page_title: War poet
section_title: Ireland
hierarchical_section_title: War poet / World War I / Ireland
caption_attribution_description: English: Memorial to Francis Ledwidge on the spot where he died.
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: That Irish people served in the British Army during the Great War and that 49,400 Irish soldiers gave their lives in the same conflict remains very controversial. This is because the Easter Rising of 1916 took place during the Great War and the Irish War of Independence began only a few months after the Armistice. Ireland's national identity has been forged out of an extremely bitter conflict against the British Empire that both preceded and followed the Great War. For this reason, Irish Republicanism has traditionally viewed Irishmen who served in the British armed forces as traitors. This view became even more prevalent after 1949, when Ireland voted to become a Republic and to leave the Commonwealth of Nations. For this reason, Ireland's war poets were long neglected.
  One of them was Tom Kettle, a former member of the Irish Volunteers and M.P. for the Irish Parliamentary Party. Despite his sympathy for German-occupied Belgium, Kettle was very critical of the war at first. Comparing the Anglo-Irish landlord class to the big estate owners who similarly dominated the Kingdom of Prussia, Kettle wrote, "England goes to fight for liberty in Europe and for Junkerdom in Ireland."
  Later, when he was serving as a Lieutenant with the Royal Dublin Fusiliers on the Western Front, Kettle learned of the Easter Rising of 1916. After also learning of the executions of Roger Casement and sixteen of the Rising's other leaders, including every one of the signatories of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic, Kettle prophetically wrote, "These men will go down in history as heroes and martyrs and I will go down – if I go down at all – as a bloody British officer." 
  Mere months later, on September 9, 1916, Lieut. Kettle was shot in the chest during the Battle of Ginchy, in which the 16th (Irish) Division successfully captured and held the French village of the same name, which the Imperial German Army had been using as an artillery observation post during the Battle of the Somme. Lieut. Kettle's body was never found. 
  G. K. Chesterton later wrote, "Thomas Michael Kettle was perhaps the greatest example of that greatness of spirit which was so ill rewarded on both sides of the channel [...] He was a wit, a scholar, an orator, a man ambitious in all the arts of peace; and he fell fighting the barbarians because he was too good a European to use the barbarians against England, as England a hundred years before has used the barbarians against Ireland."
  Lieut. Kettle's best-known poem is a sonnet, To My Daughter Betty, the Gift of God, which was written and mailed to his family just days before he was killed in action. It reads:
  "In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown
  To beauty proud as was your mother's prime,
  In that desired, delayed, incredible time,
  You'll ask why I abandoned you, my own,
  And the dear heart that was your baby throne,
  To dice with death. And oh! they'll give you rhyme
  And reason: some will call the thing sublime,
  And some decry it in a knowing tone.
  So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,
  And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,
  Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,
  Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor
  But for a dream, born in a herdsman's shed
  And for the secret Scripture of the poor."
  When Francis Ledwidge, who was a member of the Irish Volunteers, learned of the outbreak of the war, he decided against enlisting in the British Army. After being put on trial before his local council in County Meath and accused of cowardice and being Pro-German, Ledwidge enlisted in the Royal Inniskilling Fusiliers. Despite his twin beliefs in socialism and Irish Republicanism, Ledwidge later wrote, "I joined the British Army because she stood between Ireland and an enemy common to our civilisation and I would not have her say that she defended us while we did nothing at home but pass resolutions."
  Ledwidge published three volumes of poetry between 1916–18, while he served at the Landing at Suvla Bay, on the Macedonian front and on the Western Front. Ledwidge expressed a belief in his poems and letters that he was 
caption: Memorial to Francis Ledwidge on the spot where he died.
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