Welcome!
Welcome to http://warpoets.wordpress.com, the weblog of the War Poets Association (see our website at www.warpoets.org).
We aim to be an international site and association on war poetry, the war poets and their lives and work. One objective in setting up this blog is that the War Poets Association (WPA) will be able to publicise many relevant war poetry events from around the world here. Individuals can post news of events or other information directly to the blog, which is moderated.
Please contribute in a language other than English if you wish – we ask only that you tell us which language it is, if that is not already clear to English users.
Here’s our list of forthcoming war poetry-related events for November or after:
Not a member of the WPA? Join today!
Please follow the relevant link below for more information about each event. If you know of a forthcoming event or publication and would like it to be included here, but cannot post the information directly, e-mail editor@warpoets.org.
Events:
Friday 25th November 2011 with a poetry reading at 8.00pm on 24th November:
Saturday 21st January 2012, 7.30 pm:
View a YouTube clip of ‘Severn and the Somme’ Film.
Guardian Books Podcast: Armistice Day.
Guardian Quiz: First World War Poetry. How much do you know?
Enduring Freedom: An Afghan Anthology.
Vivien Noakes, 1937 – 2011. An Obituary by Jean Liddiard.
The English Association: The Poetry of the Great War Special Interest Group Formed.
Graves on Graves: BBC Podcast: Witness: World War I Poetry.
War Poetry Review 2010 Published in Printed and Electronic Editions.
Hedd Wyn
The Passchendaele Society, which managed the memorial Museum Passchendaele 1917, has launched an appeal to raise money for a memorial to the men of Wales who died during the Battle of Passchendaele as well as elsewhere during the conflict. Hedd Wyn has become the most prominent representative of the many Welsh who volunteered for the First World War and lost their lives in the fields of Flanders.
Hedd Wyn, which means “blessed peace,” was the pen name of Welsh poet Ellis Humphrey Evans, born inTrawsfynydd, North Wales, in 1887. The son of sheep farmers, he was a poet from an early age, writing in the Welsh language and winning several competitions. He volunteered for the war in February of 1917, but returned to Wales on leave to help with the farming. During that time he wrote what is considered his masterpiece, Yr Arwr (The Hero). Evans was killed on 31 July, 1917 in the battle of Pilckem Ridge, near Ypres, in which Edmund Blunden’s Royal Sussex Regiment was also invoplved. On 6 September, he was elected, under the name of Fleur de Lys, as chief bard at the National Eisteddfod, the Welsh language poetry competition. When Fleur de Lys was called on to accept the award, no-one rose, and it was announced that the winner had in fact died on the battlefield two months earlier.
Third Ypres or the Battle of Passchendaele (July – November 1917) took place in atrocious conditions that have become iconic of trench warfare: constant rain, thick mud, bloody slaughter and indeterminate goals. The dead and wounded by the end of the battle came to about half a million: 300,000 on the Allied and 200,000 on the German side. Another poet, the Irishman Francis Ledwidge, also died at Passchendaele. Both Hedd Wyn and Francis Ledwidge lie buried at Artillery Farm military cemetery, to the north-east of Ypres. One of the German casualties, injured in a British gas attack, was the then 28-year-old Adolf Hitler.
The Irish and the Scots both have their own memorial to the fallen of the battles of the Ypres Salient, but as yet the Welsh did not. Erwin Ureel, secretary of the Passchendaele Society, told the BBC: “This was something we had been thinking of for a number of years; we wanted to do something for the Welshmen”. If the appeal is successful, the Welsh monument is to be inaugurated in
2017, on the anniversary of the battle, in Langemark. There you can already find a memorial plaque as a tribute to Hedd Wyn.
2011.11.11
Dear all
Ypres at this very moment is thronged with literally thousands of people from abroad and home who are coming here, musing and reminiscing. The overriding colour in the city is red, the colour of the poppy and the Royal British Legion. On Armistice Day alone, 8,000 visitors attended the special Remembrance ceremony at the Menin Gate.
