I mean, what good is a poem by some lowly person against a cruise missile, or an aircraft carrier, or Total Information Awareness?

And this feeling was borne out when I arrived and saw the crowd of mostly oldsters like myself, flying their freak flags the same as ever, only shinier.

I have written poems, especially when I was young, that use war, or have war in them. I typically exploited the horror, the feeling of helplessness, and the landscapes we leave when we give up on one another.

But I couldn’t imagine any of these bad dream poems having a salutary effect on the peace gathering. So I dug up some old World war I poems of Wilfred Owen, “Strange Meeting” and “Dulce et Decorum Est,” both harrowing poems written in his wartime “remission,” when he invalided in England after succumbing to the noise and horror of bombs.

Before they dragged Owen away, he had sat gibbering in a hole for four days with the parts of a comrade splattered all around him.

The thing about Owen’s poems is, they are bitter and sad, like every young man’s poems. Except, he had greater call. I thought, as I looked out at the gathering in the coffee shop, that we had all got so old. I’m twice Owens’ age, and Robert Bly, over there in the corner, is more than three Owens of time.

The war was so terrible, because it took a generation of men educated in genteel ways, and it ground them to puilp. They went off to war like gentlemen, and came back, if they were lucky, with a frankness of expression that was rooted in the greatest grief.

We today owe our freewheeling diction, our realism, to the horrors of the trenches. They gave us e.e. cummings and Hemingway, Robert Graves and Gertrude Stein (she worked as a nurse) … Appolinaire, Cocteau, Eluard and Breton … Isaac Rosenberg, Otto Dix and Eugenio Montale.

They gave us Robert Bridges, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, Joyce Kilmer, John Dos Passos, Edith Wharton (likewise a nurse), Archibald Macleish, Giuseppe Ungaretti, W. Somerset Maugham.

These people created a new language of straight talk from the rubble of the empires, which comes so easily to us today. worldgonewrong