Taps, or Thomas Hardy's monumental drama, The Dynasts;—when these veritable war poems take hold upon us we have no need to seal our pleasure with any assurance that the writers did or did not physically participate in conflict. The true warrior-poet is born a poet, but becomes a warrior, and it is even possible that if his actual experience in war be too long continued it may dull and blunt that restless, inquiring, delicately registering organ, the poet's mind. The poet in the soldier, indeed, may rejoice at his experience so long as it offers food imaginatively convenient for him, but the essay at the artistic interpretation of war is, like all similar efforts, primarily a spiritual undertaking, conditioned rather upon qualities of personality than upon definite objective contacts, valuable as these latter may be in point of stimulus. Whether he wear uniform or mufti, the war poet must imagine war, and imagination,[1] Carveth Read tells us, "is not made of particular fact, but of infinite analogies of things, and of things that were never observed or thought of until analogy called them to life." True poets, as Ibsen thought, are really far-sighted, whether the thing that inspires them be concretely near or far. Undoubtedly, the artist who functions in a world at peace might gain much from travel, should oportunity offer, but in any case he realizes that the world is made up of its own miniatures, and that he who interprets in a catholic spirit the life about him interprets all life. So, in a war-torn world, the poet becomes sensitively aware of the dreads and longings, the prides and pities, engendered by war within his own interior spirit and within the spirits of those about him. It is in these that the subtler meanings and realities of war are most surely to be found.
Two points of difference, however, between the militant and the non-militant war poet are sometimes appreciable. The fighting poet seem seldom to display a spirit of personal hatred toward the enemy, but apparently reserves his hatred for the impersonal Wrong for whose sake the enemy fights.
- ↑ Carveth Read: The Function of Relations in Thought (The British Journal of Psychology, December, 1911).
Cf. the graphic story, The Red Badge of Courage, by Stephen Crane, written before he had experienced war at first-hand.
