Patterns of 20th Century Anti-War Poetry in World Literature

Author(s): Robert J. Clements

Source: Comparative Literature Studies , Sep., 1981, Vol. 18, No. 3, Papers of the Seventh
Triennial Meeting of the American Comparative Literature Association (Sep., 1981), pp.
353-361
Published by: Penn State University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40246274

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

Penn State University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access
to Comparative Literature Studies

This content downloaded from

194.199.3.13 on Wed, 13 Jul 2022 14:39:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Patterns of 20th Century
Anti-War Poetry
in World Literature

ROBERT J. CLEMENTS

World Literature or Weltliteratur, the maximum geographical di-

mension of Comparative Literature, has been coming slowly to frui-
tion over many years. Some literary scholars approaching the chal-
lenge chose rather to pose the difficulties than the potentialities,
noting for example that a world-wide course on tragedy is unrealiz-
able since Indian and Eastern literatures lack tragedy as defined by
Aristotle and as practised in the West. In writing the lead article for
the first issue of World Literature Today (formerly Books Abroad) I
documented the reasons why the challenge of organizing World Lit-
erature courses could now be accepted.
These reasons I further developed in the recent book Comparative
Literature as Academic Discipline, sustaining the thesis that we are
now sufficiently equipped with literary texts, studies, and bibliogra-
phies in available languages to start organizing syllabi for courses on
several themes, forms, movements, and interrelationships. I imple-
mented two break-through graduate courses, offering syllabi on Epic
Poetry in World Literature and Twentieth-Century Poetry of Protest
in World Literature. Such courses would include readings from the
five continental land-masses, as well as Indonesia, the Philippines,
and other major areas.
For our present purposes and because of limitation of space I
shall reduce the second course mentioned above to the topic of
anti-war poetry in World Literature. Indeed, even for this reduced
subject our sampling of poems must be a careful one in view of the
abundance of materials (see below). The subject of war and its de-
mands is appropriate by its very ancientness and universality, since
wars have been the objects of poetry as far back as Gilgamesh and
the Iliad. For this paper and a larger study to follow, the poems of
protest will be limited chiefly to poets writing between roughly 1930
to 1980.
A linguistic atlas of the educated writers on our five continents
would show the dominance of English in the international literary
world. This is of course an incentive to counteract the old assumption
that World Literature presents too many problems of language to be
©1981 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
0010-4132/81/0900-0353/100.90/0
353

This content downloaded from

194.199.3.13 on Wed, 13 Jul 2022 14:39:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
354 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

undertaken on a large scale. The purpose of the pres

demonstrate the viability of the discipline precisely
vast number of anglophone writers born to a langua
glish or born to languages which only recently repla
glish as a literary language is present in varying deg
ica, much of Europe, Australia, New Zealand, the
Indonesia, the Middle East, and many former Brit
well-known decision of the Présence Africaine group
glish or French for a universal audience (the official
for example, remains English) has influenced minor-
elsewhere. The dominance of English - and of tran
glish by UNESCO and other agencies - makes cour
ature possible and viable. Works assigned in such c
a majority of English-language texts, supported by w
guages which trained comparatists are obliged to lear
least three foreign languages other than one's native
to a good start, especially if English is one of the fo
A step forward in the planning of World Literatur
the August 1981 Conference on World Literature
Study Center at Bellagio, Italy. On this occasion co
will be established and discussed by an internation
they will be made available to interested comparatist
To undertake the brief essay planned in the presen
might serve also as the syllabus of a World Literatur
the same title as the paper, the poetry of protest w
ten major themes associated with war. It will be not
indicate a topical progression, starting with the open
of war and ending with peace and reconciliation:

1. The Outbreak of war, Patriotism, Mobilization, Alignments, A

Invasion
2 imperialism, Colonizations, East-West, Third World
3.Capitalism, Communism, Socialism, Fascism, Class warfare
4.Bombs, Weapons, Genocide, Overkill, Carpet bombing, Pointless
death
5 Political prison and torture, Police state, Tyranny, Exile, Martyrdom
6.Civil war, Class warfare, Revolt, Revolution, Divisions, Strikes
7 .Secular, Racial, Religious, Territorial conflicts, Racism, Underdogs
8.Religion, Church, Churchmen, White gods, Black gods, Death of gods
9.Freedom achieved, Freedom lost, Freedom for Whom?
lOJeace, Reconciliation, Reconstruction, Veterans, Mankind, One world

Of these ten anti-war thematic areas, the present paper will be con-
fined to the fourth group above: bombs (including nuclear bombs),
weapons, genocide, overkill, etc.
The most frightening aspect of twentieth-century warfare was the

This content downloaded from

194.199.3.13 on Wed, 13 Jul 2022 14:39:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 CLEMENTS 355

massive unleashing of bom

planes themselves were ha
cities as well as battlefie
dobro wrote "Ecuatorial"
Europe:

