War Poetry - Zach

‘Here, Bullet’ by Brian Turner is a poem about war and its fatal costs. Turner served in Iraq himself and a lot of his poetry was first hand experiences of him touring as an infantry team leader. His poem doesn’t express anger or hatred like most war poetry when the poets are veterans who are torn up by the events that occurred in Iraq. Instead, Turner took the approach of looking at the war stirring inside every soldier’s minds and hearts instead of the physical war itself. Many argue that war poetry can only be successful if the poet has lived through an era of war and experienced the physical and mental torture. However, I think that war poetry can be effective even if the poet hasn’t actually been in the military or a war situation.

An opposing school of thought on this matter is that poets cannot write about events that they have never personally experienced. Their reasoning behind this is that even with the most detailed research and accounts of different people who did experience the event, the poet cannot convey these emotions unless they felt it themselves.

They believe that poets who write beyond their own experiences cannot connect to the deepest part of their minds where poetry is created. Something that is imagined is different from something that is lived and emotions felt from both these things are different although the ‘scenario’ can be the same. By writing from imagination, they are guessing what the emotions feel like instead of actually experiencing them and they argue that poetry cannot be constructed this way.

However, I believe that the important thing is not what one knows or lived, but their ability to persuade others about what you know or lived. Even if a poet has never been in a war, they can create an emotional and intellectual bond by using imagery and vocabularies of the familiar. If one can fully immerse himself into his own imagination, the same part of their brains would be stimulated if one were actually in that situation.

By using the right words, the poet can truly ‘capture’ the emotion and transfer it to the readers. If they could almost paint a picture with their words, then the readers themselves would be absorbed into this new world that the poet created whether it be a war or something completely fictional. Once the readers are immersed in the poet’s imagination, the emotion caused by the poem is real. This means that even though the poet himself might no have lived through the experience, he could still induce the same result in the readers, which is the ultimate goal of poetry.

In conclusion, I believe that poetry does not necessarily have to be created by those who have lived it. This is because poetry is constructed on language, which is used by both fictional and non-fictional poets. One set of language cannot induce different emotions in the same person. Therefore, poets who write beyond their experiences can still induce the same emotions in the readers and thus making the poem effective.