British writers on peace and war
Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
British writers on peace and war
Maria Abdy: May the gentle Dove of Peace extend her snowy pinions o’er us
Joseph Addison: Already have our quarrels fill’d the world with widows and with orphans
Joseph Addison and Richard Steele: It is a stupid and barbarous way to extend dominion by arms
Lucy Aikin: Gentle Peace with healing hand returns
Lucy Aikin: Sickening I turn on yonder plain to mourn the widows and the slain
Mark Akenside: The hidden plan whence every treaty, every war began
Mark Akenside: Statesmanship versus war
Richard Aldington: Selections on war
Richard Aldington: All the decay and dead of battlefields entered his blood and seemed to poison him
Richard Aldington: The Blood of the Young Men
Richard Aldington: The criminal cant and rant of war
Richard Aldington: How well the premeditated mass murder of war is organized
Richard Aldington: It is so important to know how to kill
Richard Aldington: Pools and ponds of blood, the huge black dogs of hell
Richard Aldington: Why so sentimental? Why all this fuss over a few million men killed and maimed?
Grant Allen: War and blood money
James Allen: A Prayer for Peace
Edwin Arnold: Heaven’s love descending in that loveliest word, PEACE!
Matthew Arnold: Man shall live in peace, as now in war
Matthew Arnold: New Age. Uphung the spear, unbent the bow.
Matthew Arnold: Tolstoy’s commandments of peace
W.H. Auden: A land laid waste, its towns in terror and all its young men slain
Alfred Austin: The White Pall of Peace
Joanna Baillie: And shall we think of war?
Joanna Baillie: Do children return from rude jarring war?
Joanna Baillie: Thy native land, freed from the ills of war, a land of peace!
Isabella Banks: The bugle of war, the bugle of peace
Isabella Banks: “Glory, glory, glory!” As if murder were not sin!
Isabella Banks: Lay down weapons, war should cease
Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Peace and Shepherd
Anna Laetitia Barbauld: The storm of horrid war rolls dreadful on
Anna Laetitia Barbauld: War’s least horror is th’ ensanguined field
Maurice Baring: The greater fools are you who seek the wars
Maurice Baring: Unalterable horror, misery, pain and suffering which is caused by modern war
Charlotte Alington Barnard: Peace Hovers
Thomas Lovell Beddoes: War’s harvest
Aphra Behn: No rough sound of war’s alarms
Aphra Behn: The pen triumphs over the sword
Hilaire Belloc: After the tempest and destruction of universal war, permanence
Arthur Christopher Benson: No carnal triumph of the empurpled sword
Elizabeth Bentley: On the return of celestial peace
Elizabeth Bentley: Terror-striking War shalt be banish’d far
Walter Besant: War and the destruction of London, a city lone and widowed
Matilda Betham: All the horrid charms of war
William Black: Military glory, the most mean, the most cruel and contemptible thing under the sun!
William Black: When Caesar’s legions turn on him
Robert Blair: Where are the mighty thunderbolts of war?
William Blake: Selections on war and peace
William Blake: Groaning among the happier dead
William Blake: O for a voice like thunder, and a tongue to drown the throat of war!
William Blake: O go not forth in Martyrdoms & Wars
William Blake: To peaceful arts shall envy bow
Mathilde Blind: All vile things that batten on disaster follow feasting in the wake of war
Mathilde Blind: Reaping War’s harvest grim and gory
Mathilde Blind: Widowing the world of men to win the world
George Borrow: Prisoners of war: misery on one side, disgrace on the other
James Boswell: Who profits by war?
Jane Bowdler: War’s deadly futility
William Lisle Bowles: Selections on war and peace
William Lisle Bowles: As War’s black trump pealed its terrific blast
William Lisle Bowles: The dread name of the hideous war-fiend shall perish
William Lisle Bowles: The Fiend of War, sated with slaughter
William Lisle Bowles: Grim-visaged War drowns with his trumpet’s blast a brother’s cries
William Lisle Bowles: Oh, when will the long tempestuous night of warfare and of woe be rolled away!
