LYCOS RETRIEVER 
War Poetry: Poems
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Northampton, MA (PRWEB) November 15, 2007 -- Winning Writers is pleased to announce the results from its sixth annual War Poetry Contest. Kyle McDonald of Toronto, Ontario won first prize and $2,000 for his poem "The Rose of Ilium", an epic account of a battle between Greek hero Achilles and Penthesilea, queen of the Amazons. Mr. McDonald's poem was written in rhyming iambic pentameter couplets, in the style of Alexander Pope's translation of the Iliad.
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War had already been a subject for poetry but never with such feelings. In English consciousness, in 1914, war was fought by processionals away from home and many people thought it glamorous. Before 1914, war poems would have an exotic ending, completely removed from immediate experience. But WW1 is a new experience in the sense that the poets had to find a poetic voice to render what they witnessed. Poets were ill-equipped because they had no tradition to draw upon, no worthwhile models to imitate. First, poets imitated anthology pieces or well-established forms like sonnets.
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Lucien Stryk is a veteran of World War II, a prize-winning poet, and an editor and translator of Chinese and Japanese Zen poetry. In these two poems, from his collection, And Still the Bird Sings, Stryk writes about the power of memory. Though not necessarily about Post-Traumatic Stress, these poems touch on the issue of flashbacks, and how painful memories can return unbidden and without warning -- a symptom common to those suffering from PTSD.
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"Wanting to revive awareness of the Vietnam War, which he sees slipping into oblivion because Americans would rather not talk about it, Philip Mahony has crafted a new kind of war-poetry anthology. He has chosen poems by both Americans and Vietnamese; by both adults involved in the fighting and children, now grown, who were displaced by it; and by both combatants and protesters." --Booklist
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Although "liberty" and "justice" (and synonymous expressions) are common to much of the war poetry, the principles underlying the terms vary according to the poet's position on the war and on the policies of the government. The author of Cautions to England is concerned with maintaining the status quo and is most likely a Tory. The author of the Ode is probably a Jacobin. The satire above is opposed to sympathy with France and to democratic notions of any kind. But what of the Mutiny at Portsmouth? An author who finds "Freedom" dwelling with the mutinous sailors at Spithead (April 15, 1797) may be considered radical, but in the case of the sailor's widow who is alleged to have written the poem, she may be without political ties altogether.
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This session will focus on the poetry of Rudyard Kipling and on the Boer War (1899-1902). Selected poems from the following volumes will be under discussion: Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses (1892); The Seven Seas (1896); The Five Nations (1903).
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