05-16-2012, 05:20 PM
A couple of points to add to those above:
Firstly, the class thing is very important: to write poetry, you need not only the time and solitude to craft it but an immersion in the canon of past poetry - a creative education, in other words. The first world war was one of the first in which large numbers of civilians were called to fight on the front line; many of those civilians (like Sassoon, Owen, Brooke) were highly educated men, and many of them were already poets. They brought their poetry to the battlefield, rather than having it formed there (even if some, like Sassoon, became very different and much better poets in the process!).
There were Roman war poets - one Furius Bibaculus, an equestrian officer in Caesar's army, apparently wrote an epic on the Gallic wars, although only one fragmentary line remains today (something about somebody falling off a horse, I think...). Albinovanus Pedo was a cavalry commander in Germanicus's campaign of AD16, and also a poet - a section of his work is preserved in Seneca's Suasoriae, describing a nightmarish voyage into the North Sea - but it's the cosmic horror of the deep rather than the horror of war that moves Pedo. Both of these men (and there were many like them, no doubt) were educated aristocrats, and wrote in the accepted epic tradition.
Secondly, while Roman poetry had a broad spectrum, from epic to satire and smutty epigram, the sentiment of modern war poetry would have been quite alien to the Roman mind. This was a society that watched criminals being gored by wild animals for entertainment, after all. A lot of the horror in the modern war poets comes from an ideal of the sanctity of life and the fellowship of man, and the wanton demolition of that sanctity by industrialised carnage - not something, perhaps, the Romans would have recognised, or cared to admit if they did.
The nature of war has also changed, of course - while ancient battles were fought up close, with blood and wounds spectacularly visible, they were also comparatively brief. A lot of the horror of modern warfare - particularly the attritional trench warfare of 1914-18 - come from its impersonality and duration. The soldier is forced to endure scenes of massive violence and suffering, often while having to remain passive. Cause and effect breaks down. This creates, in turn, a feeling of unreality, and the assumption that those 'back home' will never understand what the soldier has experienced: that brilliantly angry Sassoon poem 'Blighters' expresses a sentiment that the Roman soldier, living his life in a military environment and unexposed to the patriotic hypocrisies of civilian life, could surely never have experienced.
A brief but interesting review article here, meanwhile, wonders whether the rise in post traumatic stress disorder is directly related to the use of explosives in war...
hock:
Firstly, the class thing is very important: to write poetry, you need not only the time and solitude to craft it but an immersion in the canon of past poetry - a creative education, in other words. The first world war was one of the first in which large numbers of civilians were called to fight on the front line; many of those civilians (like Sassoon, Owen, Brooke) were highly educated men, and many of them were already poets. They brought their poetry to the battlefield, rather than having it formed there (even if some, like Sassoon, became very different and much better poets in the process!).
There were Roman war poets - one Furius Bibaculus, an equestrian officer in Caesar's army, apparently wrote an epic on the Gallic wars, although only one fragmentary line remains today (something about somebody falling off a horse, I think...). Albinovanus Pedo was a cavalry commander in Germanicus's campaign of AD16, and also a poet - a section of his work is preserved in Seneca's Suasoriae, describing a nightmarish voyage into the North Sea - but it's the cosmic horror of the deep rather than the horror of war that moves Pedo. Both of these men (and there were many like them, no doubt) were educated aristocrats, and wrote in the accepted epic tradition.
Secondly, while Roman poetry had a broad spectrum, from epic to satire and smutty epigram, the sentiment of modern war poetry would have been quite alien to the Roman mind. This was a society that watched criminals being gored by wild animals for entertainment, after all. A lot of the horror in the modern war poets comes from an ideal of the sanctity of life and the fellowship of man, and the wanton demolition of that sanctity by industrialised carnage - not something, perhaps, the Romans would have recognised, or cared to admit if they did.
The nature of war has also changed, of course - while ancient battles were fought up close, with blood and wounds spectacularly visible, they were also comparatively brief. A lot of the horror of modern warfare - particularly the attritional trench warfare of 1914-18 - come from its impersonality and duration. The soldier is forced to endure scenes of massive violence and suffering, often while having to remain passive. Cause and effect breaks down. This creates, in turn, a feeling of unreality, and the assumption that those 'back home' will never understand what the soldier has experienced: that brilliantly angry Sassoon poem 'Blighters' expresses a sentiment that the Roman soldier, living his life in a military environment and unexposed to the patriotic hypocrisies of civilian life, could surely never have experienced.
A brief but interesting review article here, meanwhile, wonders whether the rise in post traumatic stress disorder is directly related to the use of explosives in war...
hock:
Nathan Ross
