Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Joseph Addison: Already have our quarrels fill’d the world with widows and with orphans
Aeschylus: Ares, father of tears, mows the field of man
Aesop: The lies of lupine liberators
Conrad Aiken: Vast symphonic dance of death
Richard Aldington: Pools and ponds of blood, the huge black dogs of hell
Yehuda Amichai: Knowledge of peace passes from country to country, like children’s games
Leonid Andreyev: The Red Laugh
Louis Aragon: The peace that forces murder down to its knees for confession
Aristides on the two types of war: Bad and worse
Aristotle: Leader not praiseworthy in training citizens for conquest and dominion
Arrian: Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and the fate of conquerors
W.H. Auden: A land laid waste, its towns in terror and all its young men slain
Julien Benda: Military mysticism
Walter Benjamin: Self-alienated mankind experiences its own destruction as aesthetic pleasure
Ambrose Bierce: Killed At Resaca
Ambrose Bierce: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge
Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson: All labor’s dread of war’s mad waste and murder
William Blake: O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue to drown the throat of war!
Alexander Blok: The kite, the mother and endless war
Boethius: Provoking death’s destined day by waging unjust and cruel wars
Wolfgang Borchert: Only one thing to do, say No!
Randolph Bourne: The War and the Intellectuals
Randolph Bourne: War and the State
Georg Brandes: An Appeal Against Wholesale Murder
Bertolt Brecht: German Miserere
Robert Browning: They sent a million fighters forth South and North
William Cullen Bryant: Christmas 1875
Byron: War did glut himself again, all earth was but one thought – and that was death
Thomas Campbell: The snow shall be their winding-sheet, every turf a soldier’s sepulchre
Thomas Campion: Then bloody swords and armour should not be
Albert Camus: Where war lives. The reign of beasts has begun.
Karel Čapek: The War with the Newts
Ernesto Cardenal: They speak of peace and secretly prepare for war
Thomas Carlyle: What blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!
Catullus: Appalled by fratricide, gods turned from man
Cervantes: Everything then was friendship, everything was harmony
Chateaubriand: Would-be master of the world who knew only how to destroy
Coleridge: All our dainty terms for fratricide
Joseph Conrad: Men go mad in protest against “peculiar sanity” of war
Homo homini lupus: William Cowper on war and man’s inhumanity to man
Stephen Crane: There was crimson clash of war
Rubén Darío: You think the future is wherever your bullet strikes
John Davidson: Blood in torrents pour in vain, for war breeds war again
John Donne: War and misery are one thing
John Dos Passos: Three Soldiers
1862: Dostoevsky on the new world order
Theodore Dreiser and Smedley Butler: War is a Racket
W.E.B. Du Bois: Work for Peace
Georges Duhamel: The Fleshmongers, War’s Winnowing Basket
Paul Laurence Dunbar: Birds of peace and deadened hearts
Paul Éluard: True law of men despite the misery and war
Erasmus: The Complaint of Peace
Euripides: The crown of War, the crown of Woe
William Faulkner: There is only the question: When will I be blown up?
Fénelon: War is the most dreadful of all evils by which heaven has afflicted man
Fichte: The inexorable law of universal peace
Henry Fielding: On the condign fate of Great Men and conquerors
Anatole France on Émile Zola, military terrorism and world peace
Anatole France on Victor Hugo: People to substitute justice and peace for war and bloodshed
Ivan Franko: Even the dove has the blood of men on its snowy white wings
John Galsworthy, 1911: Air war last and worst hideous development of the black arts of warfare
Rasul Gamzatov: For women war is never over
Gabriel García Márquez: Five wars and seventeen military coups
André Gide: Transformation of a war supporter
William Godwin: Inventions of a barbarous age, deluging provinces with blood
Maxim Gorky on Romain Rolland, war and humanism
Remy de Gourmont: Getting drunk at the dirty cask of militarism
Robert Graves: Recalling the last war, preparing for the next
Thomas Gray: Clouds of carnage blot the sun; weave the crimson web of war
Jorge Guillén: The monsters have passed over
Nicolás Guillén: Come, dove, come tell me the tale of your woe
Thomas Hardy: All-Earth-gladdening Law of Peace, war’s apology wholly stultified
Frank Harris: Henri Barbusse and the war against war
Nathaniel Hawthorne on war: Drinking out of skulls till the Millennium
William Hazlitt: Systematic patrons of eternal war
Ernest Hemingway: Combat the murder that is war
José-Maria de Heredia: Drunk with dreams that brutal conquests bring
Miguel Hernández: Wretched Wars
Herodotus: No one is fool enough to choose war instead of peace
Robert Herrick: The olive branch, the arch of peace
Alexander Herzen: War and “international law”
Hesiod: Lamentable works of Ares lead to dank house of Hades
Nazim Hikmet: Sad kind of freedom, free to be an American air base
Friedrich Hölderlin: Celebration of Peace
Oliver Wendell Holmes: Hymn to Peace
Julia Ward Howe: Mother’s Day Proclamation 1870
William Dean Howells: Spanish Prisoners of War
Victor Hugo: The face of Cain, hunters of men, sublime cutthroats
Victor Hugo: International Peace Congress 1851
Leigh Hunt: Captain Sword and Captain Pen
Leigh Hunt: Some Remarks On War And Military Statesmen
Aldous Huxley: Rhetorical devices used to conceal fundamental absurdity and monstrosity of war
Avetik Issahakian: Eternal fabricators of war, erecting pyramids with a myriad skulls
Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz: The word pax, pax, pax
William James: The Moral Equivalent of War
William James: The Philippine Tangle
Joseph Joubert on war: All victors will be defeated
Attila József: War stirs its withering alarms, I shudder to see hatred win
Juvenal: Mighty warriors and their tombs are circumscribed by Fate
Immanuel Kant: Prescription for perpetual peace
Nikos Kazantzakis: Francis of Assisi
Keats: Days innocent of scathing war
Ellen Key: Overcoming the madness of a world at war
Karl Kraus: The evolution of humanitarian bombing
Karl Kraus: The Last Days of Mankind
La Bruyère on the lust for war
La Fontaine: When shall Peace pack up these bloody darts?
