Published poets wrote over two thousand poems about and during the war. However, only a small fraction still is known today, and several poets that were popular with contemporary readers are now obscure. From the war itself until the late 1970s, the genre of war poetry was almost exclusively reserved for male poets. This was based on an idea of an exclusive authenticity limited to the works of those who had fought and died in the war. It excluded other forms of experience in the war, such as mourning, nursing and the home front, which were more likely to be experienced by other demographics such as women. There were over 500 women writing and publishing poetry during World War I.
Austria-Hungary Géza Gyóni, a Hungarian poet with twin beliefs in
socialism and
anti-militarism, had unhappily served in the
Austro-Hungarian Army prior to the outbreak of war in 1914. In response, Gyóni had written the great
pacifist poem,
Cézar, én nem megyek ("Caesar, I Will Not Go"). According to Peter Sherwood, "Gyóni's first, still elated, poems from the Polish Front recall the 16th century Hungarian poet
Bálint Balassi's soldiers' songs of the marches, written during the campaign against
the Turks." During the
Siege of Przemyśl, Gyóni wrote poems to encourage the city's defenders and these verses were published there, under the title,
Lengyel mezőkön, tábortúz melett (
By Campfire on the Fields of Poland). A copy reached
Budapest by
aeroplane, which was an unusual feat in those days. According to Erika Papp Faber, "His leaning toward
Socialism and his anti-militarist attitude were, for a brief time, suspended, as he was caught up in the general patriotic fervor at the outbreak of World War I. But once he experienced the horrors of war first hand, he soon lost his romantic notions, and returned to the more radical positions of his youth, as it evident in his further volumes." One of his poems from this period,
Csak egy éjszakára (
For Just One Night) became a prominent
anti-war poem and its popularity has lasted well beyond the end of the First World War.
Georg Trakl, an
Expressionist poet from
Salzburg, enlisted in the
Austro-Hungarian Army as a
medical officer in 1914. He personally witnessed the
Battle of Gródek, fought in the
Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, in which the
Austro-Hungarian Army suffered a bloody defeat at the hands of the
Imperial Russian Army. Georg Trakl is best known for the poem
Grodek.
Franz Janowitz, a Jewish poet who wrote in German from
Podiebrad an der Elbe in the
Kingdom of Bohemia, had enlisted in the
Austro-Hungarian Army in 1913. On 4 November 1917, Janowitz died of wounds received at the
Battle of Caporetto. Two years after his death, a volume of Janowitz's war poems,
Aus der Erde und anderen Dichtungen ("Out of the Earth and Other Poems") was published in
Munich. The first complete collection of his poems, however, came out only in 1992. According to Jeremy Adler, "Franz Janowitz conflicts with the received idea of the best German war poets. Neither
realistic, nor ironic, nor properly
expressionistic, while he excoriated the battlefield that the whole world had become, he still preserved a Faith in nobility, innocence, and song. Forced into maturity by the war, his poetic voice never lost a certain childlike note – indeed, in some of his best poems, naivety and wisdom coexist to an almost paradoxical degree. Such poetry was fired by a vision of a transcendental realm that lay beyond conflict, but never sought to exclude death. His 25 years, the last four of which were spent in the Army, scarcely left him time to develop a wholly independent voice, but his work displays an increasing mastery of form and deepening of vision. His small
oeuvre consists of
Novellen, essays, aphorisms, and a handful of the best German poems connected with the Great War."
Germany 's sculpture
Mother with her Dead Son inside the
Neue Wache, which since 1931 has been Germany's
Tomb of the Unknown Soldier and national memorial to the fallen soldiers of the Great War, upon
Unter Den Linden in
Berlin.
