary scholar, may have been applying a high level of scholarship to poetry, and in that case nothing that really makes any sense would truly qualify as poetry. The poems cited on this thread are wonderful reading, but I’m afraid my professors would judge them unworthy of the English literary canon. It’s a shame – I enjoy them very much.

[Captain_Amazing]

I like this translation of Born’s poetry:

“My heart is filled with gladness when I see
Strong castles besieged, stockades broken and overwhelmed,
Many vassals struck down,
Horses of the dead and wounded roving at random.
And when battle is joined, let all men of good lineage
Think of naught but the breaking of heads and arms,
For it is better to die than be vanquished and live. . . .
I tell you I have no such joy as when I hear the shout
‘On! On!’ from both sides and the neighing of riderless steeds,
And groans of ‘Help me! Help me!’
And when I see both great and small
Fall in the ditches and on the grass
And see the dead transfixed by spear shafts!
Lords, mortgage your domains, castles, cities,
But never give up war!”

Dante put him in hell, btw.

[Maeglin]

@Captain Amazing

Dante put him in hell, btw.

Yeah, as a “stirrer of strife.”

[well_he_s_back]

I think Sasoon and Owen (2 of the poets I too obliquely referred to in my first post)ARE considered part of the literary canon. Sunrazor, your profs seem a bit narrow in their judgement here.

[Bridget_Burke]

@Sunrazor

…The poems cited on this thread are wonderful reading, but I’m afraid my professors would judge them unworthy of the English literary canon. It’s a shame – I enjoy them very much.

Ask your professors about Wilfred Owen.

[BrainGlutton]

@Sunrazor

It’s possible Orwell was putting Kipling in a different class of poets from the war veterans. One of the reasons I’m avoiding poetry whenever possible in my graduate work (MA, English Lit) is that I just don’t “get” poetry. The one time I submitted a paper on close reading of a poem, I submitted an 8-page critique of a 17th century sonnet and failed miserably. Orwell, who was a first-class literary scholar, may have been applying a high level of scholarship to poetry, and in that case nothing that really makes any sense would truly qualify as poetry. The poems cited on this thread are wonderful reading, but I’m afraid my professors would judge them unworthy of the English literary canon. It’s a shame – I enjoy them very much.

I don’t think that was it. One point of Orwell’s essay on Kipling was to invalidate the distinction some critics had made between “poetry” and “verse” (Kipling’s work falling into the latter category, providing an excuse to admire him on those terms without sacrificing one’s litcred). And practically all of Kipling’s poetry/verse does make sense in the sense I think you’re using the term.

[jjimm]

@Sunrazor

…I’m afraid my professors would judge them unworthy of the English literary canon. It’s a shame – I enjoy them very much.

WTF?! No offense to you intended, but I think you are displaying a little ignorance that causes you to misjudge your professors - they’d be very odd if they judged what are held in the UK to be the most significant war poets in the entire English canon (or at least those of the 20th century) “unworthy”.

Anthem for Doomed Youth
Wilfred Owen

What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles’ rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.
No mockeries for them from prayers or bells,
Nor any voice of mourning save the choirs,—
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires.

Add Rupert Brooke to that list - more patriotic, but still significant.

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever England. There shall be
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed;
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware,
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam,
A body of England’s, breathing English air,
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.

Also, may I recommend the Ghost Road Trilogy by Pat Barker. Fabulously researched and imagined portrayal of the poets’ experiences and motivations.

[BrainGlutton]

@BrainGlutton

I don’t think that was it. One point of Orwell’s essay on Kipling was to invalidate the distinction some critics had made between “poetry” and “verse” (Kipling’s work falling into the latter category, providing an excuse to admire him on those terms without sacrificing one’s litcred). And practically all of Kipling’s poetry/verse does make sense in the sense I think you’re using the term.

