Love And Death: War Elegies by Whitman, Owen, Douglas and more

Mark Ford and Seamus Perry

7 July 2025

As long as there have been poets, they have been writing war elegies. In this episode, Mark and Seamus discuss responses to the American Civil War (Walt Whitman), both world wars (W.B. Yeats, Wilfred Owen, Rudyard Kipling, Keith Douglas) and the conflict in Northern Ireland (Michael Longley) to explore the way these very different poems share an ancient legacy. Spanning 160 years and energised by competing ideas of art and war, these soldiers, carers and civilians are united by a need that Mark and Seamus suggest is at the root of poetry, to memorialise the dead in words.

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Poems discussed in this episode:

Walt Whitman, ‘Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45478/vigil-strange-i-kept-on-the-field-one-night

Wilfred Owen, ‘Futility’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57283/futility-56d23aa2d4b57

Keith Douglas, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’
https://warpoets.org.uk/worldwar2/poem/vergissmeinnicht/

W.B. Yeats, ‘An Irish Airman foresees his Death’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57311/an-irish-airman-foresees-his-death

Michael Longley, ‘The Ice-Cream Man’
https://poetryarchive.org/poem/ice-cream-man/

Rudyard Kipling, ‘Epitaphs of the War’
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/57409/epitaphs-of-the-war

Further listening:

The Long and Short: Memorial and Dart by Alice Oswald

Political Poems: ‘Strange Meeting’ by Wilfred Owen

Political Poems: ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d’ by Walt Whitman

Political Poems: ‘Easter 1916’ by W.B. Yeats

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