De las cabezas prematuras

brotan alas ardientes
Y en la trinchera ecuatorial
trizada a trechos
Bajo la sombra de los aeroplanos vivos
Los soldados cantaban en las tardes duras
Las ciudades de Europa
se apagan una a una (NLP, 50)

Poets everywhere were aghast at the effective destruction of Guer-

nica and Badajoz, and it seemed during the thirties that carpet bomb-
ing was the ultimate development of air warfare. As Maurice English
wrote in his poem "The Benediction":

A voice goes seeking, calling:

"Cain, Cain, Cain! Where is your brother Abel?"
"Abel your brother - where is Abel, Cain?"
In bombed Guernica and in Badajoz,
Calling among the ruins of those stones. (WSWB, 38)

Paul Éluard was a close friend of Pablo Picasso and shared the lat-
ter's indignation over the bombing of the Basque mountain town of
Guernica by German pleines. Picasso, as everyone knows, painted his
feelings in an explosive recreation of death and demolition. The sur-
realist, communist poet created a fragmentary, free-verse poem mod-
eled on the cubist, parceled technique of his comrade. The poem es-
chews realism and chronicled fact. Keeping aloof from the perpetra-
tors, Éluard wonders how such aliens to humanity could even exist:

Votre mort va servir d'exemple . . .

Ils saluaient les cadavres,
Ils s'accablaient de politesses.
Ils persévèrent ils exagèrent ils ne sont pas
de notre monde.

As a final irony Éluard entitled his poem, "La Victoire de Guernica."

Another view of Guernica was presented by Roy Campbell, the Na-
tionalist poet arrived at Oxford from Natal, South Africa:

To blame us for the Red's subhuman crimes,

Guernica dynamited from within

This content downloaded from

194.199.3.13 on Wed, 13 Jul 2022 14:39:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
356 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

He lays to Franco's aeroplanes the sin,

And with humanitarian fuss makes bold
To "Save Bilbao's children" (and its gold). (PSCW, 118)

Campbell's poetry alleged as well that the "Reds" had planes "blitz-
ing" before the Rightists:

When with our cities blown about our ears

We bore in silence what they bawl in tears
Before we had a bomber fledged to fly,
And months before we ventured to reply. (PSCW, 117)

Bertolt Brecht was of course quick to attack the Rightists and es-
pecially the German Luftwaffe for the first bombing Transmuting the
German aviators into a single symbolic "brother," he mourns this
bombardier who now lies buried on the Guadarrama hilltops.

Mein Bruder war ein Flieger

Eines Tags bekam er eine Kart
Er hat seine Kiste eingepackt
Und sudwarts ging die Fahrt.
Mein Bruder ist ein Eroberer
Unserm Volke fehlt's an Raum
Und Grund und Boden zu kriegen, ist
Bei uns ein alter Traum.

Der Raum, den mein Bruder eroberte

Liegt in Guadarramassiv.
Er ist lang einen Meter achtzig
Und ein Meter funfzig tief. (PSCW, 263)

Yet the most frightening aspect of twentieth-century warfare was

the employment of atomic and nuclear weapons. The anglophone
world was reminded of John Milton's vision: "All air seemed then /
Conflict and Fire." Poets everywhere responded to the destruction of
Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The firebombing of Tokyo was a fore-warning
of course. The Japanese surrealist Shinkichi Takahashi reacted to this
event by a poem with a contradictory title, "Broken Glasses." Struck
by the fact that the mobs have burned his chrysanthemums but spared
his spectacles, he wrote:

The slaughter keeps on continuously,

The bombs of the bombing planes
are released like waterfalls . . .

The ground is completely filling with poisonous gases.

Among the accumulating smells of rotting
there is only one thing that is not shaken,
an abandoned pair of glasses. (MJP, 97)

This content downloaded from

194.199.3.13 on Wed, 13 Jul 2022 14:39:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 CLEMENTS 357

The writer Kuniso Hatanaka of Hiroshima describes in "Inertia Over-

come" the agonies of his family after the atomic blast. "On the twenty-
third day after the atomic-bomb explosion, my small boy died. He is
buried in a quiet cemetery in my home village. Though memorial ser-
vices are held each year in Hiroshima for the victims, no one visits my
son's grave." He adds an elegiac three lines:

On a hill in our village

my son sleeps
While Hiroshima memorials are held again. (CFP, 182)

American poets were equally appalled at the power of the bomb.

