THE WAR

During the first year of World War I, while German U-boats swarmed the Atlantic and ground fighting intensified in Europe, William Butler Yeats articulated one side of the debate in “On Being Asked for a War Poem” (1915):

I think it better that in times like these

We poets keep our mouths shut, for in truth

We have no gift to set a statesman right;

He has had enough of meddling who can please

A young girl in the indolence of her youth,

Or an old man upon a winter’s night.

But the bugles, in the night,

Were wings that bore

To where our comfort was;

Arabesques of candle beams,

Winding

Through our heavy dreams;

Winds that blew

Where the bending iris grew;

Birds of intermitted bliss,

Singing in the night's abyss;

Vines with yellow fruit,

That fell

Along the walls

That bordered Hell.

What shall I do today

To use the hours up?

It takes so short a time

To wash a plate and cup.

A neighbor might run in

To pass the time of day—

But after that was said

What would there be to say?

I could go out to walk

Like any foolish bride—

But what if the dog he loved

Ran searching at my side?

… in the crowded room you rubbed your cheek

Death is lastly a debris

Folding on the folding sea:

Blankets, boxes, belts, and bones,

And a jelly on the stones.

There not to rest. He dies there the months over

In the causes of debate.

Waiting as at a trench, at the inside cover,

The burial before which we hesitate.

War poetry asks us to consider a still larger question: what is poetry for? Should it bear witness? Create beauty? Inspire change? All of the above? Through their calls for war poems, editors such as Henderson and Hine hinted at the utility of such work; by avoiding such calls—and by publishing an issue of Resistance poems only after the war had ended—the World War II editors took a different tack. The most compelling of Poetry’s war work, from Stevens to Starbuck, has in common high artistry rather than hot argument; testaments to death, they have nonetheless outlived their century.