There can be no doubt that as a term "Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder" is clearly lacking the needed musical quality that would add to the pleasing rhythm of a poem, however the melancholy that is generated by the malady has launched a million poems throughout the course of the last century, which was to date, the bloodiest yet. Most often remembered for her anti-war verses, Lady Margaret Sackville (1881 – 1963) penned this diddly about that legion of crushed and broken men returned to their wives after World War One and how entirely unrecognizable they seemed:
"You cannot speak to us nor we reply:
You learnt a different language where men die..."
W.W. II: Where were the war poets?
An account by one learned traveler who journeyed to that one isolated piece of ground on the isle of Skyros that will forever be England - the grave of the English poet Rupert Brooke (1887 - 1915).
The literati who wrote the attached article went to great lengths imparting the significance of Skyros throughout all antiquity and it's meaning to the world of letters; credited only as S. Casson, he informed his readers that he arrived on the island five years after the original burial in order to erect the headstone that is currently in place and describes the shepherds and other assorted rustics in some detail while alluding religiously to the works of Homer.
"I wonder how many people will visit this remote island to see the grave? It means long and weary journeying, and will be a real pilgrimage. From the sea, just off Tris Boukes Bay, the monument can just be seen, with it's white Pentelic marble showing clear through the olive trees, the only visible sign of man or his works at this end of the island."
To see a color photograph of the grave, click here..
Although the U.S. President Woodrow Wilson asked Americans to be
"neutral in thought and deed" on all matters concerning the war in Europe [before to April, 1917], the sympathies of the American people firmly stood with the French and their allies. Whether they served as soldiers or non-combatants, the American public was proud of those young Americans who expressed their outrage by volunteering to serve among the French or British armies. Numbered in that group was the Poet
Alan Seeger
(1888 - 1916), who fought with the French Foreign Legion and was killed on the Somme. The following poem was written by Grace D. Vanamee (1867 – 1946) in response to Seeger's very popular poem
I Have a Rendezvous with Death (North American Review, October, 1916).
THE TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT reviewed the third edition to Charles Hamilton Sorely's (1895 - 1915) collection,
Marlborough and Other Poems, with particular attention paid to an addition to that volume called "Illustrations in Prose".
Sorely reminisced about his days before the war when he was briefly enrolled as a student at the University of Jena. During the war Sorely served in the Suffolk Regiment and was killed in the battle of Loos during the autumn of 1915.
The attached essay by Galloway Kyle (b.1871) concerns
World War I poetry and served as the preface for his 1916 anthology titled
Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men
.
A review of three volumes of World War One poetry:
From the Front
edited by Lt. Clarence Edward Andrews (dates?), Songs From The Trenches by Herbert Adams Gibbons (1880-1934) and Robert Graves' (1895–1985) "Fairies and Fusiliers".
American poet Marguerite Wilkinson(1883 — 1928) was very impressed with the
World War I poetry of Sigfried Sassoon, MC (1886 – 1967); in this three page review she lucidly explained why Sassoon's voice was different from all the other wartime versifiers and illustrated her point by quoting liberally from his two earlier volumes, "The Old Huntsman" (1917) and "Counter Attack" (1918):
"Such wisdom is the shining power of Sigfried Sassoon. To read it is to come face to face with indelible memories of unspeakable anguish. No palliatives are offered. The truth about warfare is told, as Mr. Sassoon understands it, with vigor and in sight...It is told by a man, a soldier, who will never forget this Calvary of the youth of our generation."
The following five page article was written by the World War One poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886 - 1967), in an "attempt to give a rough outline of what the British poets did in the Great War, making every allowance for the fact that they were writing under great difficulty...".
This 1917 article listed the known body count of dead poets who were rotting away in no-man's land. A number of the scribes are unknown in our era; among the prominent names are Alan Seeger, Julian Grenfel and Rupert Brooke.
Printed in a popular U.S. magazine, it appeared on the newsstands the same week that Wilfred Owen, the most well known of World War I poets, was discharged from Craiglockhart Hospital, where he first resolved to write poetry about his experiences in the war.
"On came the foe, rushing foe,
As down they fell by hundreds.
'Twas bravery held our men;
They knew they were outnumbered."
"'Hundreds' and 'outnumbered'; Tennyson could hardly have done better than that. But even Tennyson would not have tried to rhyme 'steam and 'submarine', as the author of the following succeded in doing:
"Brave boys, put on steam;
Be ready at the guns, boys;
'Tis a German submarine."
etc., etc.,
Attached is an interesting article by the noted poet and poetry anthologist, Louis Untermeyer (1885 – 1977). He praised the soldier poets of the First World War and expressed his bafflement concerning the absolute dirth of competent rhyme-slingers in the Second World War:
"Why then, it has been asked again and again, is the poetry of this war so thin, so emotionally anemic, so unrepresentative of the fierce struggle in which the world is engaged? Why has no poet, not even a single poem, emerged to stir the heart and burn into the mind?"
The front-line Tommy of the First World War, like Fritz, Jock, Sammy and Les Poilu, had a good deal of time on his hands between terrors. Some wrote letters, some made trench art, some slept - and the ones we're concentrating on were the ones who made this handy alphabetic guide that explained their world:
"Z is for ZERO, the time we go over,
Most of us wish we were way back
in Dover
Making munitions and living in clover
And far, far away from the trenches"
