What Is War Poetry—and When is a War Poem an Antiwar Poem?
A conversation between our Poetry Editor, Dr. Katherine Hollander, and poet and scholar, Dr. Larry Rosenwald, that focuses on antiwar literature and peace movements.
Editor’s Note: I conducted this interview with the scholar Lawrence Rosenwald in the summer of 2022, when the Russian invasion of Ukraine was not yet a year old, and the new war in Israel/Palestine had not yet broken out. Myriad other geopolitical conflicts have ebbed, changed, and intensified around the globe since then. I believe that the conversation about antiwar literature and peace movements is evergreen and always relevant, but we have to acknowledge that the context is always changing, and we hope our readers will understand the chronological moment in which this conversation took place.
In this initial conversation, Larry and I began to clarify the parameters of what would be our special section, in Consequence Volume 15.2, “What is War Poetry: When is a War Poem an Antiwar Poem?” The interview precedes ten poems that we felt illuminated or illustrated key ideas from the conversation. Those poems, and an excerpt from the interview, can be found in the print journal. Here, you can read the full interview.
Katherine Hollander: Larry, I’m so delighted to be talking with you today. Thank you for joining me! As you know, since I joined Consequence as Poetry Editor in early 2021, we’ve been running occasional special sections in the print journal (with some web content as well) that address the question, “What is war poetry?” Our first two focused on ancient texts, The Iliad and The Bhagavad Gita, which are generally neutral about the moral and social valence of war–or, to put it another, more accurate way, are polyvocal, expressing multiple points of view about its glorious or disastrous attributes and consequences for humans (and gods), and, as the scholars who wrote brief introductory essays for us pointed out, generally accepting war as a natural–or supernatural–occurrence, a perhaps not-unending but always recurring and unchangeable part of the world. But that’s not how poets generally write about war today, certainly not in the poems we receive as submissions here at Consequence. Associate poetry editor Sam Reichman and I–and increasingly our whole team–have been having more and more conversations about the kinds of poems we get and the kinds of assumptions they make about war. And because of your deep study of war and antiwar poems, and your investigation into what you call pacifist criticism, I’m so excited to be talking with you today.
So I want to start with a big question–and I’ll give some background as to why we’re asking it, and we can break it down, if we want, into smaller questions. But thinking about war poetry today, we ask “When is a war poem an antiwar poem?”
To fill in some background: Almost none of the poems we receive as submissions at Consequence glorify war in the style of, say, Tennyson’s “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (which is now Sam’s and my go-to short-hand for a certain kind of war poem that doesn’t seem to be written anymore). The few poems we do get that are positive about war generally also glorify violence or broadly villainize one side of a geopolitical conflict in ways that are nationalistic, racist, or imbued with ethnic hatred. We won’t, and don’t, publish poems like that. Their formal or linguistic qualities are never impressive or successful enough to even begin to mitigate what is objectionable and harmful in them. So obviously, I’m acknowledging here the interrelation between ethics and aesthetics.
Generally, the poems we get adopt a kind of pessimism about war, a stance that assumes that “war is hell.” But, as well you know, simply not being “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (a famously cheerful poem about an abject military disaster) or an expression of ethno-nationalist sentiment, or even starting from an assumption that, indeed, “war is hell,” does not an antiwar poem make. And most of the poems we get, especially the powerful, effective ones (perhaps paradoxically), don’t make moves to actually question or critique war in real or central ways. They live in a middle zone, lamenting the hell that war is, but not acknowledging or interrogating the possibility of a way out of that hell. And that’s okay: Many brilliant war poems live there.
So my real question at this point is: How did war poems get like this? Historically, how did we get from a more positive portrayal of war to almost a requirement of negativity–and yet that negativity, even if it involves some critique, does not generally include compelling or forceful antiwar components. If I had to guess, my money is on the Great War poets–Sassoon, Owen, Trakl–but you tell me.
