Collection

War Poetry

Poems and prose about conflict, armed conflict, and poetry's role in shaping perceptions and outcomes of war.

Articles About War And War Poetry

- 100 Years of Poetry: The Magazine and War
  Abigail Deutsch
A historical look at the role of poetry in wartime.
- American Service
  Paisley Rekdal
Veterans Day and a citizenship based on hope.
- A “Poetry-Fueled War”
  Ruth Graham
During the Civil War, poetry didn’t just respond to events; it shaped them.
- Craft Vs. Conscience
  Ange Mlinko
How the Vietnam War destroyed the friendship between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov.
- Poetry, Wartime, and Unwieldy Metaphors
  Cliff Doerksen
Poets participate in a panel on war and peace poems.
- War Stories
  Evan Smith Rakoff
Veteran Kevin Powers’s celebrated novel The Yellow Birds has its origins in his poetry.
- “Are We All Monsters?”
  Jacob Silverman
Philip Schultz’s The Wherewithal grapples with the Holocaust, poverty, Vietnam, and then some.

Essays From poetry Magazine

- Poems, Bombs, and the Road to Baghdad
  Matthew Doherty
- Everyone Is an Immigrant
  Eliza Griswold
- Sarajevo Blues
  Aleksandar Hemon
- Romance and Reality
  Lt. Gen. William James Lennox Jr.
- Like Soldiers Marching
  Rachel Cohen
- How With This Rage
  Chris Hedges
- When Yellow Ribbons and Flag-Waving Aren't Enough
  Nathaniel Fick

Contemporary Poems (post-1945)

- We Lived Happily During the War
  Ilya Kaminsky
- Vietnam Epic Treatment
  Donald Revell
- Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)
  Muriel Rukeyser
- The Hurt Locker
  Brian Turner
- The End and the Beginning
  Wisława Szymborska
- Don't Let Me Be Lonely: “I don't usually talk to strangers...”
  Claudia Rankine
- Casualty
  Seamus Heaney
- Camouflaging the Chimera
  Yusef Komunyakaa
- To Our Land
  Mahmoud Darwish
- Ode for the American Dead in Asia
  Thomas McGrath
- Gettysburg: July 1, 1863
  Jane Kenyon
- Wildpeace
  Yehuda Amichai
- The Conscientious Objector
  Karl Shapiro
- The Grand Army of the Republic
  John Spaulding
- By the Well of Living and Seeing, Part II, Section 28: “During the Second World War”
  Charles Reznikoff
- “After Experience Taught Me ...”
  W. D. Snodgrass
- At the Bomb Testing Site
  William E. Stafford
- Healing Gila
  Lawson Fusao Inada
- The Lost Pilot
  James Tate
- Apparition of the Exile
  Bruce Weigl
- Making Peace
  Denise Levertov
- Ode to a Drone
  Amit Majmudar
- High Noon at Los Alamos
  Eleanor Wilner

Classic Poems (pre-1945)

- On being asked for a War Poem
  William Butler Yeats
- What the Birds Said
  John Greenleaf Whittier
- Insensibility
  Wilfred Owen
- Love among the Ruins
  Robert Browning
- Concord Hymn
  Ralph Waldo Emerson
- Battle-Hymn of the Republic
  Julia Ward Howe
- Long, too long America
  Walt Whitman
- Armistice
  Sophie Jewett
- Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight
  Vachel Lindsay
- September, 1918
  Amy Lowell
- If We Must Die
  Claude McKay
- I Have a Rendezvous with Death
  Alan Seeger
- Anthem for Doomed Youth
  Wilfred Owen
- Arms and the Boy
  Wilfred Owen
- Strange Meeting
  Wilfred Owen
- Easter, 1916
  William Butler Yeats
- Grass
  Carl Sandburg
- Dreamers
  Siegfried Sassoon
- The Charge of the Light Brigade
  Alfred, Lord Tennyson
- Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field one Night
  Walt Whitman
- The French Revolution as It Appeared to Enthusiasts at Its Commencement
  William Wordsworth