A war for Peace: Poets Against the war‪.‬

The relation between poetry and war is, as W. S. Merwin puts it, old as poetry itself; it can be traced back to Homer and Virgil with their epics of courage and valor, of heroes battling against evil and mythical gods bringing victory to the righteous. Today's wars, however, do not invoke mythical gods nor praise chivalry; modern wars, with their massive destruction and the reduction of the "moral" to economic power and control, cannot fit the "fairy tale" version of war where the "hero" restores the moral balance after a lot of "sacrifice" (Lakoff). (1) Both World War I and II have produced adequate examples of war poets and poems that have shaped our modern consciousness towards the miseries of war; the maimed soldier in Owen's poetry, and the general sense of futility represented in Auden's poetry have transformed war poetry from its glorious appeal of gallantry into a disappointment with the human condition. As Doug Talley puts it: "The pity of war, as distinguished from its patriotism and heroism, has become a persistent modern theme." Nonetheless, on the political level, wars are still justified as "an eternal justice," where "a heavenly banquet of heroes [is] in store for the fallen dead, and an evil enemy whose expatriation is the will of God" (Mersmann, 12). This belief coupled with the American imperial fervor, derived from an "implicit source of imperial right in terms of police action," where "the capacity to define, every time in an exceptional way, the demands of intervention," has caused a series of wars across the world (Negri, 17). Yet poets witnessing these modern wars, unlike the ancients who glorified war, or the moderns who "accepted war as unavoidable reality," resist war (Mersmann, 12). With words as their only weapon, poets resist, explain and oppose war: waging their own war: a war for peace.