Testing Preconceptions- WWI and WWII Poets/Poetry

WWI poetry compared to WWII poetry… the place to begin research today is Google… I will try 'WWI poetry' first… but first my preconceptions:

My Preconceptions: Just glancing over the WWI hits on Google I suspect WWI poetry will be patriotic and justifying, and I suspect WWII poetry will be cynical and negative… now to test those preconceptions:

WWI POETRY

Here’s a promising hit- Poetry and Poets of the First World War 1914 - 1918 hopefully I will get historic information and not opinion, for opinion is my job here.

 

Well, that link gave me half-a-dozen poets:

 

Rupert Brooke

Wilfred Owen

Isaac Rosenberg

Siegfried Sassoon

Edward Thomas

Ivor Gurney

I’ll make an assumption- that these six poets will be a good cross-section of all WWI poets.

Rupert Brooke

I will skip the introductory blurb on him, for I must go straight to the poetry to formulating an original, uninfluenced opinion…

Excerpts from the first poem listed: “The Soldier”

“If I should die… there’s some corner of the earth that is forever England… a richer dust…”

So far my preconception holds- in this first poem I find patriotism, self-sacrifice, and no regrets. As this is a male poet, another question arises- Will male poets be this way, and female poets dwell more on the tragic aspects of war?

I'll read a few more from this male author before I move on to female to get a good cross-section of his thoughts:

Excerpts from “The Dead”:

“loved, gone proudly… a white unbroken glory... radiance…”

Again, no regrets, only about the beautiful aspects of dying (for a just cause, we can assume).

In “The Channel Passage” he addresses dealing with a minute detail of military life, and gives no grand positive or negative conclusion of it…

In “The Goddess in the Wood” he touches on the tragic, but minimizes it with the eternal…

And in “Fragment” the wonder that some would soon die… on pride and pity… deeper psychologically than the others, which attempt to offset the tragic with patriotism or piousness…

 So, patriotism, piousness giving just cause and relieving the pain of the tragic… now since all six authors are male, I'll conclude that they will all similarly address the same issues with the same reasoning… now let’s find a female poet of the era to test the male/female question…

Here is a promising link on women poets of the time: First World War.com - Feature Articles - Women and WWI

 

Here is a book referenced: Reilly, Catherine (ed.). Scars upon My Heart: Women's Poetry and Verse of the First World War. London: Virago Press, 1981.

Now, just by the title alone I can conclude that my new preconception holds- women tend to dwell on the tragic aspects of war.

WWII POETRY

Lets search for ‘Poetry 1939 1945’

This may be a difficult task, there is nothing useful on the first several pages of links…

Wikipedia tells us that during the time a topic of discussion was ‘Where are all the war poets?’ This indicates something very different between the poets/poetry of the two conflicts. I can think of several answers to the question- that people were just ‘doing’ and not ‘thinking’; that ‘right and wrong’ were more clearly defined, giving rise to less wonder; or that people were more about ‘getting the job done’, a mundane view not lending itself to poetry in the mindsets of the time…

Let me alter my search: 'WWII Poetry'… again not many links, but maybe more useful…

Here’s one: World War II Poetry-Main Page

 

This site contains poems written in Japanese internment camps in the US, and concentration camps in Europe during the war… my initial instinct is that this is a small, focused selection reflecting more on today’s activist liberal focusing on small, peripheral aspects rather than that of the general mindset of the period. It would confirm my preconception about WWII being more cynical, but I am not satisfied with simply deceiving you. It does indicate that more poetry was being written and published by a larger segment of the population...

 

Let’s try to find a less narrow selection… there is another link to poems written by prisoners of war- again, too narrow of a selection to represent a broad cross-section of the poetic population.

 

We do see the lack of WWII poetry issue arise again and again on other links…

 

Let's refine our search once last time to "Poets 20^th Century" and find those who experienced the war outside of the confinement the war's time period…

 

How about a relatively unknown… Alan Dugan
The short bio:
Alan Dugan's seven books of poems were entitled Poems. He was known as a poet of World War II, an “ironic and unsentimental” writer, a technical virtuoso whose work used all the varieties of contemporary vernacular & was often funny, focused on the details of quotidian life but always aware of death & metaphysics under the surface.

(note- ‘quotidian’- everyday, commonplace)

I think we have a winner if his thoughts are broad enough, and not overly focused on one or two aspects of the war...
 

Let’s search our own Oldpoetry for him… yes, there he is… now looking at the selection we can immediately see that, though he lived through the war (and actually served in it) he has not dwelt upon it, positively or negatively… in fact, it looks like it will be difficult finding a poem of his concerning the war… so we can draw a conclusion here- that people of the time considered the war unpleasant and necessary to get through, so normalcy in life (read ‘writing poetry’ here) could be returned to…

 

We will have to go beyond Oldpoetry, because there are only a handful of his poems here, and none mention war…

 

There is an NPR interview, but considering their leftist/anti-US slant we cannot trust it to be objective…

 

I can, however, draw certain conclusions on WWII Poets and Poetry without going any further:

Using Alan Dugan as a rule rather than an exception, I can see that the war did not impact the poets of the time- they lived through it, they served in it (as did Mr. Dugan), and they moved on in life. I see that my preconceptions about the era’s poetry being cynical or negative concerning the war were false, and were most likely shaped by current liberal ideologies supported by a lack of scruples about distorting history in the name of 'fresh', 'interesting', and controversial journalism, three things that are pushed today at the expense of balanced truth.