August Stramm, who is considered the first of the
expressionists, has been called by
Jeremy Adler one of, "the most innovative poets of the
First World War." Stramm, Adler writes, treated, "language like a physical material" and, "honed down
syntax to its bare essentials." Citing Stramm's fondness for "fashioning new words out of old," Adler has also written that, "what
James Joyce did on a grand scale for English, Stramm achieved more modestly for German." Stramm's war poetry was first published by
Herwarth Walden in the
avant-garde literary journal Der Sturm and later appeared in the collection
Tropfenblut ("Dripping Blood"), which was published in 1919. According to Patrick Bridgwater, "While Stramm is known to have enjoyed his peacetime role of
reserve officer, he was too sensitive to have any illusions about the war, which he hated (for all the unholy fascination it held for him). On 12 January 1915, he wrote to Walden from the
Western Front, 'I stand like a cramp, unsteady, without a foundation, without a brace, anchored, and numb in the grimace of my will and stubbornness,' and a few months later he wrote to his wife from
Galicia that everything was so dreadful, so unspeakably dreadful. Thus while he was always absolutely sure where his duty lay, he did not write a single
chauvinistic war poem even at the time when nearly everybody else in Germany – or so it seemed – was doing so. Nor did he write overtly
anti-war poems, which his conscience would not have allowed him to do. In retrospect it seems extraordinary that the poem
Feuertaufe ("Baptism by Fire") should have caused a scandal in the German press in 1915, for its only conceivable fault is its utter honesty, its attempt to convey the feeling of coming under enemy fire for the first time and its implicit refusal to pretend that the feeling in question was one of heroic excitement."
Gerrit Engelke is best known for his
anti-war poem
An die Soldaten Des Grossen Krieges ("To the Soldiers of the Great War"), a poem in
rhymed
dactylic hexameter modeled after the Neo-Classical odes of
Friedrich Hölderlin. In the ode, Engelke urges the soldiers of all the combatant nations to join hands together in universal brotherhood. An English translation exists by Patrick Bridgwater.
Walter Flex, who is best known as the author of the war poem
Wildgänse rauschen durch die Nacht and the novella
Der Wanderer zwischen Beiden Welten, was a native of
Eisenach, in the
Grand Duchy of
Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, and had attended the
University of Erlangen. At the outbreak of the war, Flex was working as a private tutor to a family from the
German nobility. Despite weak ligaments in his right hand, Flex immediately volunteered for the
Imperial German Army. Owing to Flex's idealism about the Great War, the posthumous popularity of his writing, and the iconic status that was attached to his wartime death, he is now considered Germany's answer to Allied war poets
Rupert Brooke and
Alan Seeger.
Yvan Goll, a
Jewish poet from
Sankt Didel, in the disputed territory of
Alsace-Lorraine, wrote bilingually in both German and French. At the outbreak of war in 1914, Goll fled to
Zürich, in neutral
Switzerland, to evade
conscription into the
Imperial German Army. While there, he wrote many
anti-war poems, in which he sought to promote better understanding between Germany and France. His most famous war poem is
Requiem. Für die Gefallenen von Europa (
Requiem for the Dead of Europe).
Stefan George, a German poet who had done his literary apprenticeship with the French
Symbolist poets during the
Belle Époque in Paris, still had many friends in France and viewed the Great War as disastrous. In his 1916
anti-war poem
Der Krieg ("The War"), George attacked the horrors that soldiers of all nations were facing in the trenches. In the poem, George famously declared,
"Der alte Gott der schlachten ist nicht mehr." ("The ancient god of battles is no more.") In his 1921 collection
Drei Gesänge, George returned to the same subject matter in his poems,
An die Toten ("To the Dead"),
Der Dichter in Zeiten der Wirren ("The Poet in Times of Chaos"), and
Einen jungen Führer im Ersten Weltkrieg ("To a Young Officer of the First World War").