Larry Rosenwald: So . . . that’s in part a historical question, right? A question about influence, which in theory one would want to answer with some empirical evidence, which I don’t have much of. What comes to mind: First, this is in theory a conversation about antiwar poetry, but it might not be possible to separate poetry from prose here. I mean, Remarque’s All Quiet is doing work similar to the work being done by Sassoon and Owen, it’s a war-is-hell kind of book, it comes out around the same time, so do other war-is-hell memoirs and fictions.
Second, the Great War (1914-1918) does seem to me the turning point—the war itself, not only the poems we’re talking about. It was so hellish a war, so large a war, and was experienced by so many civilians and soldiers as a pointless, perpetual, misery-infested war—in the trenches in particular, in the deaths of so many soldiers for such small victories. I’m speaking within a European and American perspective, obviously, which is a limitation, but it’s where I’m located.
KH: As am I: As a Central Europeanist by training, with some focus in Britain and the United states. That’s worth disclosing in this conversation. I think we’d both want to be clear that the orientation in our conversation is dependent in large part on our own orientation as scholars and writers, which is a limitation, not a claim about what literature is more worth studying. That said, the Great War, as a global conflict, is hard to overestimate in the scope of the violence and misery it unleashed.
LR: And it was the first—well, in most respects the first—air war, too, and Karl Kraus wrote that he dated the end of civilization from the beginning of the air war. It was also the Great War that led to the formation of peace studies as a discipline. The influence of Sassoon and Owen and Trakl & co. almost seems epiphenomenal to me—the war itself was such a large fact, a story writers were going to tell.
As for actual influence—well, the military historian Corelli Barnett claimed that the Great War poets and memoirists had a large influence on British views about World War II—an influence he regards as disastrous, by the way (since, he argues, it made Britain so much slower to respond to the dangers of Nazi Germany), but a large influence nonetheless. No one I’ve read has made a comparable claim about earlier war-is-hell poems or fictions, Bierce’s “Chickamauga” or Melville’s “Shiloh” for example. But at the same time, a lot of antiwar poets and writers from the Great War became pro-war writers, or became silent (Kraus: “das Wort entschlief, als jene Welt erwachte”) in relation to World War II, which had a better and clearer cause. But once released, the war-is-hell genie couldn’t be put back into the bottle.
Finally, I’m not surprised that the best poems you get still regard war as inevitable—surely something that’s inevitable, not contingent, not alterable, is at least on the face of it a better subject for most poets than something that we could do away with. Death is better than the minimum wage . . .
At some point in this conversation, I’d love to come back to Homer and the Bhagavad Gita.
KH: Thank you, this is a great account of the historical development of this literary-and-historical (maybe just cultural) trend! You’ve said so many things here I want to hold on to. The idea of the “war-is-hell” trope as a genie that can’t be put back in the bottle, wow—you’re saying, and I think you’re right, that it’s almost a tonal question, a texture question, rather than political or ethical.
Maybe most interesting to me is the question of quality or success in poems—you express a lack of surprise that “the best poems you get still regard war as inevitable” and I’m going to come back to that in a minute, because it strikes me as so important. But yes, of course, please circle back to the ancient texts any time!
LR: Yes, it’s a cultural shift, post-World War I. But also a shift in the quantity of information we’re able to have about particular wars—what bodies we see, dead, injured, mutilated, what battlefields and ruined landscapes. We now get to see much more than, say, civilians in World War I—journalists could be censored then, there were no tv cameras, etc.
Look, there’s a reflection I should offer at some point in our conversation, and maybe now is as good a point as any, lest the reflection feel like an afterthought. In any case, here it is. Writing antiwar poetry requires some privilege, some safety, both personal and national, and that that fact influences who’s written it—not determines, I think, but influences. How can it not? And how can it not be the case that antiwar literature is mostly written by people who see themselves as part of a society that makes war, not a society that is only its victim? Often that has meant centering a western point of view.
