20th to 21st Century War Poetry: British and International

What is the course about?

War, alas, has been a constant in human history, as it has in world literature stretching back to the hymn to the goddess Inanna of the earliest named poet, the Sumerian princess Enheduanna: ‘In the forefront / Of the battle / All is struck down by you’. But what happens when literature confronts that horror, how far can it go? Michael Morpurgo, author of “War Horse”, sounds a note of warning. In his introduction to “You Don’t Know What War Is”, a 12-year old girl’s diary written in Kharkiv in 2022, he concedes ‘No fiction I could write about war can carry the intensity or power of her first-hand account … war is not a story told by journalists, nor by TV or films or history or fiction. It is lived day-by-day, night-by-night’. What can the snapshot of a poem bring to that reality? Honesty? Compassion? Philosophical depth? A memorable turn-of-phrase?

This online course will look at the myriad ways poets – combatants and civilians – responded to the century of total war and are responding to its legacy now. It will take us from the trenches of ’14-’18 to the global devastation of ’39-’45, from the Holocaust and the Nakba to the ongoing conflict over Gaza, from the Russian ‘Great Patriotic War’ and the parallel war waged on its own population to the invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and its escalation into an all-out struggle for cultural survival.

What will we cover?

We will begin with the extraordinarily gifted, extraordinarily popular soldier poets of WW1 whose memorial stone with its sixteen names has such a commanding presence in Westminster Abbey – Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg and their fellows. Why does their work exert such a hold on the British imagination? Why has so little attention been given to writers caught up in the conflict from other nations? We’ll explore poems of a comparable sophistication and passionate psychological engagement from across the European continent and beyond, some of it unashamedly propagandistic, but much of it at the highest level of personal insight and creativity. The same balance needs to be struck, with an even greater weight given to the international dimension, when we turn to WW2 and the Holocaust: among the writers we’ll consider are many of the most celebrated mid-century practitioners – Levi, Celan, Akhmatova, Brecht, Milosz, Swirszczynska to name only a few.

Coming closer to our own time and the spiralling number of conflicts at turn-of-century we’ll focus on countries where poetry has always had a key role in the fashioning, and preservation, of national identity. Contemporary Russian poets like Polina Barskova and Maria Stepanova take us back to the Siege of Leningrad and into direct conflict with the language of patriotism to contest the militarisation visited on daily life in the wake of the new drift to war; contemporary Ukrainians like Serhiy Zhadan and Lyuba Yakimchuk, writing with a brilliant fluency and inventiveness from the heart of the conflict, join their art of witnessing to a tradition of heroic resistance that began with the calls-to-arms of Taras Shevchenko in the mid-19th century. Our last stop will be modern day Palestine, poetry of violent uprooting, exile and return followed by military action and communal suffering on an unprecedented scale: Mahmoud Darwish, Taha Muhammad Ali, Fady Joudah and their Israeli counterparts.

What will I achieve?
By the end of this course you should be able to...

• Closely analyse, with technical competence, the effects obtained by poets from a range of cultural and historical backgrounds, weighing their achievements against the urgency of the situations in which they found themselves – what room did they find for linguistic inventiveness, for an individual signature?
• Approach with some confidence the question of what distinguishes a great war poem from a lesser one
• Place the war poems within each poet’s wider oeuvre, themes and achievements, with pointers to further reading.

What level is the course and do I need any particular skills?

No previous knowledge is required. Anyone who enjoys close reading and is willing to take part in discussion is welcome.

How will I be taught, and will there be any work outside the class?

There will be a variety of teaching methods, including direct tutor input, power point and small group discussion. There will be opportunities to express why individually we are participating on the course and what we hope to take away from it. No work outside class apart from reading the texts circulated digitally by the tutor before each session. All the poems we’re going to read together will come to you in this format.

Are there any other costs? Is there anything I need to bring?

All materials will be supplied by the tutor; you do not need to buy any books for this course, although there are recommendable major anthologies for anyone interested. A good starting point might be Lindsey Hilsum’s recent “I Brought the War with Me” (Chatto and Windus 2024), exemplary in terms of its global breadth of reference both regarding the poems and the specific conflicts in which she found them to be of value.

When I've finished, what course can I do next?

For other poetry courses in the Literature programme please look under History, Culture and Writing/ Literature/Poetry on our website at www.citylit.ac.uk.