From said essay:

Mr. Eliot describes Kipling’s metrical work as ‘verse’ and not ‘poetry’, but adds that it is ‘GREAT verse’, and further qualifies this by saying that a writer can only be described as a ‘great verse-writer’ if there is some of his work ‘of which we cannot say whether it is verse or poetry’. Apparently Kipling was a versifier who occasionally wrote poems, in which case it was a pity that Mr. Eliot did not specify these poems by name. The trouble is that whenever an aesthetic judgement on Kipling’s work seems to be called for, Mr. Eliot is too much on the defensive to be able to speak plainly. What he does not say, and what I think one ought to start by saying in any discussion of Kipling, is that most of Kipling’s verse is so horribly vulgar that it gives one the same sensation as one gets from watching a third-rate music-hall performer recite ‘The Pigtail of Wu Fang Fu’ with the purple limelight on his face, AND yet there is much of it that is capable of giving pleasure to people who know what poetry means. At his worst, and also his most vital, in poems like ‘Gunga Din’ or ‘Danny Deever’, Kipling is almost a shameful pleasure, like the taste for cheap sweets that some people secretly carry into middle life. But even with his best passages one has the same sense of being seduced by something spurious, and yet unquestionably seduced. Unless one is merely a snob and a liar it is impossible to say that no one who cares for poetry could get any pleasure out of such lines as:

For the wind is in the palm trees, and the temple bells they say, ‘Come you back, you British soldier, come you back to Mandalay!’

and yet those lines are not poetry in the same sense as ‘Felix Randal’ or ‘When icicles hang by the wall’ are poetry. One can, perhaps, place Kipling more satisfactorily than by juggling with the words ‘verse’ and ‘poetry’, if one describes him simply as a good bad poet. He is as a poet what Harriet Beecher Stowe was as a novelist. And the mere existence of work of this kind, which is perceived by generation after generation to be vulgar and yet goes on being read, tells one something about the age we live in.

There is a great deal of good bad poetry in English, all of it, I should say, subsequent to 1790. Examples of good bad poems—I am deliberately choosing diverse ones—are ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, ‘When all the world is young, lad’, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’, Bret Harte’s ‘Dickens in Camp’, ‘The Burial of Sir John Moore’, ‘Jenny Kissed Me’, ‘Keith of Ravelston’, ‘Casabianca’. All of these reek of sentimentality, and yet— not these particular poems, perhaps, but poems of this kind, are capable of giving true pleasure to people who can see clearly what is wrong with them. One could fill a fair-sized anthology with good bad poems, if it were not for the significant fact that good bad poetry is usually too well known to be worth reprinting.

It is no use pretending that in an age like our own, ‘good’ poetry can have any genuine popularity. It is, and must be, the cult of a very few people, the least tolerated of the arts. Perhaps that statement needs a certain amount of qualification. True poetry can sometimes be acceptable to the mass of the people when it disguises itself as something else. One can see an example of this in the folk-poetry that England still possesses, certain nursery rhymes and mnemonic rhymes, for instance, and the songs that soldiers make up, including the words that go to some of the bugle-calls. But in general ours is a civilization in which the very word ‘poetry’ evokes a hostile snigger or, at best, the sort of frozen disgust that most people feel when they hear the word ‘God’. If you are good at playing the concertina you could probably go into the nearest public bar and get yourself an appreciative audience within five minutes. But what would be the attitude of that same audience if you suggested reading them Shakespeare’s sonnets, for instance? Good bad poetry, however, can get across to the most unpromising audiences if the right atmosphere has been worked up beforehand. Some months back Churchill produced a great effect by quoting Clough’s ‘Endeavour’ in one of his broadcast speeches. I listened to this speech among people who could certainly not be accused of caring for poetry, and I am convinced that the lapse into verse impressed them and did not embarrass them. But not even Churchill could have got away with it if he had quoted anything much better than this.

[Sampiro]

I don’t know if he was in combat, but the famous final line of Randall Jarrett’s Death of a Ball Turret Gunner was based on something he actually saw in WW2.

[Sampiro]

I don’t know much about his poetry other than he wrote it (I’ve only read his prose), but Ambrose Bierce was a veteran of some of the fiercest hand-to-hand combat of the Civil War. Might wanna see if any of his poems were battle related.