Reinhard Sorge, the
Kleist Prize winning author of the
Expressionist play
Der Bettler, saw the coming of the war as an idealistic recent convert to the
Roman Catholic Church. Sorge wrote many poems, many of which are in the experimental forms pioneered by
August Stramm and
Herwarth Walden, about both his Catholic Faith and what he was witnessing as a soldier with the
Imperial German Army in France. Four days before being
mortally wounded by grenade fragments during the
Battle of the Somme, Sorge wrote to his wife expressing a belief that what he called, "the Anglo-French Offensive" was going to succeed in overrunning German defenses. Sorge died in a
field hospital at
Ablaincourt on 20 July 1916. Susanne Sorge only learned of his death when a letter, in which she informed her husband that she had been pregnant with their second son since his most recent
furlough, was returned to her as undeliverable. In 1920, German poet
Anton Schnack, whom Patrick Bridgwater has dubbed, "one of the two unambiguously great," German poets of
World War I and, "the only German language poet whose work can be compared with that of
Wilfred Owen," published the
sonnet sequence,
Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier ("Beast Strove Mightily with Beast"). The 60 sonnets that comprise
Tier rang gewaltig mit Tier, "are dominated by themes of night and death." Although his ABBACDDCEFGEFG rhyme scheme is typical of the
sonnet form, Schnack also, "writes in the long line in free rhythms developed in Germany by
Ernst Stadler," According to Ian Higgins, "It has been suggested that here at last was the great adventure he had been longing for. Certainly, the prelude to the war 'interested' him, and he was keen to witness and, if possible, take part in a war which was probably going to 'set the whole of Europe on fire.' His
Lettres de guerre develop movingly from initial enthusiasm for the defense of Civilization and a conviction that the enemy was the entire
German people, through a growing irritation with
chauvinistic brainwashing and the flagrancy of what would now be called the 'disinformation' peddled through the French press (so much more heavily censored than the British, he said), to an eventual admiration, at the front, for the heroism and humanity often shown by the enemy." Kalloc'h's last work was the poetry collection,
Ar en Deulin, which was published posthumously. According to Jelle Krol, "It is not merely a collection of poems by a major Breton poet: it is a symbol of homage to Yann-Ber Kalloc'h and all those
Bretons whose creative powers were cut short by their untimely deaths.
Breton literature from the trenches is very rare. Only Yann-Ber Kalloc'h's poems, some war notes written by
Auguste Bocher, the memoirs recounted by
Ambroise Harel and
Loeiz Herrieu's letters addressed to his wife survived the war."
Russia ,
Anna Akhmatova and their son
Lev Gumilev, in 1913 Russia also produced a number of significant war poets including
Alexander Blok,
Ilya Ehrenburg (who published war poems in his book "On the Eve"), and
Nikolay Semenovich Tikhonov (who published the book
Orda (The Horde) in 1922). The
Acmeist poet
Nikolay Gumilyov served in the
Imperial Russian Army during World War I. He saw combat in
East Prussia, the
Macedonian front, and with the
Russian Expeditionary Force in France. He was also decorated twice with the
Cross of St. George. Gumilyov's war poems were assembled in the collection
The Quiver (1916). Gumilyov's wife, the poet
Anna Akhmatova, began writing poems during World War I that expressed the collective suffering of the
Russian people as men were called up and the women in their lives bade them goodbye. For Akhmatova, writing such poems turned into her life's work and she continued writing similar poems about the suffering of the Russian people during the
Bolshevik Revolution, the
Russian Civil War, the
Red Terror, and
Joseph Stalin's
Great Purge.
Australia Leon Gellert, an Australian poet of
Hungarian descent, enlisted in the
First Australian Imperial Force's 10th Battalion within weeks of the outbreak of war and sailed for
Cairo on 22 October 1914. He landed at
ANZAC Cove, during the
Gallipoli Campaign on 25 April 1915, was wounded and repatriated as medically unfit in June 1916. He attempted to re-enlist but was soon found out. During periods of inactivity he had been indulging his appetite for writing poetry.
Songs of a Campaign (1917) was his first published book of verse, and was favourably reviewed by
The Bulletin.
Angus & Robertson soon published a new edition, illustrated by
Norman Lindsay. His second,
The Isle of San (1919), also illustrated by Lindsay, was not so well received.
John O'Donnell served in the
Australian Imperial Force during World War I. He arrived at
Gallipoli on 25 April 1915 and later fought at the
Battle of the Somme. In 1918 he was invalided back to Australia, during which time he wrote the last six poems of his only poetry collection, dealing with the war from the perspective of an Australian poet.
Canada (1872–1918)
John McCrae, a
Scottish-Canadian poet and surgeon from
Guelph, Ontario, joined the
Canadian Expeditionary Force and was appointed as medical officer and major of the 1st Brigade CFA (
Canadian Field Artillery). He treated the wounded during the
Second Battle of Ypres in 1915, from a hastily dug, bunker dug in the back of the dyke along the Yser Canal about 2 miles north of Ypres. McCrae's friend and former militia pal, Lt.
