 | | Gassed by John Singer Sargent The collection of Stanford University |
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Starting with Homer, most poetry has been pro-war, nationalistic, a great recruiting tool.
(Yet another reason to love Shakespeare: see Troilus and Cressida).
Over time, poems in praise of valour and heroism have gotten a lot of young people killed.
Before the twentieth century, poetry didn't do enough to contest the values of society.
In Western society at least, the past 100 years have proven different. Maybe it starts a little earlier, with Whitman and his observations of the Civil War dead. But the "non-sense" of war seems to have been a particularly twentieth century perception. I worry we might be drifting back to an atmosphere of "just wars" again.
Poetry isn't any "purer" than anything else. Some really lousy human initiatives (colonialism, Fascism, various final solutions) have been praised in poetry. So it should not be set apart as having some kind of superior status. (Stephen Colbert in conversation with Jackson Browne: "Just because it rhymes, Jackson, doesn't mean it's true.")
Many people in my generation see war as an antiquated idea. I wish that were true. It
isn't yet.
Poetry spent a long time valorizing the "heroic." It set the standard. It reinforced the standard. It was, often, the missionary arm of the military.
Ideas about heroism, manliness, manhood are changing. When it comes to war, the gap between idealism and reality is often wide.
As a solution to human problems, war is a truly bad idea. But our psychic evolution is
slow, and we may be living with war for a long while yet. Poets need to look at war with an objective eye, unswayed by nationalistic feeling or inappropriate sentiment.
