The Poetry of War
Cambridge University Press, 2008
This book shows how poets from Homer to Bruce Springsteen have responded to the intensity and horror of war. Acutely aware of the presence of beauty in the midst of slaughter, poets have often recognized the aesthetic dimensions of violence. Some have celebrated combat as sublime in its grandeur and terror, while others have acknowledged the dark connection between violence and the erotic. They have seen the links between sexual desire and military aggression, but they have also described the sacrifices made in war as acts of love that lead to the birth of beauty. Yeats’s memorable lines—”All changed, changed utterly, / A terrible beauty is born”—capture a lasting truth.
Poetry offers thoughtful readers precious insights into war—moral, political, and aesthetic ways of understanding war that are valuable precisely because they are not simple. Poets have given memorable expression to the personal motives that send men forth to fight: honor, shame, comradeship, revenge. They have also helped shape the larger, more corporate ideas that nations and cultures invoke as incentives for warfare: patriotism, religion, empire, chivalry, freedom.
In a world still at war, we need language about war that goes deeper than journalism. By using traditional conventions of language and older patterns of meter to describe scenes of present chaos and violence, poets offer a more thoughtful, retrospective account of war than television or print journalists, who must necessarily focus on the immediate moment and the hard facts. A reader attentive to both syntax and form will hear several kinds of meaning at once in poetic language, a complexity that makes irony possible. Through meter, metaphor, and irony, poets invite their readers to contemplate war from several points of view at once. The greatest war poets praise the victor while mourning the victim; they honor the dead while raising deep questions about the meaning of honor.
My first two chapters explore honor and shame, two powerful personal motives for violence. To invoke the idea of honor, some poets draw upon the language, ideas, and weapons of past eras. They find it easier to imagine a soldier with a “broken lance” dying in a “high hour” than to describe a soldier with a rifle and a gas mask dying with thousands of others. Other poets, however, look unsparingly at present horrors, and dismiss what their cultures call honor as male bonding, self-love, and pride.
Beneath the high-sounding clichés about honor lurks the fear of appearing weak or cowardly, the dread of shame. In the Iliad, Homer describes the disastrous results of the system anthropologists call “shame culture,” but later readers and translators have sometimes missed or suppressed his shrewd moral insights. Even after Christianity supposedly replaced “shame culture” with “guilt culture,” shame retained its power, both for individuals and for nations.
My next two chapters, on empire and chivalry, move toward national and corporate motives for war. Poets helped to develop the myth of empire, celebrating the idea of spreading “civilization” to the far corners of the world and urging imperial powers to “Take up the White Man’s burden.” But the greatest poet of empire, Virgil, is acutely aware of the human and moral costs of empire. Although later readers distorted and simplified his work, as they did Homer’s, thoughtful readers of Virgil have followed him in tracing the harmful effects of empire on the imperialists themselves.
The myth of chivalry is almost entirely the creation of poets, who invented a system of polite and honorable ideals at odds with the shameful and violent reality of medieval warfare. Even after artillery made knights in armor obsolete, poets went on developing the closed, fictional world of chivalry, which maintained a persistent hold on the imagination in later periods by linking martial feats with nobility, Christian faith, and the love of women. Already fraudulent as a description of medieval warfare, chivalry provided later poets with an elegant way of avoiding present realities; it gave governments an appealing myth for recruitment.
In wars of all periods, men have felt intense affection for each other. Even cultures intolerant of other kinds of affection between men have celebrated such affection in military contexts. In poems on comradeship, personal and public motives for warfare collide. Those most deeply touched by the fellowships of combat have often been cautious about describing them, yet out of that very reticence, the greatest poets of wartime comradeship have made high art.
My final chapter concerns the idea of liberty, the most powerful motive for warfare in the West in recent centuries. Eighteenth-century poets, I argue, created a mythology of liberty on which modern politicians still draw. Democratic concern for the common man and principled opposition to slavery, motives first felt personally, then adopted as national policies, turned out to provide new reasons to fight, and ultimately led to the high-sounding claim that World War I was “the war to end all wars.” The ideal of fighting for freedom, richly developed by some poets and sardonically undercut by others, provides a perspective from which to criticize shameful wars, including the American conquest of the Philippines in the 1890s and the more recent wars in Vietnam and Iraq.
The Poetry of War honors poetry as an art of memory, and urges modern readers and politicians to consider the wisdom embodied in poetry. Though sometimes dismissed as an elite art-form with a minuscule audience, poetry is also now reaching a wider public. Poetry “slams” are an indication of the continuing power of verse, and hip-hop music, which is essentially poetry, has dominated popular radio in the West for more than a decade. At a time when every kid on the subway knows that kind of poetry by heart, I believe it is possible to engage general readers in a discussion of the deeply connected energies of poetry and war.
