Some poems on this day
Nov. 11th, 2014 02:36 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yendiOne of my favorite classes some twenty years ago at Emory was "World War One Literature." I was a senior English major, which was basically a license to take classes where you like the reading material. This was a class that was as immersed in history as in literature, and about as anti-formalism a course as you could reasonable expect to take.
We read lots of great stuff, from All Quiet on the Western Front to Johnny Got His Gun. But as someone who specialized in studying poetry, that was far and away my favorite section of the course.
We did, out of necessity, read some of the unironic propagandistic bullshit like Owen Seaman's Pro Patria, if better to understand works like Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est, which takes the same phrase that Seaman practically masturbated to and calls it for "the old Lie" that it truly is.
Owen's about as well known as any of the WWI poets, a great voice and advocate for true knowledge of the horrors of war who went back to serve when he didn't have to, and who died a week before the end of the war.
Unlike Seaman, I found Rupert Brooke's idealism more tragic than horrifying, since he actually fought in the war, giving the lines of The Soldier a resonance that his pointless death (from an infection via a mosquito bite) underscored.
But there were more that I loved. Robert Graves is known for his memoirs and novels, but his When I'm Killed still resonates. And Siegfried Sassoon remained one of my favorites for years. His Counter-Attack is everything Seaman's poem isn't, a cacophony that's as unromantic as the war itself, filled with words like "choked" and "slime" and gloom" and with a lack of rhyme and images like "spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell."
All of which really is a preamble to say that, a hundred years after the start of the war, on a day that's supposed to celebrate the end of major war on the planet, it's hard to see that a lot's changed. I'm not a fan of celebrating war, even "just" wars, because it's celebrating the worst humanity has to offer, and WW1 was when we developed and perfected the means to make things extra horrible in all sorts of ways. I'm aware of just how much of my own privilege has war at its roots (the whole Revolutionary War thing, as demonstrated regularly on Sleepy Hollow), but it doesn't make it something I ever enjoy seeing glamorized. The whole "war is bad" thing is naive (and Steven Brust snarked at it some twenty years back), but that doesn't make it wrong. I want to know that there's a future of humanity in which war is looked at as something horrific from the past, but we're just not there yet.
We read lots of great stuff, from All Quiet on the Western Front to Johnny Got His Gun. But as someone who specialized in studying poetry, that was far and away my favorite section of the course.
We did, out of necessity, read some of the unironic propagandistic bullshit like Owen Seaman's Pro Patria, if better to understand works like Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est, which takes the same phrase that Seaman practically masturbated to and calls it for "the old Lie" that it truly is.
Owen's about as well known as any of the WWI poets, a great voice and advocate for true knowledge of the horrors of war who went back to serve when he didn't have to, and who died a week before the end of the war.
Unlike Seaman, I found Rupert Brooke's idealism more tragic than horrifying, since he actually fought in the war, giving the lines of The Soldier a resonance that his pointless death (from an infection via a mosquito bite) underscored.
But there were more that I loved. Robert Graves is known for his memoirs and novels, but his When I'm Killed still resonates. And Siegfried Sassoon remained one of my favorites for years. His Counter-Attack is everything Seaman's poem isn't, a cacophony that's as unromantic as the war itself, filled with words like "choked" and "slime" and gloom" and with a lack of rhyme and images like "spouting dark earth and wire with gusts from hell."
All of which really is a preamble to say that, a hundred years after the start of the war, on a day that's supposed to celebrate the end of major war on the planet, it's hard to see that a lot's changed. I'm not a fan of celebrating war, even "just" wars, because it's celebrating the worst humanity has to offer, and WW1 was when we developed and perfected the means to make things extra horrible in all sorts of ways. I'm aware of just how much of my own privilege has war at its roots (the whole Revolutionary War thing, as demonstrated regularly on Sleepy Hollow), but it doesn't make it something I ever enjoy seeing glamorized. The whole "war is bad" thing is naive (and Steven Brust snarked at it some twenty years back), but that doesn't make it wrong. I want to know that there's a future of humanity in which war is looked at as something horrific from the past, but we're just not there yet.
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Date: 2014-11-12 03:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-11-12 05:32 pm (UTC)