Okay, let's unpack this. Today we are bringing
you a deep dive into a really massive, deeply
moving compilation of material. Truly massive.
Right. And it's focused entirely on war poetry.
We're going on a journey to trace exactly how
humanity has processed the trauma, the, well,
the fleeting glory and just the absolute horror
of conflict through verse. And the timeline we're
looking at is incredible. Yeah, we were talking
about a timeline that stretches all the way from
ancient bards of Greece, you know, singing to
huge crowds right up to... modern digital newsletters
being published in real time in Ukraine. So welcome
to the deep dive. It is a remarkable stack of
history to sort through for sure. And just to
set the stage for you, it is crucial to understand
the sheer breadth of what we're actually looking
at today, because when people hear the phrase
war poet, the immediate image that jumps to mind
is usually like a young guy in a muddy trench.
Exactly. A young soldier shivering in a trench
with a notebook. But the reality is so much broader
than that. These writers are combatants, absolutely,
but they're also field nurses up to their elbows
in casualties. They're civilians caught up in
the crossfire of besieged cities. Distant observers,
right. Right, distant observers just trying to
make sense of the geopolitical chaos unfolding
around them. And I want you to think about why
this matters to you for a second. Put yourself
in the mindset of reading a standard history
book. Usually you're getting sterile facts. Just
the data. Yeah, you get the dates, the movement
of troop lines on a map, the grim tally of casualty
numbers. It's incredibly distant. But poetry
bypasses all of that analytical distance. It
gives you the raw, unfiltered, emotional reality
of those exact moments in history. It puts you
right there in the boots of the people who are
living through it, breathing the same dust. It
truly serves as an emotional anchor. And we see
that right from the very beginning of human civilization,
deeply embedded in ancient oral traditions. So
let's start right there at the beginning. You've
got Homer's Iliad. from around the 8th century
BC. Detailing the siege of Troy. Yeah, the 10
-year siege. But what really caught my eye was
the Iranian memorial of Zur. This was composed
in pre -Islamic Persia. Oh, that is a fascinating
one. It really is. This epic was kept alive by
Zoroastrian priests and sung by traveling minstrels.
And these minstrels were an absolute fixture
of society back then. They weren't just providing,
you know, background entertainment at a banquet.
No, oh. This was how an entire culture memorialized
its survival. It was how they honored their warriors.
What's fascinating here is how poetry wasn't
just reflecting history as this passive, backward
-looking record. Sometimes it was active. It
was subversive. And it was hiding right in plain
sight. Oh, like the secret codes. Yes! Take the
famous English nursery rhyme, The Queen of Hearts.
The one about baking tarts. That's the one. You
probably remember it from childhood. But historical
analysis suggests this innocuous little rhyme
is alleged to be a highly coded, thinly veiled
political poem. About a war. About the outbreak
of the Thirty Years' War in the 17th century.
Wait, the nursery rhyme about the Queen baking
tarts is about a 17th century European conflict.
It really is. The King and Queen of Hearts supposedly
represent the Elector Palatine, Frederick V,
and his wife, Elizabeth Stuart. Okay, so where
do the tarts come in? The whole bit about the
queen deciding to big tarts is actually a coded
reference to her persuading her Calvinist husband
to accept the Czech nobility's offer to take
the throne of Bohemia. Okay, so if the king and
queen are these 17th century royals, who is the
nave of hearts? The one who steals the tarts?
That represents the Holy Roman Emperor. The local
officials of the emperor were overthrown in a
famous palace coup. It's known as the Third Defenestration
of Prague. I have to stop you right there. Defenestration
as in literally throwing someone out of a window.
Literally. And this was the third time they did
it. Yes, it was a whole thing. The Czech nobility
literally threw the Emperor's Catholic Regents
out of a third story window at Prague Castle.
That is insane. Did they survive? They survived
because they landed in a massive pile of manure.
