The Case for Reading War Poetry as Ephemera

Abstract

The First World War blurred the lines between “ordinary” and “literary” writing practices. Many sources corroborate this: necrologies written about poets who died in the act of writing not a poem but rather a letter, or introductions to poetry collections where bereaved families and friends admit they had no knowledge of their loved one’s writing practices until they found a journal full of poems after the author’s death, which they only published as a posthumous tribute. This article uses examples of French poetry of the Great War to explore this permeability between what is considered war poetry and what is considered war ephemera. The main question it addresses is what changes when we look at the war poems that were initially ephemera or ordinary writing. Whose stories get told when poetry is studied not as literature to be judged as accomplished or failed art but as a way of writing to make sense of the world? It argues that when we choose to read poems as ephemera and from the point of view of a larger anthropology of writing practices, diverse histories emerge and communities who write poetry not only as an artistic pursuit but also as a means of organizing experience and leaving traces behind reclaim ownership over their own narratives. This can challenge the false equivalence between the cultural history of warfare and an intellectual history of the elites at war and includes poetry within paradigmatic shifts that place objects at the centre of mediations of the experience of war.