Henry Noel Brailsford: Waiting for the horrors of a war that was coming
Henry Noel Brailsford: Who is the happy warrior?
Vera Mary Brittain: August, 1914
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Exalt the name of Peace and leave those rusty wars that eat the soul
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: War’s human harvest
Robert Browning: Selections on peace and war
Robert Browning: The devil’s doctrine, the paraded shame of war
Robert Browning: Far and wide the victims of our warfare strew the plain
Robert Browning: Peace, in whom depths of wealth lie
Robert Browning: Peace rises within them ever more and more
Robert Browning: They sent a million fighters forth South and North
Robert Buchanan: The moon gleamed on the dreadful drifts of dead
Edward Bulwer Lytton: The sword, consecrating homicide and massacre with a hollow name
Robert Burns: I hate murder by flood or field
Robert Burns: Peace, thy olive wand extend and bid wild War his ravage end
Robert Burns: Wars, the plagues of human life
Samuel Butler: Religion of war
Samuel Butler: Valor in modern warfare
Byron: The age of beauty will succeed the sport of war
Byron: All ills past, present and to come yield to the true portrait of one battle-field
Byron: Blasted below the hot breath of war
Byron: The drying up a single tear has more of honest fame than shedding seas of gore.
Byron: Gore and glory seen in hell alone
Byron: The Grave shall bear the chiefest prize away
Byron: I loathe all war and warriors
Byron: Just ponder what a pious pastime war is
Byron: Such is the absorbing hate when warring nations meet
Byron: The time is past when swords subdued
Byron: War, banquet for wolf and worm
Byron: War cuts up not only branch, but root
Byron: War did glut himself again, all earth was but one thought – and that was death
Byron: War feeds the vultures, wolves and worms
Byron: War returns on its perpetrator
Byron: War’s a brain-spattering, windpipe-slitting art
Thomas Campbell: Selections on peace and war
Thomas Campbell: Maddening strife and blood-stain’d fields to come
Thomas Campbell: Men will weep for him when many a guilty martial fame is dim
Thomas Campbell: Sending whirlwind warrants forth to rouse the slumbering fiends of war
Thomas Campbell: Shall War’s polluted banner ne’er be furl’d?
Thomas Campbell: The snow shall be their winding-sheet, every turf a soldier’s sepulchre
Thomas Campion: Raving war wastes our empty fields
Thomas Campion: Then bloody swords and armour should not be
Thomas Campion: Upright man needs neither towers nor armour
Thomas Carew: Lust for gold fills the world with tumult, blood, and war
Thomas Carew: They’ll hang their arms upon the olive bough
Thomas Carlyle: The works of peace versus battles and war-tumults
Thomas Carlyle: What blood-filled trenches, and contentious centuries, may still divide us!
George Chapman: Men’s want of peace, which was from want of love
George Chapman: Peace with all her heavenly seed
Thomas Chatterton: Peace, gentlest, softest of the virtues
Geoffrey Chaucer: The city to the soldier’s rage resigned; successless wars and poverty behind
G.K. Chesterton: In modern war defeat is complete defeat
Charles Churchill: Thousands bleed for some vile spot where fifty cannot feed
Caroline Clive: The bloody words of ruffian war
Arthur Hugh Clough: For an impalpable odour of honour armies shall bleed
Arthur Hugh Clough: Ye vulgar dreamers about peace
Elizabeth Cobbold: Earth’s bosom drenching with her children’s blood
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Selections on peace and war
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: All our dainty terms for fratricide
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: And war still violates the unfinished works of peace
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: The demon War and its attendants, maniac Suicide and giant Murder
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Fire, Famine, And Slaughter: A War Eclogue
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: From all sides rush the thirsty brood of War!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: War and all its dread vicissitudes pleasingly agitate their stagnant hearts
Samuel Taylor Coleridge: War is a murderous fiend, by fiends adored
William Congreve: Cursed ambition wakes the world to war and ruin
William Congreve: No more do youth leave the sacred arts for stubborn arms
Joseph Conrad: Selections on war
Joseph Conrad: Firing into a continent, a touch of insanity in the proceeding
Joseph Conrad: Men go mad in protest against “peculiar sanity” of war
Joseph Conrad: With earth soaked in blood, all men seek some formula of peace
Eliza Cook: Selections on peace and war
Eliza Cook: Crimson battlefield. When the world shall be spread with tombless dead.