Selma Lagerlöf: The Fifth Commandment. The Great Beast is War.
Lamartine: The republic of peace
Sidney Lanier: War by other means
D.H. Lawrence: All modern militarism is foul
D.H. Lawrence: Future War, Murderous Weapons, Refinements of Evil
Richard Le Gallienne: The Illusion of War
Stephen Leacock: The war mania of middle age and embonpoint
Sinclair Lewis: It Can(‘t) Happen Here
Livy: On the political utility of starting unprovoked wars
Federico García Lorca: War goes crying with a million gray rats
Lu Hsün: Ballads among bushes of bayonets, hungry dove amid crumbling walls
Lucan: Over all the world you are victorious and your soldiers die
Lucian: War propaganda and its hyperbole
Hugh MacDiarmid: A war to save civilization, you say?
Bernard Mandeville: How to induce men to kill and die
Heinrich Mann: Mission of letters in a world in rubble with 10 million corpses underground
Thomas Mann: Dirge for a homeland wasted by war
Christopher Marlowe: Accurs’d be he that first invented war!
José Martí: Oscar Wilde on war and aesthetics
Roger Martin du Gard: From Nobel Prize in Literature speech
Andrew Marvell: When roses only arms might bear
Edgar Lee Masters: “The honor of the flag must be upheld”
Edgar Lee Masters: The Philippine Conquest
Herman Melville: Trophies of Peace
H.L. Mencken: New wars will bring about an unparalleled butchery of men
George Meredith: On the Danger of War
Adam Mickiewicz: The transient glory of military conquerors
Milton: Men levy cruel wars, wasting the earth, each other to destroy
Milton: Without ambition, war, or violence
Eugenio Montale: Poetry in an era of nuclear weapons and Doomsday atmosphere
William Vaughn Moody: Bullet’s scream went wide of its mark to its homeland’s heart
Pablo Neruda: Bandits with planes, jackals that the jackals would despise
Novalis: Celebrating a great banquet of love as a festival of peace
Vladimir Odoevsky: City without a name, system with one
Kenzaburō Ōe: Categorical imperative to renounce war forever
Wilfred Owen: Arms and the Boy and Disabled
Pascal on war: An assassin if he kills in his own country, a hero if in another
Charles Péguy: Cursed be war, cursed of God
Petrarch: Wealth and power at a bloody rate is wicked, better bread and water eat with peace
Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics
Plato: No true statesman looks only, or first of all, to external warfare
Plutarch: On war and its opponents
Edgar Allan Poe: The Valley of Unrest
Alexander Pope: Peace o’er the world her olive wand extend
J.B. Priestley: Insane regress of ultimate weapons leads to radioactive cemetery
Marcel Proust: Every day war is declared anew
Salvatore Quasimodo: In every country a cultural tradition opposes war
Herbert Read: Bombing Casualties
Romain Rolland: Above The Battle
Romain Rolland: Ara Pacis and Ave, Caesar, Morituri Te Salutant
Romain Rolland: Message to America on the will to conquer the world
Romain Rolland: Where to rebuild the world after war?
Ronsard: Far away from Europe and far from its wars
Saint-Exupéry: Charred flesh of children viewed with indifference
Sallust: Lust for dominion the reason for war
George Santayana on war and militarism
Friedrich Schiller: Oh, blessed peace, may the day of grim War’s ruthless crew never dawn
Olive Schreiner: Give me back my dead!
