Five War Poets

Above all else, it is the poetry of the First World War that that has seared the horror of this conflict onto our collective memory. It was a war of poets, as professional writers and ordinary humanity took up the pen to try to record, interpret, mourn, or simply bear witness. When we hear the term ‘war poets’, we immediately think of names like Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and Robert Graves, but there were hundreds if not thousands of poets writing across the world; men and women, combatants and non-combatants, whose names might not be as instantly familiar, but whose writing is no less haunting and beautiful.

In honour of Armistice Day, and in anticipation of Wordsworth Editions’ forthcoming collection For the Fallen: The Poetry of the First World War, here are five such voices that you may or may not know, all of whom are present in our new book alongside the more famous war poets.

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy (1883–1929) was an English writer, poet, and Anglican priest. Born in Leeds to Irish parents, Studdert Kennedy was educated at Leeds Grammar School and Trinity College, Dublin. Before the war, he was a curate at St Andrew’s Church, Rugby, becoming the vicar of St. Paul’s, Worcester, in 1914. Granted permission by his Bishop, he volunteered as an Army Chaplain in 1915. Popular with the men for his generosity and habit of swearing during sermons, he was affectionately nicknamed ‘Woodbine Willie’ for his love of Woodbine cigarettes, of which he always carried plentiful supplies to share with soldiers. He wrote under this name for his first volume of war poetry, Rough Rhymes of a Padre (1918). He was awarded the Military Cross after the Battle of Messines in 1917 for conspicuous gallantry and devotion to duty, searching No Man’s Land under heavy fire to save British and German casualties. His citation also notes that his ‘cheerfulness and endurance had a splendid effect upon all ranks in the front line trenches, which he constantly visited.’ Disillusioned by the war, Studdert Kennedy became a pacifist and converted to Christian socialism, working with the Industrial Christian Fellowship as an outspoken advocate for working-class rights. He became a prominent public speaker and his post-war books on social reform, in which he argued that the church should actively fight poverty and inequality, were bestsellers. A chronic asthmatic and a heavy smoker, Studdert Kennedy died suddenly after contracting flu doing a lecture tour aged 45. The Dean of Westminster refused a burial at the Abbey because of Studdert Kennedy’s socialism. He was buried in Worcester. Veterans and poor working people flocked to his funeral to pay their respects, many tossing packets of Woodbines into his grave. Five War Poets

 

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy

Sunday There and Here (1918)

Over there the bells are ringing,

Sunday bells are sweetly ringing,

Children’s voices softly singing,

Over there.

 

Over there are mothers kneeling

At their prayers, all lowly kneeling,

Down their cheeks the tears are stealing,

Over there.

 

Over here the shells are shrieking,

Hellish hatred shrilly shrieking,

Each its victim swiftly seeking,

Over here.

 

Over here their sons are falling,

Dearly loved their sons are falling,

Death is ever calling,—calling,

Over here. Five War Poets

 

Alan Seeger (1888–1916) was an American poet whose romanticism and idealism have led to frequent comparisons with Rupert Brooke. Born into an affluent New York business family, Seeger attended Harvard in the same year as T.S. Eliot, editing the literary magazine The Harvard Monthly. After graduating, Seeger pursued a bohemian lifestyle, first in Greenwich Village, then in Paris. When war broke out, he joined the French Foreign Legion partly to defend France, but also in search of meaning and adventure. He first saw action in the Battle of Champagne in September 1915, which ended in victory for German forces. While at the Front, Seeger kept a diary and wrote poems and letters, sending dispatches to the American newspaper The Sun and contributing the essay ‘As a Soldier Thinks of War’ to The New Republic in one of several attempts to influence the American government to enter the war. He was killed on the fourth of July in the attack on Belloy-en-Santerre during the Battle of the Somme and was buried in a mass grave. Seeger was posthumously awarded the Croix de Guerre and the Médaille militaire, and the bronze statue by Jean Boucher on the memorial to American volunteers in the Place des États-Unis, Paris, is based on him. After America entered the war in 1917, a posthumously published collection of Seeger’s war poetry went through six editions in a year. Seeger was the uncle of the folk singer and social activist Pete Seeger. Five War Poets

 

Alan Seeger

I Have a Rendezvous with Death (1915)

I have a rendezvous with Death

At some disputed barricade,

When Spring comes back with rustling shade

And apple blossoms fill the air—

I have a rendezvous with Death

When Spring brings back blue days and fair.

 

It may be he shall take my hand

And lead me into his dark land

And close my eyes and quench my breath—

It may be I shall pass him still.

I have a rendezvous with Death

On some scarred slope of battered hill,

When Spring comes round again this year

And the first meadow flowers appear.

 

God knows ’twere better to be deep

Pillowed in silk and scented down,

Where Love throbs out in blissful sleep,

Pulse nigh to pulse, and breath to breath,

Where hushed awakenings are dear …

But I’ve a rendezvous with Death

At midnight in some flaming town,

When Spring trips north again this year,

And I to my pledged word am true,

I shall not fail that rendezvous.

