The Death of a Soldier

"The Waste Land" by T. S. Eliot (1922)

Published a year before Stevens’s “The Death of a Soldier,” Eliot’s “Waste Land” describes a sterility and metaphysical disorientation of the postwar Western civilization. The long poem is a definitive piece of Modernist poetry addressing what Eliot perceived as the ethical failings of modern society. However, the poem maintains an element of hope even after so much violence and destruction, turning to Eastern spirituality and philosophy to make sense of the new, postwar world.

"Anthem for Doomed Youth" by Wilfred Owen (1917)

Written in the fall of 1917 while recovering from shellshock, Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” is one of the most pivotal poems of World War I. The poem is a lament to the young soldiers who perished during the war, describing some of the bloodiest battles and the funerals that followed. A take on the Petrarchan sonnet, the poem flips the classic form traditionally reserved for love on its head by describing instead the violence of war and the deadly quiet that follows in its wake.

"Drummer Hodge" by Thomas Hardy (1899)

Possibly Hardy’s most famous poem about warfare, “Drummer Hodge” tells the story of the burial of a soldier named Hodge, a drummer in the British army during the Second Boer War in 1899.