For Remembrance: Soldier Poets who have Fallen in the War

For Remembrance: Soldier Poets who have Fallen in the War

by A. St. John Adcock

 

‘No Hymn of Hate is among them, no glorification of slaughter, no note of boastfulness or blatancy, but a deep love of country, a clear, rational sense of the tragedy and dire necessity of what must be done...’

 


Published in 1918, this book is a biographical collection of war poems written by soldiers who lost their lives serving their country on the Western Front during the Great War.

Written tenderly and with a surfeit of emotion, Arthur St. John Adcock, a skilled anthologist, takes Chaucer and Pope as evidence that English poets have always discussed warfare and conflict.

Some of the soldiers who perished were scholarly, who had been to good public schools and the great universities to learn discipline and the arts, and combined them in their texts. Many others were less educated, and experimented for the first time, leaving behind raw emotion unencumbered by rhetorical flourishes.

Poets whose names have lasted the ages feature, such as Rupert Brooke, among forty or so men who wrote of various subjects while on the front. Sometimes they recalled happier times, while at others they documented the grim realities of war.

The natural world, the danger of weapons and the sense of honour and patriotism all come through in the verses quoted in the book, the lives of whose writers gives a context to already powerful text.

We have an anthology here from men who did not live to see their words inside it which, a hundred year after Armistice, remains a glorious tribute to the words of the fallen.

Arthur St. John Adcock (17 January 1864 – 9 June 1930), was a journalist, novelist and poet whose books included Songs of the War, Love in London and The Booklover’s London.

 

 

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