International Poetry of the First World War

An Anthology of Lost Voices

Constance M. Ruzich

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781350226067
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350106451
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: World War I
• Index: Literature

Ranging far beyond the traditional canon, this ground-breaking anthology casts a vivid new light on poetic responses to the First World War. Bringing together poems by soldiers and non-combatants, patriots and dissenters, and from all sides of the conflict across the world, International Poetry of the First World War reveals the crucial public role that poetry played in shaping responses to and the legacies of the conflict.

Across over 150 poems, this anthology explores such topics as the following:
· Life at the Front
· Psychological trauma
· Noncombatants and the home front
· Rationalising the war
· Remembering the dead
· Peace and the aftermath of the war

With contextual notes throughout, the book includes poems written by authors from America, Australia, Austria-Hungary, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Great Britain, India, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Russia, and South Africa.

1

Soldiers’ Lives

Poems in this chapter describe patrols, raids, and attacks; assess the aftermath of assaults; contrast the perspectives of fresh troops with those of veterans; relate the tedium of life in the trenches; and respond to the new technologies of war. Some poems describe the experiences of the wounded and the horrors of mutilation; others tell of finding laughter, beauty, and wonder at the front. The experiences and moods of military life during the First World War were more varied than has been fully represented by the war’s canonical poetry.

Fragment

I strayed about the deck, an hour, to-night

Under a cloudy moonless sky; and peeped

In at the windows, watched my friends at table,

Or playing cards, or standing in the doorway,

Or coming out into the darkness. Still

No one could see me.

I would have thought of them

—Heedless, within a week of battle—in pity,

Pride in their strength and in the weight and firmness

And link’d beauty of bodies, and pity that

This gay machine of splendour’ld soon be broken,

Thought little of, pashed, scattered….

Only, always,

I could but see them—against the lamplight—pass

Like coloured shadows, thinner than filmy glass,

Slight bubbles, fainter than the wave’s faint light,

That broke to phosphorus out in the night,

Perishing things and strange ghosts—soon to die

To other ghosts—this one, or that, or I.

April 1915

—Rupert Brooke

Rupert Brooke is best known for his poem “The Soldier” and its memorable first lines, “If I should die, think only this of me: / That there’s some corner of a foreign field / That is for ever England.” That poem was published in the London Times Literary Supplement in March of 1915 and read by the Dean of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London on Easter Sunday, April 4, 1915. During the sermon, a war protestor objected so loudly that he had to be removed from the church (as reported in the London Times the following day).¹ Three weeks later, Brooke died en route to Gallipoli. “The Soldier” appeared in his posthumously published collection 1914 and Other Poems (1915), which by the end of the war was in its twenty-fourth reprinting. Brooke’s “Fragment,” titled as such by Edward Marsh, was one of only two “coherent fragments found in the notebook which he [Brooke] used in the last month of his life.”² Published in 1918, it appears in the Appendix of The Collected Poems of Rupert Brooke: With a Memoir. In “The Soldier,” Brooke speculates on his own death. In his lesser-known poem “Fragment,” he imagines the future of other soldiers as he writes from a troop-ship headed for the Dardanelles and the attack at Gallipoli.

Brooke never reached the Turkish coast, dying on the island of Skyros on April 23, 1915. His early death transformed the soldier-poet into an iconic figure. The man was far more complicated than the myth, however, and scholars argue that neither Brooke nor his poetry is as naïve or idealistic as often assumed.³ In 1918, Bertrand Russell reflected on Rupert Brooke and his early death:

Rupert and his brother … and lots of others—in whom one foolishly thought at the time that there was hope for the world—they were full of life and energy and truth—Rupert himself loved life and the world—his hatreds were very concrete, resulting from some quite specific vanity or jealousy, but in the main he found the world lovable and interesting. There was nothing of humbug in him.⁴

An early reviewer wrote, “Rupert Brooke not only lived in perpetual interrogation of the unknowable; he made poetry of his questionings.”⁵

The Transport

I.

A thick still heat stifles the dim saloon.

The rotten air hangs heavy on us all,

and trails a steady penetrating steam

of hot wet flannel and the evening’s mess.

Close bodies swaying, catcalls out of tune,

while the jazz band syncopates the Darktown Strutters’ Ball,

we crowd like minnows in a muddy stream.

O God, even here a sense of loneliness …

I grope my way on deck to watch the moon

gleam sharply where the shadows rise and fall

in the immense disturbance of the sea.

And like the vast possession of a dream

that black ship, and the pale sky’s emptiness,

and this great wind become a part of me.

—John Allan Wyeth⁶ (1929)

When America entered the First World War on April 6, 1917, many politicians and members of the public assumed that the United States would simply continue to send armaments and aid, with no direct military involvement. Shortly after war was declared, Virginia senator Thomas S. Martin expressed stunned surprise upon learning that President Wilson intended to send American troops overseas: “Good Lord! You’re not going to send soldiers over there, are you?”⁷ On June 14, 1917, a little more than two months after the United States entered the war, the first American troops sailed for France—14,000 soldiers of the First Division. By August of 1918, the United States had sent nearly 1,500,000 men overseas.⁸ Willard Newton, a doughboy sailing with the 105th Engineers of North Carolina, describes his outbound voyage:

As the transport steams slowly out of Hoboken it passes the Statue of Liberty, and though we are all supposed to be below deck several of us fellows slip up and take a last look at the statue and then go back below. The fellows congregate in small groups, some singing songs that have become popular since the war, and others are discussing the journey that lays before them. We are leaving the States to return no more until our task “over there” is finished.⁹

John Allan Wyeth served as a staff officer and language translator with the 33rd Division of the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF). His only volume of poetry, This Man’s Army: A War in Fifty-Odd Sonnets, was published in 1929. Wyeth’s use of modernist forms, especially his “mixed meters and disjunctive syntax”¹⁰ may be attributed Ezra Pound’s influence. The men formed a friendship in the years after the war; both lived in Rapallo, Italy, in the mid-1920s and socialized in a literary circle that included Max Beerbohm and W.B. Yeats.¹¹ Yet from the 1930s to the present, not one of Wyeth’s poems has appeared in an anthology of First World War poetry. “Of all the writers of the Lost Generation, there was perhaps none quite so lost as John Allan Wyeth,” writes B.J. Omanson, the military historian and poet who, together with Dana Gioia, rediscovered Wyeth and his work.¹² Since the republishing of This Man’s Army in 2008, scholars have remarked on the craftsmanship of Wyeth’s sonnets, praising them for their “clarity of perspective and … emotional detachment,”¹³ and comparing them to “quick, on-the-spot sketches, struck down on paper with no objective beyond capturing the fleeting essence of the moment.”¹⁴ Tim Kendall, editor of Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology (Oxford, 2013), describes Wyeth’s sonnet sequence as “the great forgotten book of the War.”¹⁵ Dana Gioia argues that This Man’s Army “is the most ambitious, representative, and successful poetic venture by an American combatant in the Great War, and it is also probably the only volume that stands compa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Soldiers’ Lives
• 2 Minds at War
• 3 Noncombatants
• 4 Making Sense of War
• 5 Remembering the Dead
• 6 Aftermath
• Primary Sources
• Further Reading
• Index of Poets, Translators, and Poems
• Index of Poem Titles and First Lines
• Imprint