Vietnam War Poetry (i) Introduction: According to the Oxford Companion to Military History, poetry of war is of two kinds: poetry written about war by poets who may or may not have had direct experience of it, and poetry written by soldier-poets. The latter is very much a 20th-century phenomenon as whole societies were mobilised for total war. However, poems about war are as old as poetry itself, beginning with the greatest epic in European culture, Homer's Iliad composed in the 8th century BC telling the legendary tales of Troy and war between Greek and Trojan. The epic is clearly based on much older oral forms. Virgil's Aeneid, written in the 1st century BC, tells the story of the Trojan Prince Aeneas and his adventures after the fall of Troy. Other civilisations also recorded war in poetic form from the earliest times. The great Indian epic The Mahabharata tells of the futility of warbetween kin groups feuding over power and wealth. Early Celtic poems, although dating from the 6th century AD, refer to much older oral forms concerning their legendary wars in the heroic age. Poems such as the Welsh Gododdin testify to the celebration of the warrior ideal and its powerful attraction for poets. Chinese civilisation provides the earliest evidence of a continuous poetic tradition and from the 4th century BC poems about war are to be found. From ancient times, poets were fully aware of both the glories of heroic military action and its consequences in grief and destruction. Epic poems lauded both the warrior's courage and noble ideals as well as deploring the horror of war and its wastefulness. War poems were both reminders of past glories and awful warnings for the future. The designs on the shield of Achilles, in Book XVIII of the Iliad, contrast scenes of peace and harmonious governance, harvest and the vintage with scenes of war and battle. The Roman poet Horace might, when prompted by his patron Caesar Augustus, construct odes to celebrate the ideal that to die for one's country is a ‘sweet and noble thing' (dulce et decorum est pro patia mori',) but Roman poetry leaves us in no doubt that Cicero's peaceful good life is to be preferred. Poetry in the heroic age established the ideal of the noble warrior. Beowulf, written in the 8th century AD, celebrated the achievements of a Scandinavian hero and his eventual death in combat with a dragon. The Anglo-Saxon fragment The Battle of Maldon, concerning a minor skirmish with the Vikings fought in AD 991 on the coast of Essex, makes personal loyalty the key quality of the warrior élite even in hopeless circumstances. The full flowering of the ideals of knighthood and chivalry is found in poetry of the high Middle Ages. Chaucer's Knight in the Canterbury Tales embodies both martial valour and humility: ‘He loved chivalrye, trouthe and honour, freedom and curteisye'. The revival and elaboration of Arthur's Camelot reach their most complete evocation in Sir Thomas Malory's great cycle Morte D'Arthur, first published by Caxton in 1485. How far chivalry can be interpreted as providing rules for war during European conflicts such as the Hundred Years War is a matter of dispute among military historians, but among Western poets the chivalric ideal was the main poetic convention during the Middle Ages. War poetry arose in similar feudal societies in the East such as Japan where the samurai code was also a subject for poets. Like their European counterparts samurai themselves were expected to be practised in the fine arts including poetry, composing five-line verses known as tanka when not actually fighting. Dear Egyptian Mail readers, Your comments and/or contributions are welcome. We promise to publish whatever is deemed publishable at the end of each series of articles. [email protected]