Olive Schreiner: The bestiality and insanity of war
Albert Schweitzer: On nuclear weapons in NATO’s hands
Senancour: Lottery of war amid heaps of the dead
George Bernard Shaw: The shallowness of the ideals of men ignorant of history is their destruction
Militarist myopia: George Bernard Shaw’s Common Sense About the War
Juvenilia: Percy Bysshe Shelley on war
Taras Shevchenko: The civilizing mission…at sword’s point
Victor Domingo Silva: Cain, the fratricide
Edith Sitwell: Dirge for the New Sunrise
Robert Southey: The Battle of Blenheim
Wole Soyinka: Africa victim, never perpetrator, of theo/ideological wars
Wole Soyinka: Civilian and Soldier
Stephen Spender: Ultima Ratio Regum
Stendhal and Byron: Military leprosy; fronts of brass and feet of clay
Jonathan Swift: Lemuel Gulliver on War
Tacitus: The robbery, slaughter and plunder that empire calls peace
Tennyson: Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
Theocritus: May spiders spin their slender webs over weapons of war
Dylan Thomas: The Hand That Signed the Paper
James Thomson: Peace is the natural state of man; war his corruption, his disgrace
Thucydides: Admonitions against war
Tibullus: War is a crime perpetrated by hearts hardened like weapons
Ernst Toller: Corpses In The Woods
Alexei Tolstoy: The one incontestable result was dead bodies
Leo Tolstoy: The Law of Love and the Law of Violence
Leo Tolstoy: Two Wars and Carthago Delenda Est
Georg Trakl: Night beckons to dying soldiers, the ghosts of the killed are sighing
Kurt Tucholsky: The White Spots
Mark Twain: To the Person Sitting in Darkness
Lesya Ukrainka: Do you understand that word called war?
Paul Vaillant-Couturier: The Song of Craonne
Paul Valéry on global conflicts, Europe governed by American commission
César Vallejo: So much love and yet so powerless against death
Émile Verhaeren: I hold war in execration; ashamed to be butchers of their fellows
Paul Verlaine: The joy of sweet peace without victory
Franz Werfel: To a Lark in War-Time
John Greenleaf Whittier: If this be Peace, pray what is War?
John Greenleaf Whittier: The Peace Convention at Brussels
Oscar Wilde: Crimson seas of war, Great Game in Central and South Asia
Wordsworth: We felt as men should feel at vast carnage
Xenophon: Socrates’ war sophistry; civil crimes are martial virtues
Edward Young: Draw the murd’ring sword to give mankind a single lord
Marguerite Yourcenar: Fruits of war are food for new wars
Émile Zola: One sole city of peace and truth and justice
Zuhair: Accursed thing, war will grind you between millstones
Arnold Zweig: Education Before Verdun
Stefan Zweig: The fear of opposing military hysteria
MIssing Smedley Butler, there. But congrats, great list and great unflinching work.
Nice. Will bookmark.
we will not join your army and we will not fight your war
——————————————————————–
well i may be from the back streets on the wrong side of the tracks,
and i didn’t go to prep school and i don’t read latin books,
and i may have run a little wild and even robbed a store,
but i will not join your army and i will not fight your war.
through your secretive societies and underhanded plans,
you have hijacked our democracies and usurped all our lands,
you have consorted with criminals and helped spread drugs and vice,
and you’ve backed and armed dictators to repress their people’s voice.
and you trample rights and commit torture when it suits your plans,
and you’ve rigged the world economy to feed wealth to your hands.
but right now you claim you want to spread democracy and peace
and to guarantee prosperity through global enterprise.
but the truth of what you’re up to now is sinister and plain
- you want tens of thousands like me to be soldiers and marines
so that you can build your empire, bring your plunder back to rome,
to achieve world domination and extend your power at home,
and your motives are just selfishness and avarice, it’s sure,
and you’re misusing our taxes which should go to help the poor.
so send your own sons and daughters out to do your dirty work
and spend your own wealth on guns and bombs to launch your sneak attack,
then we’ll treat you like the evil vicious terrorists you are
- but we will not join your army and we will not fight your war.
(c) gildas sapiens, 2004
Sapient indeed. Bravo.
“To those of us who still retain an irreconcilable animus against war….”
Whatever sickening justification may be advanced.
David Peterson
Chicago, USA
Right, David. There is always an excuse for war in the minds of sociopaths – there is never an excuse for war in the minds of moral beings.
Randolph Bourne may have been the last prophet vouchsafed the United States (after Mark Twain, William James and other founders of the Anti-Imperialist League). Providence may have then thrown in the towel in disgust. See the entry by Catullus.
This is moving and relevant material – from start to ‘finish’. But that’s the trouble, isn’t, it? There is no finish.
Poetry list is excellent.