On the other hand, when I’ve read African antiwar novels, Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Sozaboy, for example, or the Japanese antiwar manga, Shigeru Mizuki’s Onward to our Noble Deaths, or the North Vietnamese writer Bao Ninh’s The Sorrow of War, I’m of course aware that they’re bringing forward new perspectives on war, deploying new strategies, being unique as art is unique, irreproducible; but I’m also aware that they feel surprisingly familiar, they have something in common with All Quiet and Johnny Got His Gun and Lorraine Hansberry’s end-of-the-world play What Use Are Flowers? Which gives me hope, hope for a future in which the antiwar impulse is more diversely manifested, and in which that diversity strengthens the impulse, and prevails.
KH: This is fascinating. In some ways what you’re describing is the building or growing or assembling of an antiwar literary tradition. Which I think you, as a scholar, writer, and human being, are uniquely positioned to illuminate. One thing that strikes me is your comment that antiwar literature has often been produced by writers in what we might call war-initiating countries, invaders rather than invaded (though not in the case of the Great War writers we talked about, where Sassoon and Trakl were on opposite sides, and despite one side being the eventual loser and one the winner, all sides we miserable and much of the war was a stalemate). I imagine that this is because the function of this literature at some level is to influence–to change the minds of readers, societies, governments presumed to be otherwise in support of war, seeing it as advantageous or a necessary evil. But I also think of someone like Andreas Gryffius, poet of the Thirty Years War (1618-1648), just writing about straight-up abject misery, a misery felt on all sides. It may be rarer, as you suggest, for an antiwar literary impulse to arise in places that have been victims of war, of aggression and invasion—it’s so logical to say Fight back! And I mean, use violence, use military might—but at the same time I wonder what tradition of lamentation is also there, and is an antiwar tradition also. Is all antiwar writing argumentative, or can it just be expressive? Maybe this is where the ancient texts tie in?
LR: That’s a lovely way of bringing us back to the ancient texts! Homer and the Gita—I wouldn’t regard either as an antiwar poem, Simone Weil and Gandhi to the contrary notwithstanding, if by antiwar poem we mean the most evident sense of the term, a poem that in its nature and design opposes war or a war. Neither poem does that. For Homer war is inevitable, and heroism is possible and admirable. (John Buchan was more right than Weil when he wrote in his journals—after being an ardent propagandist for the Great War—that he could no longer read Homer because he so “glorified war.”) For the Gita poet, Arjuna’s participation in war is the just and necessary fulfillment of his obligation.
But because they’re capacious poems as well as profound ones, they have room to depict opposition to war. And since part of the problem for the antiwar impulse is getting heard, dramatized, recognized, that’s a big deal. Arjuna spends a long time saying no, even though in the end he says yes. Thersites the antiwar orator in Homer is a coward, and everyone laughs when Odysseus whacks him with a staff and he cries; but he’s there, he’s vividly imagined, someone at least is saying no.
KH: Yes! And Brecht says that cowardice is good, heroism is bad, because being afraid is logical, you should be afraid of war, of being a soldier, it’s terrifying, you might die, you might get maimed, there is pain and suffering, you might kill someone. If everyone was an honest coward, he suggests, we might not have so many wars! He’s being a little perverse here, but in a really useful way. Be cowardly! He says at one point that epic theater was born from a production of Richard III, when they put the white make-up on the soldiers, in response to the question of how they are feeling before the battle: “They’re pale, they’re afraid.” It makes me think about a moment I used to teach when I would teach, as part of the second half of the world history survey, Camilla Townshend’s wonderful book on the Conquest of Mexico, Malintzin’s Choices. At one point, in a description of the Spanish soldier-sailors who have initiated the invasion with Cortes—and they are not sympathetic, these conquistadors—but there’s this incredible detail: They’re sleeping in their armor. They’re afraid.
LR: That’s fantastic. And Brecht’s is a very deep insight, but to live by it you’d have to undo an immense amount of deeply held views. “Views” isn’t the right word, in fact, because they’re deeper than views, they’re the water we breathe. To value cowardice over courage, Falstaff-like? It would take a lot. I mean in general, and I mean for me in particular. I recall a passage in Victor Klemperer’s Language of the Third Reich—it’s about “heroism,” and Klemperer says that to uproot the sources of the Third Reich you’d have to stop using the word, that the word itself is pernicious. He reports having people ask him, “Isn’t there real heroism in war?” As of course there is, and he knows it. But he deflects the question by saying that we can’t use the word until we use it about people like his wife—a German gentile who did not divorce or renounce him, regardless of the persecution she was subject to—more often than, or at least as often as, we use it of soldiers on the battlefield.
