In historical order by date of publication, we offer this anthology for your wartime reading and reflection, and in remembrance of those who gave their lives in the many wars fought in human history. (With thanks to the members of the NewPoetry list who reminded us of some of the poems gathered here...)
- Li Po,
“Nefarious War” (c. 750) - William Shakespeare,
“St. Crispin’s Day speech,” from Henry V (1599) - William Blake,
“Prologue Intended for a Dramatic Piece of King Edward the Fourth” (1783)
- Alfred, Lord Tennyson,
“The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854) - Elizabeth Barrett Browning,
“Mother and Poet” (1862) - Herman Melville,
“Shiloh: A Requiem (April, 1862)” (1866) - Walt Whitman,
“The Artilleryman’s Vision” (1871) - Stephen Crane,
“War Is Kind” (1899) - Walt Whitman,
“Look Down, Fair Moon” and “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d” (1900) - Walt Whitman,
“Dirge for Two Veterans” (1900) - Thomas Hardy,
“In Time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’” and “The Man He Killed” (1915)
- Wilfrid Wilson Gibson,
“Comrades” and “Back” (1915)
- John McCrae,
“In Flanders Fields” (1915)
- Rupert Brooke,
“The Soldier” (1915)
- Amy Lowell,
“Patterns” (1916)
- Carl Sandburg,
“Iron” and “Grass” (1916 and 1918) - Wilfred Owen,
“Dulce et Decorum Est” (1917) - Wilfred Owen,
“Anthem for Doomed Youth” (1917) - Alan Seeger,
“I Have a Rendezvous with Death” (1917) - Robert Frost,
“Not to Keep” (1917) - Siegfried Sassoon,
“Aftermath” (1919) - Robert Graves,
“Country at War” (1920) - William Butler Yeats,
“On Being Asked for a War Poem” (1928) - Thomas McGrath,
from “Remembering That Island” (1972)
