War poetry

A war poet is usually defined as a poet who participates in a war and writes about his experiences. While the term is applied especially to those who served during World War I, it is documented as early as 1848, in reference to German revolutionary poet, Georg Herwegh. and is now applied to a poet writing about any war. However, Tennyson wrote probably one of the most famous war poems of the nineteenth century, and another non-combatant, Thomas Hardy, wrote major war poetry.

As the American Civil War was beginning, American poet Walt Whitman published his poem "" as a patriotic rally call for the North. Whitman volunteered for a time as a nurse in the army hospitals, and his collection Drum-Taps (1865) deals with his experiences during the War.

Probably the most famous nineteenth century war poem is Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade", which he supposedly wrote in only a few minutes after reading an account of the battle in The Times. As poet laureate he often wrote verses about public events. It immediately became hugely popular, even reaching the troops in the Crimea, where it was distributed in pamphlet form .

Rudyard Kipling's poem "The Last of the Light Brigade", written some forty years after the appearance of "The Charge of the Light Brigade", in 1891, focuses on the terrible hardships faced in old age by veterans of the Crimean War, as exemplified by the cavalry men of the Light Brigade, in an attempt to shame the British public into offering financial assistance. Various lines from the poem are randomly quoted by Mr. Ramsay in Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse.

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