One of those many ‘leftovers’ from a poetry presentation to senior high teachers I, ironically, never got to try myself.
Remembrance Day: War Poetry
Read John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields”, then discuss how war has provoked much writing on the theme. Invite student groups to pick one of the following poets to research via the Internet. Groups can do a brief presentation about their poet providing a brief biographical note on the writer’s involvement or response to war, followed by a reading or representation of a war poem, with some personal response to what the poet has to say about the subject.
Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Edward Thomas, Sigfried Sassoon,
Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg, Julian Grenfell, Francis Ludwidge,
Robert Graves, Edmund Blunden, Ivor Gurney, David Jones,
W.N. Hodgson, Alan Seeger, Richard Dennys, E. Wyndham Tennant,
Leslie Coulson, Arthur Graeme West, Hamish Mann, Horace Bray,
Bernard Freeman, Trotter Henry, Lamont Simpson
Additionally/alternately, specific poems might be searched such as:
“The Fifth Sense” (Patricia Beer)
“The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” (Randall Jarrell)
“Apocalypse” (D.J. Enright)
“Masters of War” (Bob Dylan)
“Goodnight Saigon” (Billy Joel)
“This Excellent Machine” (John Lehmann)
“Reason for Refusal” (Martin Bell)
“The Hand That Signed the Paper Felled a City” (Dylan Thomas)
“Hate” (James Stephens)
“The Man He Killed” (Thomas Hardy)
“Familial” aka “Family History” (Jacques Prevert)
“There Will Come Soft Rains” (Sara Teasdale)
“With God on Our Side” (Bob Dylan)
“Last Night I Had the Strangest Dream” (Ed McCurdy; Simon & Garfunkle version)
“Grass” (Carl Sandburg)
“Selective Service” (Carolyn Forche)
“Cambodia” (James Fenton)
“Ode for the American Dead in Asia” (Thomas McGrath)
“Facing It” (Yusef Komunyakaa)
“Phrase Book” (Jo Sharpcott)
“Every Day” (Ingeborg Bachmann)
“The End and the Beginning” (Wislawa Szymborska)
“The People of the Other Village” (Thomas Lux)
“The Lilacs and the Roses” (Louis Aragon)
“These Are Facts” (Ruthven Todd)
“The Naming of Parts” (Henry Reed)
“Retribution” (Ilya Ehrenburg)
“How to Kill” (Keith Douglas)
“A Front” (Randall Jarrell)