Vietnam War Poetry (ii) The Gunpowder Age: “ON Being Asked for a War Poem (1915) I think it better that in times like these A poet's mouth be silent, for in truth We have no gift to set a statesman right; He has had enough of meddling, who can please A young girl in the indolence of her youth, Or an old man upon a winter's night,” said William Butler Yeats Irish poet, Nobel Prize winner (1865-1939). It might be suggested that the coming of gunpowder curtailed chivalric war poetry as the experience of the Thirty Years War and other conflicts in the 17th century provided evidence enough of the fearsome impact of firepower as an addition to war's grim reality. Shakespeare's dissolute Falstaff condemned honour in war as merely a ‘word' in King Henry IV, Part I, but the protagonist embodied it. The sentiments lingered in the verses of the cavalier poets in Britain and only fizzled out at the beginning of the 18th century, save in the descriptions of the Royal Navy's sea fights, where the ideal of the noble warrior continued to be embodied in the deeds of Britain's sea captains. Professional soldiers of this age did not appear to have time for verse. Poets in the age of Romanticism revived the ideal of the noble warrior especially when inspired by the defence of liberty or new nationalist or revolutionary fervour, although Wordsworth's ‘Happy Warrior' is offset by Coleridge's reminder in ‘Fears in Solitude', written in 1798, that no soldier who fell in battle ‘passed off to Heaven, translated and not killed'. To him war remained a horrific business and should make us tremble even if it is necessary for our self-defence. As the features of modern ‘industrial' war became discernible in the 19th century, so contemporary poets tried to clothe them in classical respectability. Tennyson's ‘six hundred' were a modern-day equivalent to the Spartans at Thermopylae save that ‘someone had blundered' and their sacrifice was unintentional. The fratricidal bloodshed of the American civil war was mourned by James Lowell and Walt Whitman. Time brought reconciliation and death united enemies, but as Julia Howe put it in The Battle Hymn of the Republic, God's purpose remained ‘to make men free'. Poets began to accept that war might be worth it when the cause was justified, which explains why the outbreak of World War I in 1914 was greeted with such apparent enthusiasm in verse. Rupert Brooke was not alone in seeing war as a consummation and it misrepresents his individual and often ironic poetry to view it as the result of naïve and youthful innocence. What is more, his generation, throughout Europe, had been prepared beforehand to describe their sentiments in poetic form. Catherine Reilly has identified details of 2,225 published poets in English during this period. This can be matched by enormous poetic output across Europe. The nature of modern conscripted mass armies which faced each other provided the reason why it is WW I which sees the specific coining of the phrases ‘war poet' and ‘war poetry', as Robert Graves points out, himself one of the foremost ‘poets in arms'. On all sides soldier-poets could be found; men and women in the ranks (including army, navy, air, and support services), who were themselves poets or who used poetry as a medium for expression, as distinct from civilians who only wrote poetry about war. The most famous and moving of the latter was the above-quoted Irish poet W. B. Yeats. 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]
