THE WAR IN VERSE

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 338, 25 April 1928, Page 16

THE WAR IN VERSE

MOST RELIABLE HISTORIAN HOPES AND, ILLUSIONS OF 1914-18 “A peace made by the poets would be more enduring than a peace made by soldiers and politicians,” said Mr. J. A. Lee, M.P. for Auckland East, last evening, when lecturing to an audience in St. Andrew’s Hall on the poetry of the war. and explaining the phases through which the war poets passed. Poetry he considered to be the most reliable historian of the. war, because it comprised a record of intense and sincere feeling written in the hot blood of inspiration. Mr. Lee divided his anthology into two parts, the years 1914-15, when the established poets sang of the romantic side of war, and the years 1916-18, which he classed as the period of the “disillusioned civilian.” After Kipling had stirred the nation in 1914 with his call to arms, Rupert Brooke penned that wonderful thought, “Who dies fighting has increase of life,”. Alan Seeger died singing, “I’ve a rendezvous with death,” and John McCrae wrote his beautiful “In Flanders’ Fields.” Later the poet forsook his verses singing of the romance of war. No longer was he concerned with the causes of the war; he was too appalled at the immensity of the sacrifice. He saw nothing pretty about it, no flying banners and prancing chargers, not even the survival of the fittest. They saw the horror of the battlefields, the stark reality. There were scores of wonderfully expressive lines like those of Studdart Kennedy (known familiarly in the trenches as Woodbine Willy). Marriot Watson and Leon Gellert were other realistic poets of the war, the latter writing those dramatic verses, “Shuffle the Pack,” and “The Gesture of the Trench.” And yet, while the men who wrote these fought in the trenches and died, leaving their souls’ outpourings to posterity, those who did not fight cried aloud for more blood sacrifices on the altar of Mars. In October, 1918, on the eve of the Armistice, Kipling penned his “Justice.” “If we have parley with the foe, the load our sons must bear.”