War poems:

I have not read many poems of the generation of English poets that wrote between wars, I have read several. But I think none of them was proud to have participated in a war, nor described war as something honourable. Quite the opposite. If Garcilaso was a "man of arms" and "letters" and proud of it, that possiblity was not available to the writers that remained after the First World War. We had a tradition of epic poems that lasted centuries, almost any culture has one. The Romans had the Aeneid and the Greeks The Ilyad. But what happened in the xxth century. I'm not so sure. The heroes of the Second World War were not soldiers, but "The Resistance". We have epic films, but ....Nobody is proud of having bombed Iroshima in the same way (I hope) That nobody is proud of having bombed P. Harbour.We are proud nevertheless of D. Day, so in a certain way the epic still ...