Oh. Yeah. but it kicked off a massive continental
war. So the Queen of Hearts was essentially a
secret political commentary disguised as a harmless
children's rhyme so people wouldn't be executed
for singing it. That is wild. It really proves
poetry was a dangerous, potent tool. And you
actually see examples where poetry literally
started wars. Fast forward to the 18th century.
And there's the Scottish Gaelic poet, Alasdair
Macmaester Alasdair. A very influential figure.
Incredibly influential. He was this passionate
supporter of the House of Stuart. His Jacobite
poems were so fiery and persuasive that they
were translated into English and read aloud to
Prince Charles Edward Stuart. Direct to the Prince.
Direct to the Prince. And those very poems played
a major role in convincing the Prince to actually
initiate the bloody 1745 uprising. It is a staggering
amount of cultural influence for a poet to wield.
He quite literally talked a royal into a rebellion.
Which is pretty funny to think about today, considering
you can barely convince people to show up for
an open mic poetry night, let alone overthrow
a monarchy. That is a very fair point. But contrast
that slow, deliberate spread of 18th -century
Gaelic poems with the sheer speed of how poetry
mobilized in the 19th century. The printing press,
right. Exactly. The industrialization of the
printing press changed the game completely. During
the Crimean War in 1854, Alfred Lord Tennyson
read a newspaper account of a disastrous cavalry
charge by British forces. Right. Within just
a few minutes of reading that grim article, he
sat down and wrote The Charge of the Light Brigade.
He wrote one of the most famous poems in the
English language in just a few minutes. He did.
And because of the printing press, it became
this massive sensation almost overnight. It was
printed in pamphlet form and shipped out, distributed
directly to the troops sitting on the front lines
in the Crimea. Wow. Imagine being a soldier and
reading a poem about the battle you are currently
fighting in. It functioned almost exactly like
a 19th century viral post. It was this immediate
widespread cultural processing of a military
disaster. It turned a horrific tactical blender
into a story of glorious sacrifice. Here's where
it gets really interesting, because that romantic
idea of a glorious cavalry charge, he couldn't
survive what was coming next. the mechanized
meat grinder of the First World War completely
broke that tradition. The Great War changed European
literature forever. Up until 1914, war poetry
often maintained some thread of individual military
glory, virtuous leadership, or noble sacrifice,
tracing all the way back to those Homeric traditions
we started with. But the trenches changed all
that. Completely. The sheer unprecedented trauma
of modern mechanized warfare, the slaughter of
millions of young men by impersonal machine guns
and long -range artillery, it completely annihilated
those classic tropes. Writers had to struggle
to find a totally new vocabulary that could convey
the apocalyptic reality they were living through.
And you see that struggle literally breaking
the language apart. Take the German expressionist
poet August Graham. The guy treated language
like a physical material that was being blown
to pieces. He tore the grammar completely apart.
He paired his syntax down to its absolute bare
essentials, completely stripping out standard
grammar. He even coined new jagged words from
old ones. He wrote a poem called Baptism by Fire
that caused a massive scandal in the German press
in 1915. And the wild part is it wasn't scandalous
because it was overtly unpatriotic. Right, it
was scandalous simply because it was too honest.
Stramm absolutely refused to pretend that coming
under heavy artillery fire felt like heroic excitement.
The establishment wanted tales of bravery, but
Stramm just presented the terrifying, numb, shattered
reality of an artillery barrage. His broken sentences
mirrored the broken landscape. But as much as
poets like Stram, Wilfred Owen, and Siegfried
Sassoon redefine the entire genre for the 20th
century, there is a massive historical blind
spot we need to talk about. Yes, the exclusion
of non -combatants. Right. From the end of the
First World War right up until the 1970s, the
war poet label was almost exclusively reserved
for men who fought and died in the mud of the
trenches. It was an incredibly narrow definition
of authenticity that completely boxed out other
experiences. It excluded so many vital voices.