Alexis Helmer, was killed in the battle, and his burial inspired the poem,
In Flanders Fields, which was written on 3 May 1915, and first published in the magazine
Punch.
In Flanders Fields appeared anonymously in
Punch on 8 December 1915, but in the index, to that year McCrae was named as the author. The verses swiftly became one of the most popular poems of the war, used in countless fund-raising campaigns and frequently translated. "In Flanders Fields" was also extensively printed in the United States, whose government was contemplating joining the war, alongside a 'reply' by
R. W. Lillard, ("...Fear not that you have died for naught, / The torch ye threw to us we caught...").
Robert W. Service, an
English-Canadian poet from
Preston, Lancashire and who had already been dubbed, "The Canadian
Kipling", was living in Paris when
World War I broke out. Service was a
war correspondent for the
Toronto Star, but "was arrested and nearly executed in an outbreak of spy hysteria in
Dunkirk." He then "worked as a
stretcher bearer and
ambulance driver with the Ambulance Corps of the
American Red Cross, until his health broke." While recuperating in Paris, Service wrote a volume of war poems,
Rhymes of a Red-Cross Man, which was published in
Toronto in 1916. The book was dedicated to the memory of Service's "brother, Lieutenant Albert Service, Canadian Infantry, Killed in Action, France, August 1916." In 1926,
Archibald MacMechan, professor of English at
Dalhousie University in
Halifax, Nova Scotia, published
Headwaters of Canadian Literature, in which he praised Service's war poetry, writing, "his
Rhymes of a Red Cross Man are an advance on his previous volumes. He has come into touch with the grimmest of realities; and while his radical faults have not been cured, his rude lines drive home the truth that he has seen." In 1924, a poetic tribute to the
Canadian Corps soldiers of the
85th Battalion (Nova Scotia Highlanders) was composed in
Canadian Gaelic by Alasdair MacÌosaig of
St. Andrew's Channel,
Cape Breton,
Nova Scotia. The poem praised the courage of the Battalion's fallen Canadian
Gaels and told them that they had fought better against the
Imperial German Army than the
English did, while also lamenting the absence of fallen soldiers from their families and villages. The poem ended by denouncing the
invasion of Belgium and vowing, even though
Kaiser Wilhelm II had managed to evade prosecution by being granted
political asylum in the neutral
Netherlands, that he would one day be tried and
hanged. The poem was first published in the
Antigonish-based newspaper
The Casket on 14 February 1924.
England The major novelist and poet
Thomas Hardy wrote a number of significant war poems that relate to the
Napoleonic Wars, the Boer Wars and
World War I, including "Drummer Hodge", "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations", "The Man He Killed" and ‘"And there was a great calm" (on the signing of the Armistice, Nov.11, 1918)’: his work had a profound influence on other war poets such as
Rupert Brooke and
Siegfried Sassoon. Hardy in these poems often used the viewpoint of ordinary soldiers and their colloquial speech. At the beginning of World War I, like many other writers, Kipling wrote pamphlets and poems which enthusiastically supported the British war aims of restoring Belgium after that kingdom had been occupied by Germany together with more generalised statements that Britain was standing up for the cause of good. For the first time, a substantial number of important British poets were soldiers, writing about their experiences of war. A number of them died on the battlefield, most famously
Edward Thomas,
Isaac Rosenberg,
Wilfred Owen, and
Charles Sorley. Others including
Robert Graves,
Ivor Gurney and Siegfried Sassoon survived but were scarred by their experiences, and this was reflected in their poetry. Robert H. Ross describes the British "war poets" as
Georgian poets. Many poems by British war poets were published in newspapers and then collected in 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 of the wartime anthologies,
The Muse in Arms, was published in 1917, and several were published in the years following the war.
David Jones'
epic poem of World War I
In Parenthesis was first published in England in 1937, and is based on Jones's own experience as an infantryman in the War.