Eliza Cook: I felt a shuddering horror lurk, to think I’d mingled in such work
Eliza Cook: No bloodstain lingers there. The plough and the spear.
Eliza Cook: Not where bullet, sword, and shield lie strown with the gory slain
Eliza Cook: Who can love the laurel wreath, plucked from the gory field of death?
Joseph Cottle: Selections on war
Joseph Cottle: If on the slaughter’d field some mind humane…
Joseph Cottle: Know you their crimes on whom you warfare wage?
Joseph Cottle: Plant the seeds of universal peace
Joseph Cottle: Torn from their cots to wield the murderer’s blade
Joseph Cottle: Warn mankind to shun the hostile spear
Joseph Cottle: War’s noxious breath fills earth with discord, dread, and death
Peter L. Courtier: Ode to Peace
Francis Coutts: Why was no better gift by thee bequeathed than a sword unsheathed?
Abraham Cowley: Like the peace, but think it comes too late
Abraham Cowley: Only peace breeds scarcity in Hell
Abraham Cowley: To give peace and then the rules of peace
William Cowper: Selections on peace and war
William Cowper on war and man’s inhumanity to man: Homo homini lupus
William Cowper: In every heart are sown the sparks that kindle fiery war
William Cowper: Never shall you hear the voice of war again
William Cowper: Peace, both the duty and the prize
William Cowper: They trust in navies and armies
William Cowper: Universal soldiership has stabbed the heart of man
Richard Crashaw: In Hell’s palaces
William Crowe: On poets who sing of war
William Cunningham: A thousand gifts are thine, Sweet Peace! – which War can never know
William Davenant : War, the sport of kings, increases the number of dead
John Davidson: Blood in torrents pour in vain, for war breeds war again
John Davidson: The blood of men poured out in endless wars
Thomas Day: Wages abhorred war with humankind
Daniel Defoe: Mammon and Mars, twin deities
Thomas Dekker: Lands ravaged by soldiers and war
Charles Dickens: Waging war to perpetuate slavery
John Donne: The horror and ghastliness of war
John Donne: War and misery are one thing
Augusta Theodosia Drane: It needs must be that gentle Peace prevail!
Michael Drayton: All your banks with peace preserved be
John Dryden: All your care is to provide the horrid pomp of war
John Dryden: In peace the thoughts of war he could remove
John Dryden and Horace: Happy is he who trumpets summon not to war
John Dryden and Lucretius: Venus and Mars: Lull the world in universal peace
Edward Dyer: So that of war the very name may not be heard again
Havelock Ellis: War, a relapse from civilisation into barbarism, if not savagery
Eleanor Farjeon: Now that you too join the vanishing armies
George Farquhar: What induced you to turn soldier?
Henry Fielding: On the condign fate of Great Men and conquerors
Ford Maddox Ford: Millions massacred for picturesque phrases in politicians’ speeches
Ford Maddox Ford: Preparing men likes bullocks for the slaughterhouse
E.M. Forster: The Imperialist is not what he thinks or seems. He is a destroyer.
E.M. Forster: Wars spurred on by persistent talk of war, amplified by the gutter press
Thomas Fuller: As though there were not enough men-murdering engines
Thomas Fuller: When all the world might smile in perfect peace
Richard Furness: Selections on war
Richard Furness: Death and demons laugh’d in horrid joy
Richard Furness: The plough and the sword
Richard Furness: Whatever monster rose to mar the happiness of earth by war
Richard Furness: Who wasted earth with sword and flame and murdered millions for a name
John Galsworthy: Selections on war
John Galsworthy, 1911: Air war last and worst hideous development of the black arts of warfare
John Galsworthy: Achieving perpetual peace by securing the annihilation of our common enemies
John Galsworthy: Air war leads to reverse evolution
John Galsworthy: Friend becomes foe with war psychosis
John Galsworthy: Grandiloquent phrases are the very munitions of war
John Galsworthy: The monstrous injustice of conflating chauvinism with common drunkenness
John Galsworthy: On the drawbacks of uttering pro-war cant
John Galsworthy: On the embarrassing consequences of bellicose pontification
John Galsworthy: Only a helpless or wicked God would allow the slaughter of millions
John Galsworthy: The procreative demands of war
John Galsworthy: The pure essence of humanitarian warfare sentiments
John Galsworthy: Rivers of blood and tears. When would killing go out of fashion?