Over 500 women published poetry during World
War I. They were writing about the crushing anxiety
of the home front, the deep grief of mourning
a lost generation, and the visceral blood soaked
reality of nursing the wounded. But they were
basically ignored. Largely brushed aside and
excluded from early literary anthologies because
they didn't fit the soldier poet archetype. Which
is ironic considering the medical side of the
war gave us two of the most iconic cultural symbols
of World War I. You have the Canadian surgeon
John McCrae. He was treating the wounded during
the horrific Second Battle of Ypres. Just a bloodbath.
Absolute nightmare. After burying a close friend,
he sat in a tiny eight by eight foot dirt bunker
and wrote In Flanders Fields. A poem that resonated
so deeply it went truly global. Right. It became
so ubiquitous that it inspired an American poet
named Moina Michael. She read McCrae's poem and
was so moved by the imagery of the poppies blowing
among the crosses that she established the tradition
of wearing a red poppy year round to honor the
fallen. It's amazing. It is amazing how one short
poem scribbled in a dirt bunker between surgeries
shaped the way the entire globe handles memorial
culture for a century. It is a profound legacy,
but World War I poetry also exposes the deep
messy political complications of the era. The
Irish poets are a prime example of this tension.
Divided loyalties. Exactly. Take Francis Ledwidge.
He was a staunch Irish Republican who initially
refused to enlist in the British army, which
makes total sense given the political climate
in Ireland at the time. But he ended up in a
British uniform anyway. How did that happen?
He faced a brutal show trial by local unionists
who publicly accused him of cowardice. The pressure
was immense. Ultimately, he joined the British
military, but he made it very clear it wasn't
out of loyalty to the British crown. It was a
moral stance for him. Right. He joined because
he simply refused to let others defend European
civilization from imperialism while he stayed
comfortably at home. And he tragically died at
the Battle of Passchendaele. Then on the other
side of that coin, you have W .B. Yeats. He wrote
an Irish airman foresees his death about his
friend, Major Robert Gregory. But he didn't publish
it right away. No, Yates actually withheld publishing
that poem until after the 1918 armistice. He
intentionally showed restraint, feeling it was
inappropriate to publish such a highly nuanced
politically complex poem during the absolute
height of a global conflict. That incredible
tension of divided loyalties only amplifies as
we move forward in the timeline into the 20s
and 30s. It does. And this brings us to the Russian
and the Spanish civil wars. Now I want to take
a second to speak directly to you, the listener,
because the sources here deal with highly politically
charged content from both left -wing and right
-wing figures. We want to make it absolutely
clear that we are not taking sides. We are not
endorsing any of these viewpoints. Exactly. We
are simply acting as impartial guides. We're
reporting on the ideas and historical realities
contained within the original source material
to understand how humanity processes conflict.
If we connect this to the bigger picture, civil
wars are uniquely devastating because they force
writers to turn their pens and their weapons
against their own countrymen. It fractures a
nation's literary soul. It turns neighbor against
neighbor. Exactly. During the Russian Civil War,
the symbolist poet Marina Tsveteva wrote an epic
cycle of poems that essentially served as a diary
glorifying the anti -communist White Army. Meanwhile,
On the exact opposite side of that brutal conflict,
you have Osip Mandelstam. He was writing poems,
fervently praising the Red Army. But the profound
tragedy of his story is that he truly believed
a poet must be the unflinching conscience of
the people. And that belief eventually cost him
everything. It really did. Decades later, Mandelstam
composed a short epigram that mocked Joseph Stalin's
cruelty. And he died in a Soviet gulag simply
for writing it. We see that same intense bitter
divide during the Spanish Civil War. English
-speaking poets actually travel to Spain to volunteer
and fight on both sides. On the nationalist side,
you have the South African poet Roy Campbell.
The Catholic convert, right? Yes, he was a recent
Catholic convert and he was absolutely horrified
by the violence of the Republican forces, specifically
the Red Terror. He discovered the bodies of Carmelite
monks and Toledo men he had personally befriended
who had been executed in the street without a
trial. And the executioners had written, thus
strikes the Cheka in blood above the bodies of
the monks. Right. And just for context, the Cheka
was the original Soviet secret police force,
which heavily influenced the communist factions
in Spain. So Campbell wrote furious poems detailing
this horrific event, cementing his pro -nationalist
stance. But that had consequences for his legacy.