In Parenthesis narrates the experiences of English Private John Ball in a mixed English-Welsh regiment starting with their leaving England and ending seven months later with the assault on
Mametz Wood during the
Battle of the Somme. The work employs a mixture of lyrical verse and prose, is highly allusive, and ranges in tone from formal to
Cockney colloquial and military slang. The poem won the
Hawthornden Prize and the admiration of writers such as
W. B. Yeats and
T. S. Eliot. In November 1985, a slate memorial was unveiled in
Poet's Corner commemorating 16 poets of the Great War:
Richard Aldington,
Laurence Binyon,
Edmund Blunden,
Rupert Brooke,
Wilfrid Gibson,
Robert Graves,
Julian Grenfell,
Ivor Gurney,
David Jones,
Robert Nichols,
Wilfred Owen,
Herbert Read,
Isaac Rosenberg,
Siegfried Sassoon,
Charles Sorley and
Edward Thomas.
Ireland , Dublin. The fact that 49,400 Irish soldiers in the
British Army gave their lives fighting in the Great War remains controversial in Ireland. This is because the
Easter Rising of 1916 took place during the war and the
Irish War of Independence began only a few months after the
11 November Armistice. For this reason,
Irish republicanism has traditionally viewed Irishmen who serve in the
British military as traitors. This view became even more prevalent after 1949, when Ireland voted to become a
Republic and to leave the
Commonwealth. For this reason, Ireland's war poets were long neglected. , Dublin, Ireland One of them was
Tom Kettle. Despite his outrage over the
Rape of Belgium, Kettle was very critical of the war at first. Comparing the
Anglo-Irish landlord class to the
aristocratic big estate owners who similarly dominated the
Kingdom of Prussia, Kettle wrote, "England goes to fight for
liberty in Europe and for
Junkerdom in Ireland."
G. K. Chesterton later wrote, "
Thomas Michael Kettle was perhaps the greatest example of that greatness of spirit which was so ill rewarded on both sides of
the channel [...] He was a
wit, a scholar, an orator, a man ambitious in all the arts of peace; and he fell fighting the
barbarians because he was too good a European to use the barbarians against England, as England a hundred years before has used the barbarians against Ireland." Lieut. Kettle's best-known poem is a
sonnet,
To My Daughter Betty, the Gift of God, which was written and mailed to his family just days before he was
killed in action. When
Francis Ledwidge, who was a member of the
Irish Volunteers in
Slane, County Meath, learned of the outbreak of the war, he decided against enlisting in the
British Army. In response, the Unionist
National Volunteers subjected Ledwidge to a
show trial, during which they accused him of
cowardice and of being
pro-German. Until his death at the
Battle of Passchendaele in 1917, Ledwidge wrote the verses published in three volumes of poetry between 1916 and 1918, while he served at the
Landing at Suvla Bay, on the
Macedonian front and on the
Western Front. Yeats changed the poem's title from "To a friend who has asked me to sign his manifesto to the neutral nations" to "A Reason for Keeping Silent" before sending it in a letter to James, which Yeats wrote at
Coole Park on 20 August 1915. When it was later reprinted the title was changed to "On being asked for a War Poem". Yeats' most famous war poem is
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death, which is a
soliloquy by
Major Robert Gregory, an
Irish nationalist flying ace who was also a friend of Yeats, and the son of
Anglo-Irish landlord Sir
William Henry Gregory and Yeats' patroness Lady
Augusta Gregory. Wishing to show restraint from publishing a political poem during the height of the Great War, Yeats withheld publication of
An Irish Airman Foresees His Death until after the 1918
Armistice. at the
Island of Ireland Peace Park, near the WWI battlefield at
Messines Ridge, Belgium. "
The Second Coming" is a poem written by Irish poet W. B. Yeats in 1919, in the aftermath of the First World War and at the beginning of the
Irish War of Independence, which followed the
Easter Rising of 1916, but before
David Lloyd George and
Winston Churchill sent the
Black and Tans to Ireland. The poem uses Christian imagery regarding the
Apocalypse, the
Antichrist, and the
Second Coming to
allegorise the state of Europe during the
Interwar Period.
Scotland , Edinburgh. Even though its author died in 1905, Ronald Black has written that Fr.