Margaret Rockwell's "Hiroshima" recalls the event as an awesome
Oriental bestiary:

One August morning, still and very clear

Came the superfortress from the south,
Dragon with a lantern in his mouth
To light the way to hell, proud pioneer;
Red fig dropped slow and first, as if to feed
A thousand angels, burst to blue-white glow -
Then broke all fury's furnace, and below
Tombstones bleached and tottered and the seed
Fell down in mortal rain . . . (POP, 9)

Recalling the victim Sadako Sasaki who tried to forestall radiation

death by folding a thousand cranes, only to die and become a statue
in the Peace Park at Hiroshima, Joseph Langland composed his "Hiro-
shima Lullaby." Noting the return of the cranes in the wake of the dis-
aster, Langland tried to console the spirit of the victim:

The Hiroshima birds

came back across the sea
into the city square.
Sleep now, Sadako, sleep! (POP, 131)

Other American poets stood in awe of this tragic event. Lindley

Hubbell reported later on the rebuilt city and its bustle, concluding:
"But we knew we were standing / Where the end of the world began"
(WSWB, 148). Poet Lucien Stryk's "Return to Hiroshima" recounts
the later self-justification of the bombardier and pilot and of three
moribund survivors, "hands gripped like children in a ring." (WSWB,
131)
Shortly after the bombs had fallen on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the
Malay poet Usman Awang decided that man had attained the ultimate
destruction and that the earth was bound to become "The Smiling
World" ("Dunya yang Senyum"), as he entitled his poem:

This content downloaded from

194.199.3.13 on Wed, 13 Jul 2022 14:39:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
358 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

Around us the world is an atomic fragment,

Crater factories are not for smiles.
Where shall we shelter when they erupt, roaring? . . .
The peace-loving voices fly on wings, soaring . . .
Change the bombs for balloons for children to dance with. (MMV, 23)

Even in Asia the atomic bomb became a prodigious and daring ac-
complishment, a metaphor of dynamism. An anonymous Chinese sol-
dier wrote in "Three Atomic Bombs" of 1959:

The challenge to think, to speak, to act

Is like three atomic bombs
Blasting open a thousand years of superstition,
Shattering ten thousand of inferiority complex. (MCP, 246)

The holocausts of which nuclear weapons are capable do not mini-

mize the terror which lesser bombs are capable of instilling among
soldiers and civilians. The sudden attack of incendiary bombs and
their impact is expressed by the Chinese poet Ya Hsien in a minimum
of words, in the economy of haiku or tanka. As a navy commander
he did not subjectivize or waste words even at his mother's death:

When spring was over

Incendiary bombs lifted up the main street like a fan.
In the demolished red
Sandalwood chair
My mother's stiff smile rose straight upward to become a memory.
(ACCL, 191)

The carpet bombing in Viet Nam allowed for the most efficient mass
slaughter, as related in Pham Nha Uyen's poem "Night of Agony."

Through blackened agony I still recall

those stark colored slashes in the sky,
people surrendering in the moment of agony,
their last cries sinking to the heart of earth
as they cling to a small door frame. (TYVP, 198)

The Vietnamese poet Thich Nhat-Hanh recalls similar bombings in

his poem "Condemnation."

Yesterday six Viet Cong came through my village.

Because of this my village was bombed - completely destroyed.
Every soul was killed . . .
The pagoda has neither roof nor altar.
Only the foundations of houses are left. (POP, 40)

This content downloaded from

194.199.3.13 on Wed, 13 Jul 2022 14:39:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 CLEMENTS 359

One thinks of Lieutenan

throes of Viet Nam were
Levertov in "What were
most Americans at the time.

When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies

And the water buffalo stepped surely along terraces,
Maybe fathers told their sons old tales.
When the bombs smashed the mirrors
there was only time to scream. (WSWB, 53)

The Chinese Lo Fu was as a reporter a witness to the sufferings of

both North and South Viet Nam. His collection Poems of Saigon at-
test to the incendiary bombing and the tank warfare:

Bloom: the bars on Saturday

Bloom: the bombs on Wednesday
The tank walks chewing a hamburger
Whereas the machine-gun is a Dadaist
Elevating the stagnant water in the street
To become a stretch of twilight
Therefore
When a bunch of bullets fly from the southgate to the northgate
When we light ourselves within
A furious lamp (ACCL, 84)

Before turning to the continent of Africa, let us continue our census

of anti-war poetry with a second condemnation of the Luftwaffe (the
first being Paul Eluard's) by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. In his poem, "The
Companion," the Russian poet recalls being on a civilian train which
was dive-bombed by German airforce planes. He writes:

We got cut off from our grandmothers

while the Germans were dive-bombing the train.
Katya was her name. She was nine.
I'd no idea what I could do about her,
but doubt quickly dissolved to certainty:
I'd have to take this thing under my wing . . .
So on and on
we walked without thinking of rest
passing craters, passing fire,
under the rocking sky of '41
tottering crazy on its smoking columns. (WSWb, 127-8)

The collections of Black African poetry, so deeply concerned with

the roots, problems, and ethos of the African people, concern them-
selves little with nuclear or even incendiary bombs. Except for local,