KH: That’s lovely. And powerful, too.
LR: That’s why for me that poem of yours, the one with the reference to the Steffin constellation, is so important in this context; a deep rejection of war says, among other things, “You know, maybe there are better things to do, let’s go elsewhere.” Theater ist schöner als Krieg, after all.
KH: Thank you so much! That means a lot to me. And—this connects to something else I wanted to ask you about, which has to do with Virginia Woolf, but maybe we’ll work our way around to it.
LR: I’ve been reading the third volume of Pat Barker’s trilogy, The Ghost Road, and there’s this fascinating moment, related to your poem. The character Prior writes in his diary:
“Bainbrigge’s dead. I remember him in the oyster bar in Scarborough a couple of nights before we left. We were all pissed, but Bainbrigge was pissed enough to quote his own poems (than which there is no pisseder). He was talking to Owen, saying real anti-war poems ought to celebrate what war deprives men of—wait for it—‘Beethoven, Botticelli, beer and boys.’ Owen kicked him under the table, for my benefit, I think. A wasted kick.”
Bainbrigge is a historical character by the way, friend and lover of C. K. Scott Moncrieff, though his wikipedia biography says nothing about his poems. Now it can’t be the case that every poem celebrating Beethoven, or for that matter boys, is an antiwar poem. But it might be the case that if an antiwar poem has nothing to celebrate, nothing to turn to when it turns away from war, that it’s not doing everything that needs to be done.
KH: This is wonderful, and makes me think of that terrific and, to me, heartbreaking moment in Doktor Faustus, when Leverkühn’s concert tour is canceled because war has broken out between Germany and France. And he says to his friends (who are enlisting, presumably) “I cannot go to Paris, you all are going in my place.” A concert, which is better than a war, cannot be had because of war. I heard Naomi Shihab Nye talk along similar lines at one point–she is a wonderful poet of war and peace, and has been involved in efforts for peace through the arts in Israel/Palestine. And she was pointing out the limits of these efforts–she said, essentially, you can get people to play music together and make art and poems together, and become friends, but in the end, the people with the authority and the guns and the power and the money make the call, and all the orchestras in the world can’t stop them. The limits of antiwar art are very real. Which, I think, is more pessimistic than what you were saying, but I think is still in agreement about needing to be more inventive about illuminating the quality of what is lost when we give up on peace. Her poems are really good at doing that.
LR: Hmm . . . Shibab Nye’s comments have a lot of truth. And orchestras alone can’t stop war. But it’s not clear to me that “the people with the authority and the guns and the power and the money make the call,” not always at any rate. I mean, those were the people who wanted the Vietnam War to continue, but they didn’t get to make that call; the call was made by people who made art, people who refused the draft, poets who wrote about the people who refused the draft, great singers at protests at antiwar rallies, etc.
KH: I think I was making too broad a statement—these things are particular to each moment in time, the conflict in question, the movement. I think Naomi was expressing sadness at the fragility of these movements, or the ways in which they happen in the midst of war, without changing the course of war. That doesn’t mean they aren’t useful and beautiful. But so often, we imagine or hope human friendships can change geopolitics, but if governments want to make war, absent direct and sustained pressure on levers of power, and in the presence of real or manufactured hatred, even alongside real and beautiful friendships or connections through art, they very often do.
LR: Yes. That’s beautiful. In this connection, though I admit the connection is loose, I’m thinking about all those Roman poets, maybe Greek ones too, who write elegies and not epics, Propertius and Horace etc., and who often have poems discussing their choice. Usually this is described as resulting from limited capacity, and in particular a limited metrical capacity—I can’t write about war, I can’t write hexameters, my chariot’s missing a wheel (i.e., I’m writing elegiac couplets rather than hexameters); but every once in a while, if I recall correctly, there’s some indication that the turn away from writing about war is expressive and important.