Huge consequences. Because he backed Francisco
Franco's fascist -aligned forces, he was effectively
blacklisted. He was deliberately left out of
many subsequent poetry anthologies and university
literature courses for decades. Now, contrast
Campbell's experience with that of his close
friend, Luis Cridge. Criggs was an Afrikaner
Calvinist and he campaigned just as passionately,
but for the opposing Republican faction. He wrote
a furious Afrikaner's poem. that specifically
condemned the bombing raids carried out by pro
-nationalist Lafawfoo pilots. And he didn't pull
any punches with his imagery. Not at all. Craig
used a savage irony that mixed sacred Latin church
liturgy with the violence of the mercenaries
dropping bombs on civilians. That's intense.
It built to a massive climax that openly mocked
the crucifixion of Christ. Essentially asking
how the church could support a side dropping
bombs from the sky, the outrage was immediate.
vehement condemnation poured in from the Catholic
Church in South Africa, who called the poem deeply
sacrilegious. Just goes to show how in a civil
war, poetry doesn't just reflect the battlefield.
It becomes a battlefield itself. Exactly. That
is a crucial insight. But as the 30s bleed into
the 40s, the tone of the poetry shifts yet again.
It really does. There's this fascinating observation
from the American poet Richard Wilbur. He noted
that the World War II poets felt fundamentally
different from the World War I poets. In what
way? Well, if World War I was defined by a sense
of tragic futility, young men dying for nothing
in the mud world war. Two poets felt they were
fighting a just war against terrible, fascistic
enemies that absolutely had to be destroyed to
save the world. But believing a war is just absolutely
does not insulate a poet from its horrors. Why?
The difficulty of processing the sheer industrialized
scale of civilian and military devastation in
World War II was immense. Look at the Polish
poet Anna Szroczewska. Her story is incredible.
She served as a battlefield nurse during the
1944 Warsaw Uprising. Put yourself in her shoes.
She witnessed a city of a million people fighting
a desperate, doomed battle against Nazi tanks
and heavy artillery for 63 straight days. And
the most striking thing is that it took her 30
years to figure out how to write about it. Exactly.
30 years of silence on the subject. She tried
for decades to put the uprising into verse, but
she kept destroying her manuscripts. Everything
she wrote felt too flowery, too wordy, or too
pathetic compared to the brutal reality she had
lived through. So what did she end up doing?
She realized she had to strip everything away,
even more than August Ram did in World War I.
She published a collection of what she called
un -rhymed miniature micro -reports. Just tiny,
breathless, fragmented observations of a single
horrific incident, because that was the only
way the human mind could process that level of
trauma without completely breaking down. Psychological
toll is just staggering to think about. And we
see a similarly chilling attempt to process the
dark ideology of the war. From the Hungarian
poet, Niklos Rednody, he was a vocal critic of
both the fascist Arrow Cross party and the pro
-German government. He had a very specific view
on totalitarianism. He did. Rednody believed
that totalitarianism, whether fascism or communism,
destroyed intricate, beautiful civil society
in order to create what he called a criminally
simple -minded order. His analogy for this concept
is one of the most haunting details we've come
across. It really stuck with me. He compared
authoritarianism to wanting an ideal cat. Yeah.
So imagine you take a real living breathing cat.
You kill it. You strip away its flesh, you put
it into an industrial mold, and you press it
into the perfect uniform shape of a cat. It's
grotesque. It's this visceral, horrifying image
of how regimes crush the messy, beautiful reality
of human lives into a dead artificial mold where
everyone conforms. And part of maintaining that
dead artificial mold is strictly controlling
the narrative. Which brings us to the profound
theme of censorship in World War Two poetry.
We have the Japanese general, Tadamichi Korebayashi.
