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This project is dedicated to poets who wrote about the experience of war. The object is to assemble war poets of all periods and nationalities, with a primary focus on conflicts since 1914 – mainly the First World War, Spanish War 1936-39, Second World War and Ireland.
Poets have written about the experience of war since the Greeks, but the young soldier poets of the First World War established war poetry as a literary genre. Their combined voice has become one of the defining texts of Twentieth Century Europe.
In 1914 hundreds of young men in uniform took to writing poetry as a way of expressing their emotions and experiences.
Although ‘war poet’ tends traditionally to refer to active combatants, war poetry has been written by many ‘civilians’ caught up in conflict in other ways: Cesar Vallejo and WH Auden in the Spanish Civil War, Margaret Postgate Cole and Rose Macaulay in the First World War, James Fenton in Cambodia.
War poetry is not necessarily ‘anti-war’. It is often about identity, innocence, guilt, loyalty, courage, compassion, humanity, duty, desire, death. Its response to these questions.
"War poetry is currently studied in every school in Britain. It has become part of the mythology of nationhood, and an expression of both historical consciousness and political conscience. The way we read – and perhaps revere – war poetry, says something about what we are, and what we want to be, as a nation." http://www.warpoets.org/
Please add the names of War Poets to to the list below. If the person has a profile on Geni please link them to the project and add their link in bold.
See also the following GENi projects
9 Poets of the First World War at Im,perial War Museum]
this project is in HistoryLink