KH: This is fascinating. I’m curious about what you think about contemporary poems that engage with that tradition, like Alice Oswald’s Memorial, which, of course, is an account of The Iliad, but only the deaths. What a bold and unflinching choice, that project! It feels like an antiwar move to me, in an abstract way. To say: These are the only parts that matter. These deaths, these names. And that moment toward the end: “And Hector died like anyone else.” Crushing. Liberatingly flip and at the same time, entirely heartbreaking. Or Ellen Kombiyil’s Iliad erasures, quite a few of which we were honored to publish in Consequence, which are pointedly brutal and vivid. I don’t know if Ellen would say they are antiwar poems, but they do something to the Iliad, make a comment, a critique.
LR: When my kids were growing up, they prevailed on me to stop pontificating about things I hadn’t read—and I haven’t read Oswald’s work, or Kombiyil’s, but your account of them is fascinating, so I’ll make a note to myself to read them when I can, but for now, regretfully, turn away . . . . But one last point about the Iliad and the Gita—and here I have to recast what I said about Weil and Gandhi above—is that a surprisingly large number of people have read these poems as antiwar poems, have found in them a stimulus to antiwar thought and feeling. In a way it doesn’t matter whether Weil is right, whether Gandhi is right—what matters is that they are bearing witness to the effect these particular poems had on them.
KH: I think that Emily Austin and Chloe Martinez, the scholars who wrote for us about The Iliad and the Gita, respectively, would agree with you—that it’s in the capaciousness that the genius and longevity of those poems live.
LR: Yes. And in the variety and intensity of the responses they evoke.
KH: But going back, and maybe also starting to address your sense of quality—or maybe effectiveness or emotional impact, or whatever we want to call it—in war poems, which I’m fascinated by. You referred to this kind-of baked-in “war is hell” negativity that’s tonal or textural or foundational, that genie that, perhaps for decency’s sake, now that we’ve seen the bodies and the landscapes, as you say, cannot go back in the bottle. That kind of neutralizes it, for me. It’s a tonal requirement. It doesn’t have a lot of cultural or ethical meaning. That’s really important and deep, and actually kind of scathing. I want to sit with that. A poet simply can’t write a pro-war poem and have it be considered good, anymore, in most literary contexts. It’s about convention.
I had wanted to ask, “To what extent is a war poet necessarily an antiwar poet, and vice versa?” But in some ways, maybe, one thing you’re suggesting is that it’s actually very difficult to be a war poet who critiques war in a real way, because implicitly acknowledging war as inevitable or implacable sets the poet up to write a better poem. As an insight, that’s radical, frightening, and very, very smart. Can you say more about that?
LR: I can, with some uncertainty. What comes to mind: that Bertha von Suttner novel, Die Waffen nieder. She’s forthright here—having her narrator say that wars will continue as long as soldiers regard their death and misery as their fate rather than as a crime—as long, that is, as they regard war as inevitable. That might be a simplistic opposition, there has to be some room in between those two positions, but it’s clear, and I think she’s right. On the other hand, it’s not an accident that her novel was superseded as the great normative antiwar novel by Remarque’s All Quiet, where no such declaration appears. There are moments here and there when the soldiers imagine alternatives, see their enemies as their fellows, etc., but they don’t last, and at the end, the inevitability of war hasn’t been challenged. The narrator Paul is dead, you feel a kind of rage at the war that has taken his life and his comrades’ life, but there’s nowhere to stand and say that we need to put an end to war. And that ending, the announcement of Paul’s death on a cloudless, windless day, an eventless day, Im Westen nichts Neues—that’s very powerful, more powerful than the end of Von Suttner’s book, but dependent on our being willing to turn away from our opposition to war and attend only to the misery of an individual’s death.
Beyond that—I’m too timid, probably, to draw the consequences of my own comment.
KH: Is the implication here that Suttner’s claim about war being, not our fate, but a crime, is too explicitly stated to be effective as literature, because it’s a Tendenzroman, a book with a committed position that’s meant to convince—it’s too didactic, almost propagandistic?
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