 

Georg Trakl (1887–1914) was an Austrian poet and a major figure in Expressionism, a Modernist movement based on subjective representation and the evocation of emotional experience. Trakl’s mother struggled with drug addiction, an affliction that passed to her son, who cannily chose an apprenticeship in pharmacy. His studies took him to Vienna in 1908 where he began publishing poetry, later falling in with the avant-garde set around the literary journal Der Brenner. The journal’s editor, Ludwig von Ficker, was a keen supporter, bringing Trakl’s writing to the attention of philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who anonymously provided him with a large grant. In August 1914, Trakl joined the Medical Corps of the Austrian Army as a lieutenant stationed in Galicia, where the depression he had always lived with became severe. After the Battle of Gródek, he was left unsupplied in charge of nearly a hundred casualties that he could do little to help in a barn outside which the bodies of deserters hung from trees. He cracked and tried to shoot himself but some soldiers intervened and he was sent to a military hospital where he wrote his final poems, ‘Lament’ and ‘Gródek’. He died of a cocaine overdose in November, which may or may not have been accidental. Five War Poets

Georg Trakl

In The East (1914)

Like the wild organs of the winter storm

Is the people’s gloomy rage,

The purple billow of battle

Of stars leaf-stripped.

With broken brows, silvery arms

The night beckons to dying soldiers.

In the autumnal ash tree’s shade

The ghosts of the killed are sighing.

 

Thorny wilderness surrounds the town.

From steps that bleeds the moon

Drives off dumbfounded women.

Wild wolves have burst through the gate.

 

Guillaume Apollinaire (1880–1918) was a French poet, novelist, dramatist, and art critic who helped shape the course of modern art and literature. Born Wilhelm Albert Włodzimierz Apolinary Kostrowicki in Rome to a Polish mother and an unidentified but possibly aristocratic father, he moved to Paris in his late teens, adopting the name Guillaume Apollinaire. Part of the artistic community hanging around Montmartre and Montparnasse, Apollinaire’s friends and collaborators included Pablo Picasso, Henri Rousseau, Gertrude Stein, André Breton, Jean Cocteau, Erik Satie, Marcel Duchamp and Jean Metzinger. Apollinaire coined the term ‘Cubism’ in 1911 to describe the emerging art movement pioneered by Picasso and Georges Braque, ‘Orphism’ (a more abstract offshoot of Cubism) in 1912, and ‘Surrealism’ in 1917 to describe the works of Erik Satie. His own poems are unpunctuated to be modern in form and subject, and in his Calligrammes: Poems of Peace and War 1913–1916, poems are visual and concrete, the arrangement of words on the page forming shapes and pictures. Though not a French citizen, Apollinaire volunteered immediately, serving first in the Artillery then the Infantry. He was honourably discharged in 1917 after receiving a severe shrapnel wound to the head from which he never fully recovered. Physically weak, though still working, he died during the Spanish flu pandemic two days before the Armistice. Five War Poets

Guillaume Apollinaire

Shadow (1917)

Here you are again near me

Memories of my companions who died in the war

The olive branch of time

Memories that become one

Like a hundred pelts make one fur coat

Like these thousands of wounds make one

Newspaper article

Impalpable and dark presence that has taken

The changing form of my shadow

An Indian on the lookout for Eternity

Shadow you crawl near me

But you no longer hear me

You will no longer know the divine poems that I sing

But I hear you still and see you still

Destinies

Multiple shadow may the sun preserve you

You who love so much you will never leave me

You who dance in the sun without stirring dust

Ink shadow of the sun

Signature of my light

Holder of sorrows

A god who humbles himself

 

Katharine Tynan (1859–1931) was a prolific Irish poet, author and journalist born in the Dublin suburb of Clondalkin, the fifth child of a large farming family. Tynan was educated at the Dominican Convent of St. Catherine in Drogheda, and had her first poem published when she was sixteen. She was a friend of the poets Gerard Manley Hopkins, W.B. Yeats and Francis Ledwidge, and an ardent supporter of Irish Nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, working for the Ladies’ Land League, run by Parnell’s younger sister Anna. Like Yeats, she had a deep and long-lasting interest in Celtic mythology. Tynan married the Dublin lawyer and classical scholar Henry Hinkson in 1893, and the couple lived and worked in London until moving to Claremorris in County Mayo in 1911, when Hinkson was appointed Resident Magistrate there. Part of the Irish Literary Revival, Tynan wrote about women, her Catholic faith, the plight of the poor, and the effects of the war, in which two of her sons fought. She wrote over 100 novels, 12 collections of short stories, five memoirs, and 14 books of poetry.

 

Katharine Tynan

High Summer (1917)

Pinks and syringa in the garden closes,

And the sweet privet hedge and golden roses,

The pines hot in the sun, the drone of the bee,

They die in Flanders to keep these for me.

 

The long sunny days and the still weather,

The cuckoo and blackbird shouting together,

The lambs calling their mothers out on the lea,

They die in Flanders to keep these for me. Five War Poets

 

All doors and windows open: the South wind blowing

Warm through the clean sweet rooms on tiptoe going,

Where many sanctities, dear and delightsome, be,

They die in Flanders to keep these for me.

 

Daisies leaping in foam on the green grasses,

The dappled sky and the stream that sings as it passes;

These are bought with a price, a bitter fee,

They die in Flanders to keep these for me.

Our edition of For The Fallen: The Poetry of the First World War is available from 1 December 2025 and can be found here: For The Fallen: The Poetry of the First World War

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Five War Poets