John Galsworthy: Trading in fanatical idiocy at expense of others’ blood and sweat
John Galsworthy: War and the microbe of fatalism
John Galsworthy: The war brought in ugliness
John Galsworthy: The war made us all into barbarians
John Galsworthy: War moves mankind towards the manly and unforgiving vigour of the tiger and the rat
John Galsworthy: “The war! The cursed war!”
John Galsworthy: War, where Christ is daily crucified a million times over
John Galsworthy: Would they never tire of making mincemeat of the world?
David Garnett: Criminal to welcome war
David Garnett: War is the worst of the epidemic diseases which afflict mankind
John Gay: Parallel lives. Highwaymen and soldiers.
George Gissing: Selections on war
George Gissing: The imposition of military servitude
George Gissing: Lord of Slaughter commands curse of universal soldiering
George Gissing: War turns science into enemy of man
George Gissing: When the next great war comes, newspapers will be the chief cause of it
William Godwin: Inventions of a barbarous age, deluging provinces with blood
Oliver Goldsmith: Selections on war
Oliver Goldsmith on war: Hundreds of thousands killed without consequence
Oliver Goldsmith: I am an enemy to nothing in this good world but war
Oliver Goldsmith: War and its servile press
Edmund Gosse: War and the brutalities of the real thing
John Gower: Peace is chief of all world’s wealth, war is mother of all wrongs
Robert Graves: Selections on war
Robert Graves: Accommodations for a million men killed in war
Robert Graves: A certain cure for lust of blood
Robert Graves: Even its opponents don’t survive war
Robert Graves: The grim arithmetic of war
Robert Graves: Men at arms and men of letters, the birth of English pacifism in the First World War
Robert Graves: Military madness degenerating into savagery
Robert Graves: Recalling the last war, preparing for the next
Robert Graves: War follows its victims back home
Robert Graves: War should be a sport for men above forty-five only
Robert Graves: War’s path of death, decay and decomposition
Robert Graves: War’s ultimate victors, the rats
Robert Graves: When even war’s gallows humor fails
Thomas Gray: Clouds of carnage blot the sun; weave the crimson web of war
Graham Greene: He carried the war in his heart, infecting everything
Graham Greene: A hundred English Guernicas
Graham Greene: Letter On NATO Threat To Cuba
Graham Greene: None of us can hate any more – or love. You have to feel something to stop a war.
Robert Greene: Then the stormy threats of wars shall cease
Fulke Greville: The shames of peace are the pride of war
Thomas Hardy: Selections on war
Thomas Hardy: All-Earth-gladdening Law of Peace, war’s apology wholly stultified
Thomas Hardy: As war-waste classed
Thomas Hardy: The battle-god is god no more
Thomas Hardy: How long must your wroth reasonings trade on lives like these?
Thomas Hardy: The Man He Killed
Thomas Hardy: Vaster battalions press for further strands to argue in the self-same bloody mode
Frank Harris: Henri Barbusse and the war against war
William Hazlitt: Selections on war
William Hazlitt: And this is patriotism. Practitioners of eternal war.
William Hazlitt: Difference between a war-expenditure and what ought to be a peace-establishment
William Hazlitt: Effects of war and taxes
William Hazlitt: High-priests of Moloch foam at the mouth at the name of peace
William Hazlitt: Systematic patrons of eternal war
William Hazlitt: War is in itself is a thriving, sensible traffic only to cannibals
Felicia Hemans: Selections on peace and war
Felicia Hemans: Say to the hurricane of war, – “Be still”
Felicia Hemans: Speak not of death, till thou hast looked on such
Felicia Hemans: A thousand voices echo “Peace!”