He was the commander during the brutal battle
of Iwo Jima. Right. Knowing he was facing certain
death against overwhelming American forces, he
sent a farewell message back to Imperial headquarters
and he included three traditional Waka poems.
Just to clarify, Waka poetry is that classical
Japanese format, right? The one with five lines
and 31 syllables. That's right. It's an ancient,
highly structured form meant to convey deep emotion.
But the poems he sent weren't the glorious patriotic
versus the military command wanted to hear. Historians
view his Waka poems as a subtle but an incredibly
firm protest against a military command that
was so casually throwing the lives of its men
away in unwinnable battles. He wrote about the
profound sadness of his soldiers falling in battle
far from home. I'm guessing the Japanese military
sensors didn't just pull the set in the morning
paper. Not at all. They couldn't allow a commanding
general to express anti -war sentiment. So they
heavily rewrote his death poems before releasing
them to the public, completely altering his words
to falsely claim that the soldiers died happily
in suicidal ban - They hijacked his final words.
They hijacked his final words to feed the propaganda
machine. And we should note that censorship wasn't
just happening on the Axis side of the war. Take
Sadako Korihara. She survived the dropping of
the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. She wrote a major
collection of poems bearing witness to the unimaginable
horrors of the nuclear blast. But her work was
suppressed. Headily censored by the American
occupation forces in Japan because her poetry
dealt too explicitly with the devastating lingering
reality of the nuclear fallout. It proves time
and time again that poetry holds a raw truth
that authorities often find incredibly threatening.
Which brings us right up to the present day.
We are seeing these exact same dynamics, the
trauma, the desperate need for truth, and the
urge to bear witness, playing out in real time
with Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Yes,
the timeline we've been tracking ends right in
the middle of the digital age. We're seeing poetry
respond almost instantly to the conflict. There
is a heavy use of the sunflower motif representing
Ukrainian resistance and national identity. You
have prominent poets outside of Ukraine, like
the UK poet laureate Simon Armitage, publishing
new poems centered entirely on that imagery.
It's an immediate global response. But even more
fascinating to me is how the actual distribution
of war poetry has evolved. It is a massive leap.
We've gone from the traveling minstrels of pre
-Islamic Persia to digital substack newsletters.
There's a digital space right now called Sunflowers
in the Blood. It's a newsletter that curates
and publishes war poetry, translations and essays
in real time. It's not waiting for a post -war
anthology to be printed. It's being pushed straight
into people's email inboxes as the artillery
is literally firing. It's an incredible shift
in the medium. So what does this all mean? We've
covered thousands of years of human history today,
and if there is one glaring takeaway from all
this material, it's that while the weapons change
from bronze swords at Troy to mechanized tanks
in Warsaw to nuclear bombs in Hiroshima, and
the politics constantly shift back and forth,
the fundamental human impulse remains exactly
the same. We still need to process it. Yes. When
faced with the absolute extremities of war, humanity
instinctively turns to the rhythm, the structure,
and the deep emotional truth of poetry. It acts
as a constant anchor for our humanity when absolutely
everything else is being blown apart. This raises
an important question, though. We've seen how
war poetry relentlessly adapts its medium over
time. We started with traveling minstrels singing
ancient epics to crowds around a fire. Then we
moved to printed pamphlets distributed in the
mud of the Crimea. Then to radio broadcasts echoing
through the siege of Leningrad. And now we are
looking at algorithm -driven digital newsletters
updating by the minute. If the old adage is right...
and the medium truly shapes the message, how
will the instantaneous, AI -driven, and hyper
-fragmented platforms of the near future alter
the very nature of war poetry? Will it lose its
deeply personal human soul to the algorithms,
or will the raw, undeniable necessity to write
our way through trauma simply find a new, completely
unimaginable format to break our hearts all over
again? That is a heavy but incredibly vital thought
to leave you with today. Thank you so much for
joining us on this journey through the history
of how we process conflict. We appreciate you
taking the time to explore this deep dive with
us and we'll catch you on the next one. Take
care.