Francis Ledwidge: Reconsidering a War Poet

Francis Ledwidge (1887-1917) has not been one of the better-known poets of World War I. At first glance, this seems puzzling.

He saw action at Gallipoli, in the Balkans, and in the trenches in France and Flanders. His first collection of poetry was published in 1914, entitled Songs of the Fields. A second was being prepared for publication when he was killed during the Third Battle of Ypres (also known as Passchendaele) on July 31, 1917, just shy of his 30^th birthday. He was known, rightly or wrongly, as the “peasant poet,” which did him some injustice but which also helped to sell his poems and his poetry book. He didn’t come from the British upper and upper middle classes, like so many of the war poets, but his lack of reputation wasn’t a class thing.

Instead, it was a political thing. Ledwidge was Irish, and an Irishman who volunteered for the British Army. He was also an Irish Nationalist, but not like his more radical countrymen. He believed that fighting for Britain against the Germans would help Ireland gain independence. The fact that he was Irish didn’t help him or his reputation with the British, and the fact that he fought for the British didn’t help his reputation with the Irish.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

The World War I Poets in the War

Today is Armistice Day. Ninety-six years ago, Germany surrendered and brought World War I to an end. The wreckage left behind by the war was enormous. More than 16 million people died, seven million of them civilians. Monarchies had ended in Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany and the Ottoman Empire. The maps of Europe and the Middle East were redrawn. New nations were formed. Lenin and the Communist Party had taken control in Russia, except the control was tenuous, only to be decided by an ugly civil war. Massive war reparations were imposed on Germany, which would ultimately contribute to ruinous hyperinflation. Victorious Britain and France faced huge war debts.

The emotional and psychological impact on victor and defeated was just as significant. That emotion and psychology had begun during the war, and it no better articulated than by the group of Britons collectively known as the War Poets.

We’ve spent the last several weeks discussing the poets and poetry of World War I. What we have not considered ion detail in the context of the poets and what they wrote – and that context is the war itself, the Great War, the War to End All Wars.

In Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew, historian, novelist and biographer Max Egremont (he’s also written a biography of the war poet Siegfried Sassoon) does something unusual in a book.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Chateau Wood, World War I.

Poets and Poems: Seigfried Sassoon and “The War Poems”

Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) might have become “THE” war poet of the group of war poets associated with World War I. He was a published poet before the war story and was well known in poetry circles. He was an officer decorated with the Military Cross for bravery and heroism during the war. The men who served under him loved him for his leadership style (he cared about them). And he survived the war.

The only problem was that he made himself distinctly unpopular by publishing a declaration against the war, while the war was still in progress. A letter sent to a commanding officer was forwarded to the press and read aloud in Parliament. His words were considered treasonous; he could have been court-martialed. Instead, he was sent to a military hospital in Scotland where he was officially treated for “shell shock.”

Sassoon wrote poems throughout the war. Most were published in poetry collections; some were published in newspapers and journals. All of them have been collected and published over the years in various editions as The War Poems; the original was published in 1919.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry. 

Poet and Poems: Brian Gardner’s “Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914-1918”

The Great War, the “War to End All Wars,” started 100 years ago this coming August. For many of the English-speaking generations since then, few things have shaped our of World War I than a group of British writers collectively known as “The War Poets.”

The more familiar members of this group, many of whom died in battle or from disease, were potes like Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Own, and perhaps Isaac Rosenberg, who were most typically represented in our high school and college textbooks. They fought and died on the Western front, mostly in Flanders and northeastern France.

But there were other fronts – Turkey, Iraq, German East Africa – and other poets, some o whose names are still quite well known: Rudyard Kipling, Robert Graves, e.e. cummings, Herbert asquith (son of the prime minister), Thomas Hardy, Seigfried Sassoon, Robert Service, A.P. Herbert, A.E. Housman, William Butler Yeats, and even A.A. Milne.

Fifty years ago, author Brian Gardner assembled an edition of poems by the War Poets to commemorate the Great War (overshadowed as it had been by World War II). Entitled Up the Line of Death: The War Poets 1914-1918, it included poems by 72 poets, 21 of whom had died in the war.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Illustration: British World War I recruiting poster.

Poets and Poems: Andrew Motion’s “The Customs House”

Next year will mark the 100^th anniversary of World War I, the “war to end all wars,” except it didn’t. The “Great War” has held a great fascination for writers and poets, not to mention historians, not the least for which is because it so neatly, and jaggedly, divided the old word order from the new. The war also produced several poets who became famous in death, such as Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen, and several who survived the war but became part of the Lost Generation, such as Seigfried Sassoon and Robert Graves.

Their poetic styles varied widely, but they shared a view of war that was both realistic and resistant. Poetry served as the means to illustrate both.

The first half of Andrew Motion’s The Customs House: Poems shares that same realistic and resistant view of war. A series of poems about war stretches from World War I through the wars of today, including Iraq and Afghanistan. But the poems not include the battlefield and theaters of war, but also the home front, and the aftermath of war. These poems often tell stories, but they all examine war with a cold penetrating eye.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph by Tim Emerich via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.