Allan MacDonald's
Aisling poem
Ceum nam Mìltean ("The March of Thousands"), which describes a vision of legions of young men marching away to a conflict from whence they will not return, deserves to be, "first in any anthology of the poetry of the
First World War", and, "would not have been in any way out of place, with regard to style or substance", in
Sorley MacLean's groundbreaking 1943 volume
Dàin do Eimhir. In 1914,
Scottish poet
Charles Sorley, a native of
Aberdeen, was living in
Imperial Germany. After being briefly interned as an
enemy alien at
Trier and ordered to leave the country, Sorley returned to Great Britain and enlisted in the
Suffolk Regiment as a lieutenant. He was killed by a German
sniper during the
Battle of Loos in 1915 and his poems and letters were published posthumously.
Robert Graves described Charles Sorley in
Goodbye to All That as "one of the three poets of importance killed during the war". (The other two being
Isaac Rosenberg and
Wilfred Owen.) Sorley believed that Germans and British were equally blind to each other's humanity and his
anti-war poetry stands in direct contrast to the romantic idealism about the war that appears in the poems of
Rupert Brooke,
Walter Flex, and
Alan Seeger. The
Scottish Gaelic poet
John Munro, a native of
Swordale on the
Isle of Lewis, won the
Military Cross while serving as a
2nd Lieutenant with the
Seaforth Highlanders and was ultimately
killed in action during the
1918 Spring Offensive. Lt. Munro, writing under the pseudonym
Iain Rothach, came to be ranked by critics alongside the major war poets. Tragically, only three of his poems are known to survive. They are
Ar Tir ("Our Land"),
Ar Gaisgich a Thuit sna Blàir ("Our Heroes Who Fell in Battle"), and
Air sgàth nan sonn ("For the Sake of the Warriors").
Derick Thomson – the venerable poet and Professor of Celtic Studies at
Glasgow – hailed Munro as, "the first strong voice of the new Gaelic verse of the 20th century". Ronald Black has written that Munro's three poems leave behind, "his thoughts on his fallen comrades in tortured
free verse full of
reminiscence-of-rhyme; forty more years were to pass before free verse became widespread in Gaelic."
Pàdraig Moireasdan, a
Scottish Gaelic bard and
seanchaidh from
Grimsay,
North Uist, served in the
Lovat Scouts during World War I. He served in the
Gallipoli Campaign, in the
Macedonian front, and on the Western Front. In later years, Moireasdan, who ultimately reached the rank of
corporal, loved to tell how he fed countless starving Allied soldiers in
Thessalonica by making a
Quern-stone. Corporal Moireasdan composed many poems and songs during the war, including
Òran don Chogadh (A Song to the War"), which he composed while serving at Gallipoli. In 1969,
Gairm, a publishing house based in
Glasgow and specializing in
Scottish Gaelic literature, posthumously published the first book of collected poems by
Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna. The poet, who had died two years previously in the hospital at
Lochmaddy on the island of
North Uist, was a combat veteran of the
King's Own Cameron Highlanders during World War I and highly talented poet in Gaelic. According to Ronald Black, "Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna is the outstanding Gaelic poet of the trenches. His best-known song
An Eala Bhàn ("The White Swan") was produced there for home consumption, but in a remarkable series of ten other compositions he describes what it looked, felt, sounded and even smelt like to march up to the front, to lie awake on the eve of battle, to go
over the top,
to be gassed, to wear a
mask, to be surrounded by the dead and dying remains of Gaelic-speaking comrades, and so on. Others of his compositions contain scenes of
deer hunting, a symbolically traditional pursuit of which he happened to be passionately fond, and which he continued to practice all his life." The war particularly left
Welsh non-conformist chapels deeply divided. Traditionally, the Nonconformists had not been comfortable at all with the idea of warfare. The war saw a major clash within Welsh Nonconformism between those who backed military service and those who adopted
Christian pacifism. in his home village of
Trawsfynydd. The most famous
Welsh-language war poet remains Private
Ellis Humphrey Evans of the
Royal Welch Fusiliers, who is best known under his
bardic name of
Hedd Wyn. Evans wrote much of his poetry while working as a
shepherd on his family's hill farm. His style, which was influenced by
romantic poetry, was dominated by themes of nature and religion. He also wrote several war poems following the outbreak of war on the
Western Front in 1914. Like many other Welsh nonconformists, Hedd Wyn was a
Christian pacifist and refused to enlist in the armed forces, feeling that he could never kill anyone. The war, however, inspired some of Hedd Wyn's most noted poems, including
Plant Trawsfynydd ("Children of Trawsfynydd"),
Y Blotyn Du ("The Black Dot"), and
Nid â’n Ango ("[It] Will Not Be Forgotten"). His poem,
Rhyfel ("War"), remains one of his most frequently quoted works.