Even though I do not usually think of myself as being a stickler for anything, I sometimes wonder if the right colour of the poppy should not be white rather than red. I hesitate to write this, but perhaps in a way the customs and accoutrements that officialdom is adhering to might indeed create the impression that war is a glorious thing, rather than being a reminder of the deaths and the damage to families and generations that are caused by it. Instead, the white poppy – see also http://www.ppu.org.uk/whitepoppy/index.html – that is only rarely seen is merely a sign of peace. When one watches the Menin Gate from the outside, one gets the impression of seeing a triumphal arch devoted to King and Country (Pro Rege et Patria); only when one stands inside its vaults, will one be overwhelmed by the inescapable and saddening sight of the nearly 55,000 names that never found a decent grave. Against this background, I wonder whether at all it was surprising that Siegfried Sassoon wrote such scathing words about the inauguration of the Gate in his ‘On Passing the New Menin Gate’ in 1928.
In line with this Remembrance-tide I have made so bold as to enclose my personal (and rather free) rendering of an existing poem in Dutch written by the late poet Herman De Coninck (1944-1977). In it he mixes his personal impressions upon coming to Ypres to attend the Last Post at 8 p.m., and his memories of Edmund Blunden’s poetry. My poem was published some time ago in the Siegfried Sassoon Newsletter.
Here it is:
Last Post
Tonight and headed for Ypres. It was getting on for six.
I was heading West, towards three-storey
Dali-like clouds that were
pur-
sued by gale force nine
winds, heaven being blown away from earth:
I had to let go of it, I rode and rode, 100 miles an hour,
every minute falling ten minutes behind. It
was receding, that sunset
horizon of mine.
When I arrive at Ypres it is 1917. Germans have had the sun
Blasted to smithereens. The light that lingers still, is the light of explosions.
I find myself within a poem by Edmund Blunden.
From the trenches he writes an ode to the poppy.
Earth has a boastful superego of flowers about itself.
Blunden has them literally in his sights.
Here it is for a couple of long years
The penultimate second before one dies.
The only thing around here is flea-bites.
Later under the Menin Gate I hear the Last Post:
Three bugles which cast you back up to ninety years
And you hear them pierce right through
The leftovers of marrow and bone.
I should like to dedicate my poem to anyone who has ever fallen a victim to war violence anywhere, to the poets and the words they use(d) to mould their feelings and thoughts about this and turned sadness into the consolation of words, and to our wonderful party I had the privilege to be with on our Tour.
How meaningful it was, as Edmund Blunden writes in the Introduction to his Undertones of War, to “go over the ground again” together, lest we forget…
Best wishes from Flanders Fields,
Chris
The discovery of Sassoon’s M.C. in a chest in an attic on Mull raises the question of why the medal hasn’t come to light long before now. And why also people have the idea that the medal itself had been thrown away? As the Evening Standard article reminds us Sassoon in Memoirs of an Infantry Officer has Sherston rip the M.C. ribbon off his tunic and throw it into the mouth of the Mersey and watch it float away. Sassoon’s recent biographers all agree it was the ribbon and not the medal that was thrown into the water. However John Stuart Roberts in his life of Sassoon tells us also that most reports of the incident say that Sassoon threw the medal itself into the Mersey. This may explain things. Sassoon himself presumably never said anything, other than through Sherston, to contradict the idea.
What else is in the chest?
Following our conversations about weblogs at our meeting in Wimbledon today (Saturday 9th Dec. 2006,) this is to start the ball rolling (and hopefully the discussion too!) by adding this post to the WPA’s own weblog, here at http://warpoets.wordpress.com. This ‘blog’ can also be accessed directly from the link on the front page of our website at http://www.warpoets.org.
I’ll look forward to seeing some further contributions from the ‘Wimbledon Group’!