Felicia Hemans: Thousands doomed to moan, condemned by war to hopeless grief unknown
Felicia Hemans: War has still ravaged o’er the blasted plain
George Herbert: Make war to cease
Robert Herrick: The Olive Branch
Robert Herrick: The olive branch, the arch of peace
Maurice Hewlett: In the Trenches
Maurice Hewlett: Who prayeth peace?
James Hogg: Few such monsters can mankind endure: The fields are heaped with dead and dying.
James Hogg: Millions have bled that sycophants may rule
Thomas Hood: As gentle as sweet heaven’s dew beside the red and horrid drops of war
Thomas Hood: Freelance soldiering
Gerard Manley Hopkins: What pure peace allows alarms of wars?
Leigh Hunt: Captain Sword and Captain Pen
Leigh Hunt: The devilish drouth of the cannon’s ever-gaping mouth
Leigh Hunt: Some Remarks On War And Military Statesmen
Aldous Huxley: Selections on war
Aldous Huxley: Absurdity of talking about the defence of democracy by war
Aldous Huxley: The first of the political causes of war is war itself
Aldous Huxley: How are we to get rid of war when we celebrate militarists?
Aldous Huxley: Imposition of permanent military servitude upon the masses
Aldous Huxley: Manufacturing of arms, an intrinsically abominable practice
Aldous Huxley: Nuclear weapons, establishing world domination for one’s gang
Aldous Huxley: One cannot be ruler of militaristic society without being militarist oneself
Aldous Huxley: Rhetorical devices used to conceal fundamental absurdity and monstrosity of war
Aldous Huxley: Science, technology harnessed to the chariot of war
Aldous Huxley: Scientific workers must take action against war
Aldous Huxley: Shifting people’s attention in world where war-making remains an almost sacred habit
Aldous Huxley: War is mass murder organized in cold blood
Aldous Huxley: War is not a law of nature, nor even of human nature
Aldous Huxley: War is now the affair of every man, woman and child in the community
Jean Ingelow: And the dove said, “Give us peace!”
Jean Ingelow: Methought the men of war were even as gods
Soame Jenyns: One good-natured act more praises gain than armies overthrown, and thousands slain
Soame Jenyns: The soldier’s scarlet glowing from afar shows his bloody occupation’s war
Samuel Johnson: I to nobler themes aspire
Samuel Johnson: Reason frowns on War’s unequal game
Samuel Johnson: War is the extremity of evil
Henry Jones: Bid discord cease, and open wide the gates of peace
Keats: Days innocent of scathing war
John Keats: The fierce intoxicating tones of trumpets, drums and cannon
Charles Kingsley: Empire, a system of world-wide robbery, and church
Charles Kingsley: Tyrannising it luxuriously over all nations, she had sat upon the mystic beast
Henry Kirke White: Far better music inspire peace than war
Henry Kirke White: The red-eyeballed warrior doomed to ruin
Charles Lamb: More-wasting War, insatiable of blood
Walter Savage Landor: Some stopped revenge athirst for slaughter
D. H. Lawrence: Selections on war
D.H. Lawrence: All modern militarism is foul
D.H. Lawrence: Future War, Murderous Weapons, Refinements of Evil
D.H. Lawrence: In 1915 the world ended with the slaughter-machine of human devilishness
D. H. Lawrence: No romance of war. The soul did not heal.
D.H. Lawrence: The price to pay at home for terrible, terrible war
D.H. Lawrence: War adds horror to horror, becomes horrible piratic affair, dirty sort of freebooting
Richard Le Gallienne: The Illusion of War
Richard Le Gallienne: Is this to be strong, ye nations, your vulgar battles to fight?
Vernon Lee: Satan’s rules of war
Charles Lever: The self-serving drunken oblivion of war
William J. Locke: Following war
Samuel Lover: The demon of war casts his shadows before
Samuel Lover: The trumpet and the sword
Thomas Macaulay: Drive for transatlantic dominion leads to endless wars, empty treasuries
Thomas Macaulay: Loving war for its own sake
Thomas Macaulay: The self-perpetuating role of the army
Hugh MacDiarmid: A war to save civilization, you say?
