Whereas most love poems have been in favour of love, much – and most recent – war poetry has been implicitly, if not explicitly, anti-war. Man's early war-songs and love-songs were generally exhortations to action, or celebrations of action, in one or other field, but no such similarity exists between what we now more broadly define as love poetry and war poetry.
'P oetry,' Wordsworth reminds us, 'is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings', and there can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war: hope and fear exhilaration and humiliation hatred – not only for the enemy, but also for generals, politicians, and war-profiteers love – for fellow soldiers, for women and children left behind, for country (often) and cause (occasionally).
