Close Readings Love and Death: War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more
As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Walt Whitman), both world wars (W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Keith Douglas) and the conflict in Northern Ireland (Michael Longley) to explore the way these very different poems share an ancient legacy. Spanning 160 years and energised by competing ideas of art and war, these soldiers, carers and civilians are united by a need that Mark and Seamus suggest is at the root of poetry, to memorialise the dead in words.
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Poems discussed in this episode:
Walt Whitman, ‘Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45478/vigil-strange-i-kept-on-the-field-one-night
Wilfred Owen, ‘Futility’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57283/futility-56d23aa2d4b57
Keith Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’
https://warpoets.org.uk/worldwar2/poem/vergissmeinnicht/
W.B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman foresees his Death’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57311/an-irish-airman-foresees-his-death
Michael Longley, ‘The Ice-Cream Man’
https://poetryarchive.org/poem/ice-cream-man/
Rudyard Kipling, ‘Epitaphs of the War’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57409/epitaphs-of-the-war
Further reading in the LRB:
Ian Hamilton on Keith Douglas’s letters:
http://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n03/ian-hamilton/tough-guy
Jonathan Bate on war poetry:
http://lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v06/n22/jonathan-bate/players-please
Poems by Michael Longley published in the LRB:
https://www.lrb.co.uk/contributors/michael-longley
Next episode: Family elegies by William Wordsworth, Denise Riley, Anne Carson and Robert Lowell.