Chapter Summaries
Honor and Memory
In 1962, General Douglas MacArthur spoke at West Point on “Duty, Honor, Country.” To evoke the idea of honor, he used poetic language, including references to “the chalice of courage” and “the witching melody of faint bugles.” Familiar poetic phrases, some of them centuries old, are crucial to the mystique of honor. Most high-school anthologies still include a seventeenth-century poem that ends with one such cliché: “I could not love thee (Deare) so much, / Lov’d I not Honour more.” This lyric, like many poems on honor, masquerades as a love poem, but is actually a poem of self-love. Although writing at a time when war had become efficient and faceless, the poet (Richard Lovelace) ignored the realities of combat in his own time and drew his military details from the period of chivalry. The first generation of World War I poets, who habitually invoked lances, banners, and grails to discuss a war actually fought with machine guns and gas, were also denying the present by invoking the past, with increasingly stilted and false results. The rejection of the cult of honor by the later World War I poets, notably Wilfred Owen, did not prevent similar language from resurfacing later, as it does in MacArthur’s speech.
Shame and Slaughter
Embracing his wife and child, the Trojan hero Hector in the Iliad admits that he “would die of shame” if he held back from battle, and in 1969, according to Tim O’Brien, soldiers in Vietnam “died so as not to die of embarrassment.” To explain the long history of shame as a motive for combat, I reach back to Homer, and discuss how the Iliad has been read (and misread) from the Renaissance to the present. Homer’s brutal honesty about warfare includes an unsparing treatment of the crippling system of values that drives his heroes, a system anthropologists call “shame culture.” He teaches us the rules of this system, exposes its limitations, narrates its breakdown, and suggests alternatives. Although his characters sometimes recognize the limits of a system that represents honor with material goods, they cannot find a way to escape that system. In pursuing political aims, later readers, translators, and teachers often lost sight of Homer’s critical attitudes or deliberately distorted them, turning his morally subtle, shrewdly observant account of individual chieftains struggling to claim honor and avoid shame into a nationalistic and didactic story stressing the duties and obligations of the upper class. A stubbornly persistent motive for individuals, shame gathers even more power when applied to nations. In 1914, a group of famous writers “agreed that Great Britain could not without dishonourhave refused to take part in the present war.” As poetic examples confirm, the avoidance of dishonor was a more important rationale for Britain’s loss of a million men in World War I than any imagined economic or political gain.
The Cost of Empire
Since September 11, 2001, commentators have again spoken of the United States in imperial terms, prompting comparisons between our current dominance and that of Britain in the nineteenth century or Rome in the ancient world. Empires stress collective motives for war—nationalism, imperialism, and patriotism—as opposed to the personal motives of honor and shame traced in earlier chapters. Virgil’s Aeneid, the first great poem of empire,reflects this shift. As the first culture with a professional army, the Romans were brutal, ferocious warriors, despite their highly developed civic and political skills. Virgil’s poem explores that conflict. His hero Aeneas fails to achieve the diplomatic, self-disciplined Roman piety in which he believes, and finally reverts to bloody, primitive vengeance. In similes and prophecies that point to his own times, Virgil celebrates the official myths of Rome while deploring the cruel cost of empire. Lines that appear to praise Julius and Augustus Caesar often contain clues that point to another, darker reading. Nineteenth-century readers, however, missed this complexity; they simplified and distorted Virgil’s work as they did Homer’s, interpreting it as a celebration of their own imperialistic urges. Poetry has played a central role in developing the fundamental myth of empire, in which a great and civilized city, gleaming at the center of an extensive empire, receives the grateful tribute of exotic peoples from the far corners of the world. By extending this myth, some poetic apologists for empire associate it with peace and even freedom. More thoughtful poets have followed Virgil in exploring the dark side of empire. Alexander Pope’s “Windsor-Forest,” celebrating the Peace of Utrecht in 1714, and Philip Appleman’s devastating poem on Vietnam, “Peace with Honor,” are strong examples.
