War poet code#

With decisive meter and stirring refrains, patriotic war poems are designed to celebrate and inspire. When soldiers head to war or return home victorious, they march to a rousing beat.

War poet code#

Writing in Old English, an unknown Anglo Saxon poet described warriors brandishing swords and clashing shields in the ' Battle of Maldon,' which chronicled a war fought 991 AD. The poem articulated a code of heroism and nationalist spirit that dominated war literature in the Western world for a thousand years.Įven during the enormous global wars of the 20th century, many poets echoed medieval ideals, celebrating military triumphs and glorifying fallen soldiers.ġ814 broadside printing of 'Defense of Fort McHenry,' a poem that later became the lyrics of 'The Star-Spangled Banner'. Men are scattered and smeared over the desert grass, And the generals have accomplished nothing. The celebrated Chinese poet Li Po (also known as Rihaku, Li Bai, Li Pai, Li T’ai-po, and Li T’ai-pai) raged against battles he viewed as brutal and absurd. ' Nefarious War,' written in 750 AD, reads like a modern-day protest poem: You are blood rushing down a mountain, Spirit of hate, greed and anger, dominator of heaven and earth!Īt least a millennium later, the Greek poet (or group of poets) known as Homer composed The Illiad, an epic poem about a war that destroyed 'great fighters' souls' and 'made their bodies carrion, / feasts for the dogs and birds.' In about 2300 BCE, she riled against war, writing: The earliest recorded war poetry is thought to be by Enheduanna, a priestess from Sumer, the ancient land that is now Iraq. CM Dixon / Print Collector / Getty Images (Cropped detail.).īritish Museum Collection. Inlay of shell, red limestone, and lapis lazuli in Bitumen.

He is the author of, among others, The Secret Library: A Book-Lovers’ Journey Through Curiosities of History and The Great War, The Waste Land and the Modernist Long Poem.Image of a Sumerian army on the Standard of Ur, a small hollow box from a royal tomb at Ur, southern Iraq, about 2600-2400 BC. The author of this article, Dr Oliver Tearle, is a literary critic and lecturer in English at Loughborough University. The best edition of Rupert Brooke’s poems is probably (in terms of the best value) The Complete Poems of Rupert Brooke. Two years later, he would be proved right. Brooke seems to know, from his coffee-shop in Berlin, that its days are numbered. The English way of life described in the poem would be altered drastically in all sorts of ways.

Wodehouse (and even earlier Downton Abbey), the poem captures an idea of Englishness which belongs to the years immediately preceding the First World War, which changed everything forever. The closing lines – ‘Stands the church clock at ten to three? / And is there honey still for tea?’ are well-known and well-loved. Like ‘Heaven’, it’s written in iambic tetrameter rhyming couplets, but it’s not a satire: in many ways it has more in common with Brooke’s later patriotic war poetry than it has with his earlier, lighter poems. An analysis of the poem can be found here.Īnother poem Brooke wrote before the outbreak of WWI was also one of his best-loved: ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’ romanticises a small Cambridgeshire village from the perspective of a German café – a sort of updated version of Robert Browning’s ‘Home Thoughts, from Abroad’ for a new generation. Witty and well-constructed, ‘Heaven’ is an overlooked poem in Brooke’s oeuvre, but we think it’s one of his best. an afterlife – hence the title of the poem). ‘Heaven’ uses fish to make a comment on human piety, and specifically the reasons mankind offers for a belief in something more than one’s immediate surroundings (e.g.