This content downloaded from

194.199.3.13 on Wed, 13 Jul 2022 14:39:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
360 COMPARATIVE LITERATURE STUDIES

sporadic bombing of recent date, aerial warfare is no

familiar concerns of their verse. A rare mention of
"Young Africa's Plea," written in a modification o
nis Osadebay. Despite his general admiration for t
ters of Britannia who gave me hospitals, who gave m
tains grievances against the guns and bombs which
Africa:

I no get gun, I no get bomb

I no Ht fight no more;
You bring your cross and make me dumb
My heart get plenty sore.
You tell me close my eyes and pray,
Your brudder thief my land away. (ALTC, 160)

The massive bombardments of European countries in World War II

brought concern to Leopold Senghor of Senegal, at Africa' western-
most tip. In his poem "Aux soldats négro-americains" he asks:

Frères, je ne sais si c'est vous qui avez bombardé les cathédrales,

orgueil de l'Europe.
Si vous êtes la foudre dont la main de dieu a brûlé Sodome et Gomorre.
Non, vous êtes les messagers de sa merci, le souffle du Printemps
après l'Hiver.

In other areas of protest undertaken in the larger tenfold survey of

which these pages are a part, the voice of the African will ring more
loud and clear.
In the examples of polemic verse examined above, one finds the
poets recurring to a gentle, contained, and regretful disapproval of
some of the greatest atrocities of modern warfare. They seem to
ascribe guilt not to one group or another, but to mankind itself. Rare
are the exceptions, like Huard's angry outcry, "Ils ne sont pas de
notre monde."
Recalling that the dimensions of World Literature are temporal as
well as spatial, let us remember the awesome warning of the apostle
John in his Apocalypsis, reminding us that sooner or later warring
men will destroy the world: "Tanquam mons magnus igne ardens
missus est in mare, et facta est tertia pars maris sanguis et mortua est
tertia pars creaturae eorum, quae habebant animas in mare, et tertia
pars navium interiit." This prophecy haunted the Japanese trainman
and writer Mankichi Matsuyama of Nagasaki between the first and
the second atomic bomb in August 1945.

ROBERT J. CLEMENTS • New York University

This content downloaded from

194.199.3.13 on Wed, 13 Jul 2022 14:39:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 CLEMENTS 361

WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY OF SOURCE MATERIALS FOR THE CHAPEL HILL

PHASE OF PROJECT
Note: The more conventional anthologies of American, South American, and European
poetry are not included here, but have been utilized to some extent and will be reexam
during the final phase of the project. Books from my own library follow:

AA The African Assertion, ed. Shelton (NY, Odyssey, 1968)

AAP Anthology of Armenian Poetry (Columbia, 1978)
AP African Literature in the Twentieth Century (Minnesota, 1974)
ALT African Literature Today, no. 6 (Heinemann, 1973)
ACCL Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Literature, I (Taipei, 1975)
ADL Anthology of Danish Literature (Southern Illinois, 1971)
AMAP Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry (Univ. California, 1974)
AMIP Anthology of Modern Indonesian Poetry (Univ. California, 1964)
AMJP Anthology of Modern Japanese Poetry (Tuttle, 1972)
AMKV Anthology of Modern Kashmiri Verse (Poona, 1972)
BPF Black Poets in French (Scribners, 1972)
CKP Contemporary Korean Poetry (Univ. Iowa, 1970)
FHD Fazil Hushnu Saglarca, Selected (Turkish) Poems (Pittsburgh, 1969)
IPET English Poetry in English Today (Sterling, 1973)
MOTO Masterpieces of the Orient (Norton, 1977)
MCP Modern Chinese Poetry (Washington Univ.. 1972)
MEP Modern European Poetry (Bantam, 1966)
MLC Modern Literature from China (New York Univ., 1974)
MMV Modern Malay Verse (Oxford, Kuala Lumpur, 1963)
PBA Poems from Black Africa, Hughes (Indiana, 1963)
POP Poems of Protest, Old and New (Macmillan, 1968)
PSCW Poetry of the Spanish Civil War (New York Univ., 1974)
PS Poetry Singapore, voL 1, 1968
PS Poetry Singapore, vol. 2, 1968.
RG Rice Grains, Hernandez, Philippines (International, lSJbbj
SPN Selected Poems of Nirala (Columbia, 1976)
TYVP Thousand Years of Vietnamese Poetrv fKnnnf. 19751
TLR The Literary Review: Turkey, Summer, 1972
WSWB Where Steel Winds Blow (McKay. 1968)
IPET Indian Poetry in English Today (Sterling, 1973)

NOTE: All of these works, being published in the 1960s and 1970s, bring the topic of war
topic right up to the present time.

This content downloaded from

194.199.3.13 on Wed, 13 Jul 2022 14:39:59 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms