War’s spoils, poet’s fodder

Lord Tennyson comes immediately to mind for him and several of his academic peers — and The Charge of the Light Brigade: ‘‘Into the valley of death/rode the six hundred’’. Carl Sandburg and Robert Frost, Dubinsky says, wrote patriotic poems early in World War I, which, if they weren’t pro-war, weren’t anti-war either. He recalls Rupert Brooke, the most glamourous of Britain’s World War I poets. Brooke wrote romantically patriotic ‘‘pre-war’’ sonnets before he knew the cruel and grinding reality of trench warfare. In The Soldier, Brooke wrote: ‘‘If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field that is for ever England.’’ Brooke did die on the way to Gallipoli of blood poisoning from an infected mosquito bite. Churchill wrote his obituary.

Clarinda Harriss, a poet and chair of Towson University’s English department, nominates Ezra Pound’s ‘‘wildly pro-war’’ Sestina: Altaforte. The final verse of this poem from 1909 says it all: ‘‘And let the music of the swords make them crimson Hell grant soon we hear again the swords clash! Hell blot black for always the thought ‘peace’!’’

Of course, after World War II, Pound was charged with treason for broadcasting pro-Fascist and anti-Semitic screeds in Mussolini’s Italy, then spent a dozen years at a federal mental hospital in Washington, D.C.

Charles L. Weatherford, a Michigan poet, created the Poets For the War website (poetsforthewar.org) in February as a reaction to Poets Against the War. ‘‘A lot of the more conservative columnists were basically lumping all poets together,’’ he says. ‘‘I wanted the full spectrum represented.’’ So is he satisfied with the poems from the pro-war group? ‘‘This type of site is really political,’’ Weatherford replies. ‘‘Some of these poems were not literary gems. Among the 200 or so I’ve got published down there, the likelihoods that maybe one or two of them is of any literary merit. And that includes eight or 10 of my own.’’

Poets Against the War (poetsagainstthewar.org) might have just as many bad poems as Poets For the War. But there are many more well-known poets in the anti-war roster, including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, W.S. Merwin, and such worthies as Adrienne Rich, Rita Dove and Robert Pinsky.

Hamill, an ex-Marine and a notable poet and translator, launched Poets Against the War after he was invited to a symposium to discuss Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson and Langston Hughes with Laura Bush at the White House. He declined and opened the website. (LAT-WP)