The Myth of Chivalry
Of all past forms and ideologies of warfare, medieval chivalry has had the most persistent hold on the imagination of poets. For Richard Lovelace in 1648 or Alfred Lord Tennyson in 1856, or even Douglas MacArthur in 1962, a chivalric vocabulary was the surest way to connect the ugly work of war with noble birth, Christian faith, and the purity of women. The storybook knight is in large measure the creation of poets living from the Renaissance forward, poets writing after artillery had ended the era of the actual knight. The myth as it has come down to us more truly reflects the nostalgic and romantic fantasies of these later writers than the stark and violent practices of the real Middle Ages. Despite routine invocations of Christian values, early medieval history and literature provide ample evidence of “the prickly sense of honour, the insistence on autonomy, [and] the quick recourse to violence” that modern historians have identified as the distinguishing traits of actual knights. With each successive phase of chivalric poetry, the distance between military reality and fictional combat increased. The writers of historical chansons de geste (songs of exploits) based their works on the Crusades and other real campaigns. The writers of chivalric romances invented their pure heroes and intricate plots, which bear scant resemblance to any real medieval knights. And the writers of Renaissance chivalric epics continued to describe warfare as a series of single combats, although by their period, the medieval system of knighthood had already collapsed in the face of cannon, a faceless weapon that could kill many at once. The notion of holy warfare and the cult of chaste affection for women also shaped the later tradition of chivalric poetry, which had a very long afterlife. Not until the Battle of the Somme did Siegfried Sassoon bid “farewell to Galahad.”
Comrades in Arms
Affection for a fellow soldier is another important motive for violence, and a theme richly developed in poems from all periods. Some cultures, such as ancient Sparta, encouraged explicit homosexual bonds among soldiers. Virgil tells the story of Nisus and Euryalus, soldier-lovers who die together in battle, and links their death to the highest ideals of empire. Walt Whitman, who served as a medical orderly in the American Civil War, expressed his feelings about wounded soldiers in erotic terms, and homoeroticism—expressed with varying degrees of self-consciousness—appears quite often in poems about both World Wars. Affection for the individual or collective enemy is another part of this story. In the imperial campaigns of the nineteenth century, the enemy could be stigmatized as inferior in race and culture, but Kipling’s soldier-narrators, despite their thoroughly racist vocabulary, respect the courage of their foes and sometimes achieve a kind of comradeship with men from very different cultures. In poetry from many periods, moments of real or imagined contact with an enemy soldier often lead to the discovery of kinship or similarity, as in “Strange Meeting,” Wilfred Owen’s poem about confronting a dead German, who says, “I am the enemy you killed, my friend.”
The Cause of Liberty
Poets and politicians since the Enlightenment have cherished the belief that “good wars” advance the inevitable progress of mankind toward freedom, democracy, and brotherhood. The continuing power of these Enlightenment ideals as motives for warfare reflects not only the philosophical and political appeal of liberal principles, but the eloquence of eighteenth-century poets, who honored Liberty as a goddess and gave her stirring words to speak. Phrases from Addison’s poetic drama Cato, the most influential English play of the eighteenth century, decisively shaped American beliefs about liberty and warfare—including the idea that both were beautiful. Even poets who looked forward to a utopian future of peace and freedom celebrated battle as sublime.
Ironically, the ideology of freedom turned out to provide new reasons to fight. In the American Civil War, the noble cause of freeing the slaves did not prevent poets from using a frighteningly violent rhetoric. Union poets embraced the theme of liberation, but suppressed the fact that the North achieved victory by turning the war against the civilian population of the South. “The stars in our banner shone brighter,” wrote one, “When Sherman marched down to the sea”—entirely omitting the path of destruction he left behind him. Confederate poets conceived of their cause as a defense of homes, women, and Southern liberty, rarely mentioning the slave system. The unprecedented scale of death in that war, however, darkened the allegorical figure of Liberty. Addressing “Libertad” as a “Victress,” Whitman offered a disturbing gift: “No poem proud, I, chanting, bring to thee—nor mastery’s rapturous verse; / But a book, containing night’s darkness, and blood-dripping wounds, / And psalms of the dead.” American’s imperialist incursion into the Philippines after the Spanish-American war called forth poems of protest arguing that the war shamed the efforts of earlier warriors who had fought for their own liberty or to liberate the slaves.
Freedom and democracy have been no more successful at preventing war than previous ideologies. Poems from both World Wars expose the emptiness of grand claims about bringing peace to the world, and poems and songs from the Vietnam era stress the lack of freedom experienced by draftee soldiers. Bruce Springsteen’s rock anthem, “Born in the U.S.A.,” is powerful recent instance. President Reagan’s attempt to appropriate this savage indictment of conscription, pointless violence, and the hard lot of the veteran as a patriotic campaign song is an extreme instance of our readiness to hear the messages we want to hear in poems and songs of war. Yet as Philip Appleman argues in a fine poem on Vietnam, “the wisdom of losses” and “the gift of despair” expressed by poets may point the way toward a more chastened understanding of war. Although some poets have misused their gifts to sustain the myths of honor and chivalry, or to celebrate the creation of empires, those most true to their high calling have grasped and made real the rich, contradictory emotions that war calls forth in all of us. They are my heroes.