Charles Mackay: Hung the sword in the hall, the spear on the wall
Bernard Mandeville: How to induce men to kill and die
Christopher Marlowe: Accurs’d be he that first invented war!
Christopher Marlowe: Parricide and filicide. While lions war, poor lambs perish.
Andrew Marvell: War all this doth overgrow
Andrew Marvell: When roses only arms might bear
Gerald Massey: Curst, curst be war, the World’s most fatal glory!
Gerald Massey: Sweet peace comes treading down war’s cruel spears
Philip Massinger: Famine, blood, and death, Bellona’s pages
Philip Massinger: Mustn’t change ploughshares into swords
George Meredith: Selections on peace and war
George Meredith: All your gains from War resign
George Meredith: Bellona’s mad halloo
George Meredith: The Olive Branch
George Meredith: On the Danger of War
George Meredith: War wife, as good as widowed
George Meredith: War’s rivers of blood no crown for future generations
Alice Meynell: The true slayers are those who sire soldiers
Thomas Middleton: Selections on peace and war
Thomas Middleton: All made to make a peace, and not a war
Thomas Middleton: Blood-quaffing Mars, who wash’d himself in gore
Thomas Middleton: Let them that seek Peace, find Peace and enjoy Peace
Thomas Middleton: O thrice-peaceful souls, whom neither threats nor strife nor wars controls!
Thomas Middleton: The Peacemaker
Thomas Middleton: The soldier’s fate
Milton: Men levy cruel wars, wasting the earth, each other to destroy
John Milton: What can war but endless war still breed?
Milton: Without ambition, war, or violence
Mary Russell Mitford: Sheath thy gory blade in peace
James Montgomery: Fratricidal war speeds on inexorability of Death
James Montgomery: War, that self-inflicted scourge of man
George Moore: Murder pure and simple, impossible to revive the methods of Tamburlaine
George Moore: War and disillusionment
Lewis Morris: Selections on war and peace
Lewis Morris: The blight of war surges in waves of blood
Lewis Morris: The evil blight of war torments the race from age to age
Lewis Morris: Filled with love of peace
Lewis Morris: Put off the curse of war
Lewis Morris: Red war, the dungeon, and the stake
Lewis Morris: When the cannons roar and the trumpets blare no longer
Lewis Morris: White-winged Peace triumphs over War’s red rapine
Lewis Morris: Who will free us from the dreadful past of war and hatred?
Lewis Morris: The world rang with the fierce shouts of war and cries of pain
William Morris: No man knew the sight of blood
William Morris: War abroad but no peace at home
Thomas Nashe: Swords may not fight with fate
Adela Florence Nicolson: Doubtless feasted the jackal and the kite
Alfred Noyes: Selections on war
Alfred Noyes: And the cost of war, they reckoned it In little disks of gold
Alfred Noyes: The Dawn of Peace
Alfred Noyes: Medicine driven back in defeat by the nightmare chaos of war
Alfred Noyes: Out of the obscene seas of slaughter
Alfred Noyes: Scarecrows that once were men
Alfred Noyes: A shuddering lump of tattered wounds lifted up a mangled head and whined
Alfred Noyes: Slaughter! Slaughter! Slaughter!
Alfred Noyes: They say that war’s a noble thing!
Alfred Noyes: Turning wasteful strength of war to accomplish large and fruitful tasks of peace
Alfred Noyes: The Victory Ball
Alfred Noyes: War, hypocritical word for universal murder
Alfred Noyes: War they tell me is a noble thing
Alfred Noyes: When they talked of war, they thought of sawdust, not of blood
Sean O’Casey: Battles of war changed for battles of peace
Sean O’Casey: The dead of wars past clasp their colder arms around the newer dead
Sean O’Casey: The Prince of Peace transformed into the god of war
Liam O’Flaherty: The foul horror of war
Liam O’Flaherty: Sounds from a dead world. Nothing but worms and rats feeding on death.
