War Poetry - Chelsea

Though poetry can be perceived as a form of art that brings beauty and happiness to our world, James Logenbach has said about war poetry that “no poem stands apart in happy oblivion.” War poetry is an interesting category of poetry that is defined as poetry that deals specifically with war. However, a common question that might arise in response to this definition is how do we define war? Though one could argue that war can be defined by the numerous conflicts observed from day to day, such as the warring emotions that can exist in an individual, or the warring ideas of separate institutions, the war that war poetry deals with is most typically the violent conflict of combat between two opposing sides.

However, war poetry itself does not have to dwell on the specificities of this definition and only comment on battle at the front lines or a specific war. War poetry deals with war in a more complex way than simply observing what can be seen (that is typically what we have the History Channel for). War poetry commonly deals with the emotion that is aroused as a response to the war itself. Whether it speaks directly about a specific war or battle, about the action of the war, or the aftermath of the war, or the impact of the war, war poetry does exactly what it sounds like it does-- speaks about warfare.

In class, we were exposed to various examples of war poetry that all had distinct characteristics responsible for qualifying them as “war poems.” Turner’s “Here, Bullet,” is a personal response to the act of getting shot in combat. The speakers speaks directly to the bullet as it careens through his body and takes his life. The poem can be interpreted as a zoomed-in view of war as a physical conflict that occurs within the human body between the bullet, and the flesh and bones of the human.

“Sunday Morning,” by Steven Wallace is also a war poem, but in a much more indirect manner. At first, it may not be obvious that the poem is talking about war, but through some allusions and metaphors that are more complex and obscure than the content of “Here, Bullet,” we could see that in fact, Wallace’s poem was a war poem because it was reacting to World War I. Wallace’s approach to the war he dealt with was to comment on the nature of life and death and the afterlife as an emotional response to the impact of the war. He questions what comes after death, and says that death and life are a part of the circle of life, and there is beauty in death.

DJ Renegade responds directly to Steven Wallace’s statement of “death [being] the mother of beauty” in his poem “Monday Morning.” DJ Renegade’s poem speaks about violence and death, and responds to Wallace’s war poem, but “Monday Morning” is a war poem because it comments on differing attitudes towards the idea of unnatural death, which is a consequence of war. The speaker in “Monday Morning” questions Wallace’s belief that there can be beauty in death because he (the speaker of “Monday Morning”) has seen the death of a loved one firsthand. Though the death he has experienced was not necessarily death due to war (although it very well could have been a product of a gang war), it was a death not caused by natural causes, life taken away from an individual by another individual, and in “Monday Morning,” the speaker claims it is the attitude that there can be beauty extracted from the act of murder that brought about the atomic warfare of Vietnam.

Classifying a genre of poetry as “war poetry” may seem like a very specific corner of poetry, however, as demonstrated by the poems we read in class, there are still many different ways in which a poem can be considered a war poem because there are many different ways individuals choose to deal with war. Because war can be such a complex notion to understand, war poetry lends itself to the emotional responses of individuals who are coping with the impact of war, whether the poems aim to resolve a conflict, or just express and release an emotion.