Contemporary War Poems

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Excerpt from Contemporary War Poems: December, 1914 The poems of this collection have been chosen to illustrate the emotional attitudes of the United States toward the war, as those attitudes find expression in newspaper and magazine verse. At another time the literary merits of these pieces would invite judgment or comment, now, however, the suitability of war poems for the purpose of an anthology is a very minor question, and it is therefore not as a literary museum that these verses are offered, but as social documents, as evidence of the state of our civilization at this moment. Of course the emotional attitudes of a nation may unfortunately change from day to day, and it is quite possible that before these selections are in print they may have ceased to represent the national feeling, but at this moment at least we may read in them certain well-defined and common attitudes which are all the more significant since the individual poems were written in various circumstances, and come together here almost by accident. The first observation the reader will make is that the glamor of war has not touched these poems, here are no stirring battle songs and no heroic ballads. Perhaps the newspaper correspondent and the newspaper photograph have made war too frightfully real for any but a horrified treatment, perhaps warfare has ceased for the moment at least to be an idea of any sort, alluring or otherwise, and has become, or has tended to become, for the public consciousness simply an ugly and stupefying fact. But however we explain it, the absence of glamor from these verses on the war is a new and interesting phenomenon. Even when war has been condemned in itself, poets have usually recognized the moral value of certain of its by-products, or have justified the battles fought in a good cause. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.