War poems

Jessie Pope (1868-1941) was a jingoistic, pro-war writer who was very popular during the First World War. These days, she is mainly remembered because of the anger she roused in many poets who, unlike her, fought in the trenches. She glorified war and wrote enthusiastically about 'laddies' longing to 'charge and shoot' – as in The Call, featured in this 1915 edition of her war poems.

 

Wilfred Owen's most powerful war poem is probably Dulce et Decorum Est (which can be translated as 'It is sweet and fitting to die for one's country'). He wrote it in direct response to her own poems, and in an act of great irony, he originally dedicated the poem 'To Miss Jessie Pope' – but was later talked out of it. Instead, in the final stanza, he makes reference to her as he declares:

 

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,

Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues –

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori.

 

Many of Pope's war poems were published in the Daily Mail. No surprise there, then.

 

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