A thought about poets and war

[beautifulduckweed]

I've been re-reading my copy of E.E. Cummings' Selected Poems, and last night came across some of his war poetry, which of course started me thinking about Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, whose poems about their WWI experiences are chilling and beautiful and wrenching and heartbreaking. And that started me thinking: are there any poets who went through war and came out of the experience more-or-less pro-war? I'm not any sort of expert in poetry, much less war (or, more accurately, anti-war) poetry, but I can't think of any. And that, in turn, started me thinking about artists, and how many of them seem to lean left/liberal, and whether that predisposed them to think a certain way about war, or whether the trauma of the war experience in and of itself made them cynical about the endeavor. Sassoon in particular was interesting because he became a conscientious objector and wrote a famous letter denouncing the way WWI was being conducted, but he returned to the front, anyway, because he felt he owed it to his men.

And speaking of WWI, war poets in general and Sassoon in particular, this is yet another chance for me to pimp Pat Barker's amazing trilogy of WWI novels: Regeneration, The Eye in the Door and The Ghost Road. I can't even begin to summarize these books, even though each novel is relatively short, but to give you an idea, they're about war, post-traumatic stress syndrome, the politics surrounding WWI, the treatment of homosexuals during the era (the first book is a fictionalized account of Siegfriend Sassoon's "breakdown," and Sassoon was teh ghey), the brutality of trench warfare, and many other things. These three books and Barry Unsworth's A Sacred Hunger (which is about capitalism, religious morality and the commodification of human lives, as well as a crazy, rip-roaring yarn about a slaving ship run by a paranoid schizophrenic) are the four novels I can't seem to stop pimping to assorted people.

I leave you with one of my favorite of Cummings' war poems.

my sweet old etcetera
aunt lucy during the recent

war could and what
is more did tell you just
what everybody was fighting

for,
my sister

isabel created hundreds
(and
hundreds)of socks not to
mention shirts fleaproof earwarmers

etcetera wristers etcetera,my

mother hoped that

i would die etcetera
bravely of course my father used
to become hoarse talking about how it was
a privilege and if only he
could meanwhile my

self etcetera lay quietly
in the deep mud et

cetera
(dreaming,
et
cetera,of
Your smile
eyes knees and of your Etcetera)