While it is fitting to focus attention on poets who expose the horror of war and the suffering of the soldiers, there were some whose work expressed different preoccupations.
Francis Ledwidge was an Irish poet who joined the British army and died at the beginning of the third battle of Ypres on 31 July 1917. The specific national context within which Ledwidge wrote is highly significant, as during the Great War an undivided Ireland was part of the United Kingdom. Young men hastened to volunteer there, as elsewhere, and served in the army without hesitation; but others had to consider their position carefully, and Ledwidge was one of these. Since the nineteenth century there had been a strong political movement for Home Rule in Ireland — in other words, for Ireland to be ruled by the Irish, and not from Britain. Some of those who held these views were anti-British and some were identified in this way by others. Even to this day, Irish attitudes to those who fought in the war are ambivalent, and only recently have they begun to change.
Your organisation does not have access to this article.
Sign up today to give your students the edge they need to achieve their best grades with subject expertise
Subscribe