Albert Evans-Jones, a Welsh poet, served on the
Salonica front and on the
Western Front as a
RAMC ambulance man and later as a
military chaplain. After the war, he became a minister for the
Presbyterian Church of Wales and wrote many poems that shocked the Welsh population with their graphic descriptions of the horrors of the trenches and their savage attacks on wartime
ultra-nationalism. Also, in his work as Archdruid of the National Eisteddfod, Rev. Evans-Jones altered the traditional rituals, which were based in 18th century
Celtic neopaganism, to better reflect the Christian beliefs of the
Welsh people. Rev. Evans-Jones, whom
Alan Llwyd considers the greatest Welsh poet of the Great War, is best known under the
bardic name of
Cynan. Welsh poet Alan Llwyd's English translations of many poems by both poets appear in the volume
Out of the Fire of Hell; Welsh Experience of the Great War 1914–1918 in Prose and Verse.
United States , Argonne Forest, France. Although
World War I in
American literature is widely believed to begin and end with
Ernest Hemingway's
war novel A Farewell to Arms, there were also American war poets.
Alan Seeger enlisted in the
French Foreign Legion while America was still neutral and became the first great American poet of the First World War. Seeger's poems, which passionately urged the
American people to join the Allied cause, were widely publicized and remained popular. According to former
First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, decades after Alan Seeger's death, his poem
I Have a Rendezvous with Death, was a great favorite of her husband, U.S. President
John Fitzgerald Kennedy, who often asked her to read it aloud to him. , c. 1918
Joyce Kilmer, who was widely considered America's leading
Roman Catholic poet and apologist and who was often compared to
G.K. Chesterton and
Hilaire Belloc, enlisted mere days after the United States entered World War I. Before his departure, Kilmer had contracted with publishers to write a book about the war, deciding upon the title
Here and There with the Fighting Sixty-Ninth. Kilmer never completed the book; however, toward the end of the year, he did find time to write prose sketches and war poetry. The most famous of Kilmer's war poems is "
Rouge Bouquet" (1918) which commemorates the victims of a German artillery barrage against American trenches in the
Rouge Bouquet forest, near
Baccarat, on the afternoon of 7 March 1918. According to
Dana Gioia, however, "None of Kilmer's wartime verses are read today; his reputation survives on poems written before he enlisted." The collection, which is written in an experimental form truly unique in the 800-year history of the
sonnet, traces Wyeth's service as a
2nd Lieutenant and
military intelligence officer. Although ''This Man's Army'' was highly praised by American
literary critics, with the onset of the
Great Depression, Wyeth's poetry was forgotten. According to B.J. Omanson and
Dana Gioia, who rescued Wyeth's poetry from oblivion during the early 21st century, Wyeth is the only American poet of the First World War who can withstand comparison with English war poets
Siegfried Sassoon,
Isaac Rosenberg, and
Wilfred Owen. B.J. Omanson has also found that every event that Wyeth relates in his sonnets, down to the way he describes the weather, can be verified by other eyewitness accounts as completely accurate. In response to the 2008 re-publication of ''The Man's Army
, British literary critic Jon Stallworthy, the editor of The Oxford Book of War Poetry'' and the biographer of
Wilfred Owen, wrote, "At long last, marking the ninetieth anniversary of the
Armistice, an American poet takes his place in the front rank of the War Poet's parade." Inspired by Canadian poet
John McCrae's famous poem
In Flanders Fields, American poet
Moina Michael resolved at
the war's conclusion in 1918 to wear a
red poppy year-round to honour the millions of soldiers who had died in the Great War. She also wrote a poem in response called
We Shall Keep the Faith. on a U.S. postage stamp. Michael first proposed using poppies as a symbol of remembrance. ==Russian Civil War==