69. The war poets you don’t study at school

Despite the “cosmopolitan sympathies” of the poets, memorial events in the UK today are dominated by British writers. But there are many other literary voices from the battle for the trenches.

Poetry has become the centre of a propaganda battle over the meaning of the First World War, with different sides favouring those poets whose political sympathies reflect their own. Prime Minister David Cameron recently chose to intone Rupert Brooke’s “The Soldier” for a charity album recording. Brooke’s vision of “some corner of a foreign field/That is for ever England” espouses the “British values” of honour, loyalty and patriotism of which most Conservatives approve (indeed, Michael Gove wants to see them promoted in schools). Yet, of course, much British war poetry was anti-nationalist in tone. Siegfried Sassoon’s “A Night Attack”, for instance, describes a dead German soldier as “Young, fresh, and pleasant, so I dare to say./No doubt he loathed the war and longed for peace”. (…)

Although we are unfamiliar with it, much of the war poetry from France, Germany, Russia and elsewhere is of equal quality to (and, in some cases, even better than) that produced by British writers.

The most prominent European war poet was Guillaume Apollinaire, a naturalised Frenchman of Polish descent who died of influenza at the end of the war. His collection Calligrammes stands as a landmark achievement in the development of literary modernism. The book’s title refers to Apollinaire’s visual poetry, which attempted to achieve with words what Picasso and others had been doing in fine art. His poem “Du coton dans les oreilles” (“Cotton in Your Ears”) begins by re-creating the explosion of artillery shells typographically, the words tumbling upwards on the page.

Apollinaire felt that the war represented a new era, one that would require an original language. As he writes in “Victoire”: “. . . the old languages are so close to death/It’s really from habit and cowardice/That we still use them for poetry”.

(…) Sarojini Naidu, on the other hand, was a poet of exceptional quality. Known as “the Nightingale of India”, Naidu was a politician as well as a poet: a lifelong fighter for independence who became the first female state governor in her country. Her best-known poem is “The Gift of India” (1915), which describes the dead:

Gathered like pearls in their alien graves
Silent they sleep by the Persian waves,
Scattered like shells on Egyptian sands,
They lie with pale brows and brave,
broken hands,
They are strewn like blossoms mown
down by chance
On the blood-brown meadows of
Flanders and France . . .

/ Owen Clayton, New Statesman