When we look back to the first world war, it is generally the poets we turn to for the authentic voice of suffering humanity. Owen, Sassoon, Thomas - these are the secular saints of a conflict whose brutality remains barely imaginable, whose work counts the human costs that were wilfully disregarded at the time.
But, as a newly published entry in the venerable Dictionary of National Biography reminds us, that doesn't go for all the poets of that era. Reading her poetry today it's not hard to work out why Jessie Pope's work has been forgotten:
Who knows it won't be a picnic – not much-
Yet eagerly shoulders a gun?
Who would much rather come back with a crutch
Than lie low and be out of the fun?
is a pretty characteristic blast of doggerel. These days her name, if known at all, is remembered as the original, specific target of "Dulce et Decorum Est".
But during the war, thanks to the good offices of the Daily Mail and other such stalwart champions of the national cause, her tub-thumping, eerily jolly exhortations to fight reached a vast readership while the poets we now revere were virtually unknown.
It's an interesting reminder of how poetry's rhetorical clout can be co-opted for propaganda. But it's well worth reading the short biography, which shows her as more than a cheerleader for slaughter, and harder to despise than you might expect.
