05-16-2012, 07:47 AM
What follows is a piece I posted on my blog. See here for the blog post, which includes links to all the poetry. I am very much interested in what RAT people would have to say on this.
A colleague and friend who teaches English at the high school where I teach Latin gave a presentation today on poetry from World War I. It was brilliant and featured much history about various aspects of WWI warfare, on which my friend is something of an expert. Numerous pieces of poetry riveted me, including Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier," Siegfrid Sassoon's "Dreamers," and W.B. Yeats's "An Irish Airman Forsees His Death." Thumbing through his copy of The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, I was further struck by several poems of Wilfred Owen, including "Apologia Pro Poemate Meo," Dulce et Decorum Est," and "Mental Cases."
Among my thoughts as he led the students through these poems, showed them clips from the 1930 version of All Quiet on the Western Front, and passed around an Enfield rifle from the era, was why we have no poetry like this from antiquity. We have war poetry, of course. Homer, the founder of Western literature, wrote the most famous war poem of all time. Yet Homer's images of teeth clenching the bloody dust as brazen arms clatter to the ground, while graphic, are pure poetic metaphor. This is good stuff, mind you, but it is nothing, nothing like what you find in the poems cited above. Catullus writes more intimate stuff, but his poem 101 on the death of his brother, while poignant, is nothing so gritty as any of these, and his "Mentula" poems poke fun at a commanding officer who is an S.O.B., but again, this is a far cry from Owen and the others. The WWI pieces are intensely personal, immediate, tightly focused, real, gritty, and raw. There is no glory here.
So why did we not get anything like this from antiquity? My thoughts fall along a couple of lines posed as questions. Could it be that ancient warfare was not as horrific as the modern incarnation? I am Roman military re-enactor, so I know that there was plenty of horror on the ancient battlefield. We are all familiar with the centurion in the Roman army, who led the troops, but fewer people know that there was another officer, the optio, who pushed the men from behind as the natural tendency in battle is always away from danger and toward safety. Yet as my friend pointed out in his presentation, three men working a machine gun in WWI could take out 120 men in five minutes. Shrapnel offered grisly wounds. Could it be that the poetry changed along with the change in the horrors of war?
Or could it be that with wider-spread literacy and more accessible writing instruments, we are more likely to get poetry from the rank-and-file soldier's perspective? We know nothing of Homer, or if there even was a Homer, and Vergil certainly never picked up a shield and spear. Catullus himself alludes to the expense of writing materials in one of his poems, so it is unlikely an average legionary would write such poems.
Chances are, it is a combination of these and other reasons. Without question, this will change my teaching of Vergil and Catullus.
Comments I have already received on Facebook run as follows.
Insightful. Do you think it was an expectation in the ancient world to fight in such harsh conditions, and so it was unremarkable? The Vindolanda tablets are much more pedestrian (rank-and-file) than the other sources you mention, but I cannot recall anything about battle or war. Maybe it was the soldier's duty to fight and kill, and protect those back home from the harsh realities? Please correct any misconceptions I may have - ancient war is certainly NOT my forte!
Judging by the passage of time and the scarcity of known authors from antiquity... If there were any soldiers who wrote poetry or wrote of their accounts, wouldn't it have been incredibly difficult for their writings to one: be manifested into text, two: become published in some manner, or three: withstand the many hundreds of years that have passed since their time? Catullus and Vergil are two important Latin authors by more factors than we may realize, which may or may not discount the possibility of these 'soldier-authors' existences.
All of the above, but the literacy of the common soldier seems most likely. Also, the rise of postmodern philosophy and dehumanization of the way wars were fought may have also contributed. You could try looking back along war poetry's evolution and see if you can nail down when this shift in attitude changed.
A colleague and friend who teaches English at the high school where I teach Latin gave a presentation today on poetry from World War I. It was brilliant and featured much history about various aspects of WWI warfare, on which my friend is something of an expert. Numerous pieces of poetry riveted me, including Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier," Siegfrid Sassoon's "Dreamers," and W.B. Yeats's "An Irish Airman Forsees His Death." Thumbing through his copy of The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry, I was further struck by several poems of Wilfred Owen, including "Apologia Pro Poemate Meo," Dulce et Decorum Est," and "Mental Cases."
Among my thoughts as he led the students through these poems, showed them clips from the 1930 version of All Quiet on the Western Front, and passed around an Enfield rifle from the era, was why we have no poetry like this from antiquity. We have war poetry, of course. Homer, the founder of Western literature, wrote the most famous war poem of all time. Yet Homer's images of teeth clenching the bloody dust as brazen arms clatter to the ground, while graphic, are pure poetic metaphor. This is good stuff, mind you, but it is nothing, nothing like what you find in the poems cited above. Catullus writes more intimate stuff, but his poem 101 on the death of his brother, while poignant, is nothing so gritty as any of these, and his "Mentula" poems poke fun at a commanding officer who is an S.O.B., but again, this is a far cry from Owen and the others. The WWI pieces are intensely personal, immediate, tightly focused, real, gritty, and raw. There is no glory here.
So why did we not get anything like this from antiquity? My thoughts fall along a couple of lines posed as questions. Could it be that ancient warfare was not as horrific as the modern incarnation? I am Roman military re-enactor, so I know that there was plenty of horror on the ancient battlefield. We are all familiar with the centurion in the Roman army, who led the troops, but fewer people know that there was another officer, the optio, who pushed the men from behind as the natural tendency in battle is always away from danger and toward safety. Yet as my friend pointed out in his presentation, three men working a machine gun in WWI could take out 120 men in five minutes. Shrapnel offered grisly wounds. Could it be that the poetry changed along with the change in the horrors of war?
Or could it be that with wider-spread literacy and more accessible writing instruments, we are more likely to get poetry from the rank-and-file soldier's perspective? We know nothing of Homer, or if there even was a Homer, and Vergil certainly never picked up a shield and spear. Catullus himself alludes to the expense of writing materials in one of his poems, so it is unlikely an average legionary would write such poems.
Chances are, it is a combination of these and other reasons. Without question, this will change my teaching of Vergil and Catullus.
Comments I have already received on Facebook run as follows.
Insightful. Do you think it was an expectation in the ancient world to fight in such harsh conditions, and so it was unremarkable? The Vindolanda tablets are much more pedestrian (rank-and-file) than the other sources you mention, but I cannot recall anything about battle or war. Maybe it was the soldier's duty to fight and kill, and protect those back home from the harsh realities? Please correct any misconceptions I may have - ancient war is certainly NOT my forte!
Judging by the passage of time and the scarcity of known authors from antiquity... If there were any soldiers who wrote poetry or wrote of their accounts, wouldn't it have been incredibly difficult for their writings to one: be manifested into text, two: become published in some manner, or three: withstand the many hundreds of years that have passed since their time? Catullus and Vergil are two important Latin authors by more factors than we may realize, which may or may not discount the possibility of these 'soldier-authors' existences.
All of the above, but the literacy of the common soldier seems most likely. Also, the rise of postmodern philosophy and dehumanization of the way wars were fought may have also contributed. You could try looking back along war poetry's evolution and see if you can nail down when this shift in attitude changed.
