page_title: War poet
section_title: Scotland
hierarchical_section_title: War poet / World War I / Scotland
caption_attribution_description: English: Cropped and retouched version of a portrait of British soldier poet Charles Hamilton Sorley (1895-1915). Photo dated to 1914 or 1915 as subject is in uniform and enlisted in 1914 and was killed in 1915.
context_page_description: A war poet is a poet who participates in a war and writes about their experiences, or a non-combatant who writes poems about war. While the term is applied especially to those who served during World War I, the term can be applied to a poet of any nationality writing about any war, including Homer's Iliad, from around the 8th century BC, and the Old English poem The Battle of Maldon, which celebrated the actual Battle of Maldon in 991, as well as poetry of the American Civil War, the Spanish Civil War, the Crimean War and other wars.
context_section_description: When the war began, Scottish poet Charles Sorley, a native of Aberdeen, was living in Imperial Germany and attending the University of Jena. He later recalled that when the war began, his first feelings of patriotism were towards Germany. After being briefly interned as an enemy alien at Trier and ordered to leave the country, Sorley returned to Great Britain and enlisted in the Suffolk Regiment as a Lieutenant. He was killed by a German sniper during the Battle of Loos in 1915 and his poems and letters were published posthumously. 
  Robert Graves described Charles Sorley in Goodbye to All That as "one of the three poets of importance killed during the war". (The other two being Isaac Rosenberg and Wilfred Owen.) Sorley believed that Germans and British were equally blind to each other's humanity and his anti-war poetry stands in direct contrast to the jingoistic nationalism of Rupert Brooke.
  The Scottish Gaelic poet John Munro, a native of Swordale on the Isle of Lewis, won the Military Cross while serving as a 2nd Lieutenant with the Seaforth Highlanders and was ultimately killed in action during the 1918 Spring Offensive. Lt. Munro, writing under the pseudonym Iain Rothach, came to be ranked by critics alongside the major war poets. Tragically, only three of his poems are known to survive. They are Ar Tir ("Our Land"), Ar Gaisgich a Thuit sna Blàir ("Our Heroes Who Fell in Battle"), and Air sgàth nan sonn ("For the Sake of the Warriors"). Derick Thomson – the venerable poet and Professor of Celtic Studies at Glasgow – hailed Munro's work in his Companion to Gaelic Scotland as being: "the first strong voice of the new Gaelic verse of the 20th century".
  Pàdraig Moireasdan, a Scottish Gaelic bard and seanchaidh from Grimsay, North Uist, served in the Lovat Scouts during World War I. He served in the Gallipoli Campaign, in the Macedonian front, and on the Western Front. In later years, Moireasdan, who ultimately reached the rank of Corporal, loved to tell how he fed countless starving Allied soldiers in Thessalonica by making a quern. Corporal Moireasdan composed many poems and songs during the war, including Òran don Chogadh (A Song to the War"), which he composed while serving at Gallipoli.
  In 1969, Gairm, a Scottish Gaelic publishing house based in Glasgow, posthumously published the first book of poems by Dòmhnall Ruadh Chorùna, a combat veteran of the King's Own Cameron Highlanders during World War I and war poet in the Gaelic language. Unlike Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, Dòmhnall Ruadh believed himself to be fighting a just war against a terrible enemy. His anger over the futility of the war only boiled over after the Armistice, when he returned to his home in North Uist, in the Outer Hebrides, and found that none of the promises that had been made to soldiers from the Scottish Highlands and Islands were going to be kept. The rents were still high, the population was still impoverished, hunting and fishing were still prosecuted as poaching, and the omnipotence of the island's Anglo-Scottish landlord was exactly as it had been before the war began.
  Dòmhnall Ruadh's poetry proved very popular and began being used to teach the Gaelic language in the schools of the Scottish Highlands and Islands. An expanded and bilingual edition was published by the Historical Society of North Uist in 1995. In 2016, Scottish folk singer and North Uist native Julie Fowlis performed Dòmhnall Ruadh's wartime love song An Eala Bhàn ("The White Swan") at the Thiepval Memorial on the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Somme. Three senior members of the British Royal Family, Prince William, Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge, and Prince Harry were in attendance.
caption: Charles Hamilton Sorley
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