MOTION: Well, Sassoon is one of the best two or three known poets of the First World War. SIMON: Let me ask you to read a Siegfried Sassoon's poem, 'The General.'

And by the time that you get to Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Ivor Gurney and others writing in the second half of the First World War, that note of dissent is absolutely unignorable. You can even hear, I think, in one of the most famous war poems of all time, Tennyson's poem on 'The Charge Of The Light Brigade,' in its admission that someone had blundered, that there is some sort of fault line opening between the - how people are expected to respond on the homefront and what it's actually like up there on the front. And that remains more or less constant - I mean, with variations being played on that as a theme for centuries, honestly.īut as we come up to the beginning of the 20th century, the end of the 19th century, certain dissenting voices start to make themselves heard. And very often, that celebration of individual male valor is intended to combine with some sort of national or nationalistic impulse to defend the homeland, in other words, in some way or other. MOTION: Well, I think mainly what you see is a significant change in attitude over the centuries, I must say, because the poems written are very largely celebrations of male valor. SIMON: Across all these different civilizations and epochs and time and experiences in this book, what are some of the recurrent themes you see in war poetry? Thanks so much for being with us.ĪNDREW MOTION: It's my great pleasure. He joins us from Baltimore, where he's the Homewood Professor of Arts at Johns Hopkins University. 'The Folio Book Of War Poetry' is edited by Sir Andrew Motion, the former poet laureate of the United Kingdom. For in the morning, you went out to battle. They died in the moors and were not buried.

As a first-century poem from China puts it, they fought south of the ramparts. The new 'Folio Book Of War Poetry' is a collection of works by great poets that depict - as maybe only poetry can - the losses and valor that can be borne by veterans throughout history. Veterans Day is next Thursday, November 11.

Legacy battle pack for honor