The Poet's Journal

As a poet, I've always been fascinated by journals kept by famous and well know writers, by glancing at a given day, a given hour, the viewer can see a snapshot of the poet or writer's true soul and personality. You can view the inception of a poem as well as the genesis point into draft form. Through my early years of writing and college education, it became a way for me to see the poet tell their history, be it their tiny leaf upon the redwood tree that history represents but their story upon their branch.

Through T.S Eliot, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Robert Frost and William Butler Yeats I began to grasp the understanding of the the changing world within the communities of the countries they lived and study. Academic History has shown us the physical and psychological tragedies of World War One leading up to the second World War but it was only a piece of the puzzle or a small twig attached to the larger 20th century branch. The poets wrote about their experiences, their thoughts and the realities of how the war affected the common person. In the Post World War I era around 1919 Yeats wrote a poem entitled "The Second Coming" which documented the psychological toll the war had taken on himself but also the people involved or witnessed it.

My true appreciation of Poetry as a form of a journal or documentation of history didn't come until my introduction to the World War I poets who wrote poetry about their service in the war and the true brutalities that civilians only knew bits and pieces thanks to the press and family links. Upon the first lines of some of these poets like Wilfred Owen or Issac Rosenburg, you can see what they saw as they fought and lived within the trenches, to them their poetry became their journals cataloging their thoughts and memories from their service. Examples comes from Owen's "Dulce Et Decorum Est" which details a horrendous moment that many soldiers witnessed but few civilians knew the true extent of the horrors.

"Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning."

My fascination with poetry comes not just from the creative aspects but also the historical implications that it can have and how as a way of individual memory it can tell a story or release information into the veins of eager minds about a single droplet in the well of time. Poetry itself, is a journal entry inscribed by a creative mind to detail the experiences of the time, like with Owens and the other World War I poets it became a way to document history in their own words and like with the many journals of soldiers of the time it tells a story,which is preserved.