Ms Ramorn

A War poet is a poet writing in time of and on the subject of war. The term, which is applied especially to those in military service during World War I,[1] was documented as early as 1848 in reference to German revolutionary poet,[2] Georg Herwegh.[3]
Crimean War

The 1854 publication of Charge of the Light Brigade allowed Alfred Tennyson to be classified a war poet,[4] and in 1900 MabelBirch enough published Wanted–a New War Poet: a Handful of Crimean War Poems.[5]

[edit] Anglo-Zulu War

Poet George Frederick Cameron wrote the libretto for Leo, the Royal Cadet, a light opera with music by Oscar Ferdinand Telgmann in 1889.[6] The work centres on Nellie's love for Leo, a cadet at the Royal Military College of Canada who becomes a hero serving during the Anglo-Zulu War in 1879between the British Empire and the Zulu Empire. The operetta focused on typical character types, events and concerns of Telgmann and Cameron's time.

[edit] American poets

In America Stephen Crane wrote poetry as well as prose after the American Civil War, an example being "War Is kind." [7]

Other American poets wrote about war during this time including Walt Whitman who wrote Dirge forTwo Veterans (1900) [8] and Look down Fair Moon, (1900).[9]

Robert Frost's "But not to keep" (1917) was written in the WWI period[10] and other notable poets include:
Herman Melville - Shiloh - A Requiem (1868) Thomas Hardy “In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations" & "The Man He Killed"(1915) Carl Sandburg 1916 & 1918 Elizabeth Barrett Browning "Mother & Poet" (1862)
[edit] WorldWar I


See also Category: World War I poets

It was in English poetry, such as that of Wilfred Owen, that the war poem became an established genre marker and attracted growing popular interest. At the time the term soldier poet was used, but then dropped out of favour. The evolution of the concept was linked to a distinction drawn between poets who were anti-war in attitude and those whowrote more traditional war poetry. What makes a war poet is not well-defined (compare, say, Brooke and Georg Trakl). The public may have seen war poems as reportage creating direct emotional links to the soldier.

Several poets writing in English were soldiers, and wrote about their experiences of war. A number of them died on active service, most famously Rupert Brooke, Edward Thomas, IsaacRosenberg, Wilfred Owen, and Charles Sorley. Others including Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon survived, but many were scarred by their experiences, reflected in their poetry.

Canadians contributed notable work; John McCrae wrote In Flanders Fields which is on the Canadian $10 bill. Robert W. Service worked as an ambulance driver for the Canadian Red Cross, as well as working as a warcorrespondent for the Canadian government. He wrote a number of poems about the war, many appearing in a new book, Rhymes of a Red Cross Man, in 1916.

Many poems by British war poets were published in newspapers and then collected into anthologies. Several of these early anthologies were published during the war and were very popular, though the tone of the poetry changed as the war progressed. One ofthe wartime anthologies was The Muse in Arms, published in 1917. Several anthologies were also published in the years after the war had ended.

In France the popular poet and song-writer Théodore Botrel was appointed as official "Bard of the armies" in 1915. According to the New York Times he was authorised by the Minister of War "to enter all military depots, camps and hospitals for the purposeof reciting and singing his patriotic poems.".[11] Calligrammes, subtitled Poems of war and peace 1913-1916, is a collection of poems by Guillaume Apollinaire published in 1918.

The Italians had their own war poetry, most notably that of Giuseppe Ungaretti.

According to Patrick Bridgwater in The German Poets of the First World War, the closest comparison to Owen would be Anton Schnack,...