Hello Again
As we are all aware, we are all on something of a lockdown due to the Coronavirus outbreak. The precautions in the UK, although at present lighter than in other countries, are still a great change to the way we live.
I have always considered that the freedoms we experience here in the UK are the envy of many other countries. Therefore, the raft of measures introduced by the government have been something of a culture shock and we are taking a little time to get used to them.
These very sensible measures I am sure will take us through the current emergency and out the other side. There may be further rules that we will have to follow before the desired morning dawns, but it is all for the common good.
We are technically at war, not with another country but with an unseen enemy, so it is quite logical that wartime rules need to be followed. This is all I am going to say about what is happening at present, but it did set me thinking about whether people will start writing poetry about the situation.
Not poets but ordinary people like you and me, will record our experiences by writing poetry. I think we will go in this direction. The reason I am saying this is that during most wars poetry has been written.
In recent memory, the poetry of the Great War stands out with poets such as Wilfred Owen recording the horrors of the conflict.
The Second World War was different to the Great War in that unless you are interested in the subject, not so many of the poets are easily remembered.
Keith Douglas and Sidney Keyes spring to mind, but there were many others and what was also different was that the average soldier was also encouraged to write poetry (usually in the shape of poetry competitions) and the best would be collected and published in anthologies, usually with a foreword by somebody as senior as Montgomery.
I am most probably totally wrong (and apologise if I am), but I have not really found much evidence of this during the Great War. Yet, in my collection of poetry books, I have examples of poetry written and collected during the Second World War.
My first book is simply called Air Force Poetry and is a collection of poems written by men serving in the RAF and the FAA. I am not going to judge the poems, but some are quite fine.
But, what makes this anthology all the more haunting is that it is recorded in the foreword that six of the men who contributed poems were killed in action before the publication.
The other two collections were penned by members of the Eighth Army, some whilst serving in the Western Desert between December 1942 and February 1943 and others whilst serving in Italy and Sicily during the period from July 1943 to March 1944.
Poems from Italy and Poems From The Desert are the simple titles of these Eighth Army anthologies.
The Italian collection has an introduction written by Siegfried Sassoon and the Desert poems a foreword written by Field-Marshall Montgomery. These are, I believe, just three examples of poetry anthologies of this nature.
It is very likely that the Navy thought it was a good idea and published its own poems (this said I have yet to see one).
Surprisingly, these small volumes are reasonably easy to find and I have picked up each of my books from the Arcade over the last couple of years. There is an extensive military section in the bookshop under Rafters (facing you to the left as you climb the first set of stairs) and these books are very cheap and a pleasure to own.
I have kept this article short as we have many other things to do, but if this has sparked an interest then I am pleased, as I intend to as long as this current emergency lasts, to pen the odd bite-sized article for you to read (or to help you sleep).
Usually I am bombing from here to there and back again and tend to note my articles up on fag packets whilst travelling around, but although I am not self-isolating (I fall outside of the noted catgories at present) I am finding that I have time on my hands so I thought it would be fun to pop the odd article down the tubes.
Please look after yourselves.
Stuart Miller-Osborne