John Oldham: The cup and the sword
Amelia Opie: Grant, Heaven, those tears may be the last that war, detested war, shall cause!
Wildred Owen: Selections on war
Wilfred Owen: Arms and the Boy and Disabled
Wilfred Owen: From gloom’s last dregs these long-strung creatures crept
Wilfred Owen: Multitudinous murders they once witnessed
Wilfred Owen: The Parable of the Old Man and the Young
Wilfred Owen: Pawing us who dealt them war and madness
Wildred Owen: Rushed in the body to enter hell and there out-fiending all its fiends and flames
Wilfred Owen: The sons we offered might regret they died if we got nothing lasting in their stead
Wildred Owen: Strange meeting: I am the enemy you killed, my friend
Thomas Parnell: Lovely, lasting peace, appear!
Walter Pater: What are they all now, and the dust of their battles? Deity of Slaughter.
Coventry Patmore: Peace in life and art
Thomas Love Peacock: Selections on war and peace
Thomas Love Peacock: Frenzied war’s ensanguined reign
Thomas Love Peacock: The god of battle, the last deep groan of agony
Thomas Love Peacock: I’ll make my verses rattle with the din of war and battle
Thomas Love Peacock: Ne’er thy sweet echoes swell again with war’s demoniac yell!
Stephen Phillips: Appalled at bloody trophies
Harold Pinter: Art, Truth and Politics
Joseph Mary Plunkett: Till blooms the bud on olive branch, borne by the bird of peace
Alexander Pope: Peace o’er the world her olive wand extend
Alexander Pope: War, horrid war, your thoughtful walks invades
Alexander Pope: Where Peace scatters blessings from her dovelike wing
Winthrop Mackworth Praed: Take the sword away
J.B. Priestley: Insane regress of ultimate weapons leads to radioactive cemetery
Thomas Pringle: After the slaughter, the feast
Thomas Pringle: Resistless swept the ranks of war, the murder-glutted scythe of death
Matthew Prior: A new golden age free from fierce Bellona’s rage
Adelaide A. Procter: Let carnage cease and give us peace!
Herbert Read: Bombing Casualties
Herbert Read: The Happy Warrior
Charles Reade: To God? Rather to war and his sister and to the god of lies
Charles Reade: War is sweet to those who have never experienced it
Charlotte Richardson: Once more let war and discord cease
Mary Robinson: Selections on war
Mary Robinson: Anticipate the day when ruthless war shall cease to desolate
Mary Robinson: Dread-destructive power of war
Mary Robinson: Impetuous War, the lord of slaughter
Mary Robinson: The soldier sheds, for gold, a brother’s blood
Mary Robinson: Spread once more the fostering rays of Peace
Mary Robinson: The wise shall bid, too late, the sacred olive rise
Samuel Rogers: War and the Great in War let others sing
Samuel Rogers: What tho’ the iron school of War erase each milder virtue…
Isaac Rosenberg: Break of Day in the Trenches
Isaac Rosenberg: Dead Man’s Dump
Isaac Rosenberg: O! ancient crimson curse! On receiving news of the war
Isaac Rosenberg: Soldier: Twentieth Century
Christina Rossetti: They reap a red crop from the field. O Man, put up thy sword.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti: Shall Peace be still a sunk stream long unmet?
Edgar Saltus: Soldiers and no farmers; imperial sterility…and demise
Siegfried Sassoon: Selections on war
Siegfried Sassoon: Arms and the Man
Siegfried Sassoon: At the Cenotaph
Siegfried Sassoon: The foul beast of war that bludgeons life
Siegfried Sassoon: Murdering the livid hours that grope for peace
Siegfried Sassoon: No doubt he loathed the war and longed for peace
Siegfried Sassoon: Our deeds with lies were lauded, our bones with wrongs rewarded
Siegfried Sassoon: Repression of War Experience
Siegfried Sassoon: To Any Dead Officer
Siegfried Sassoon: The Tombstone-Maker
Siegfried Sassoon: The unheroic dead who fed the guns, those doomed, conscripted, unvictorious ones
Siegfried Sassoon: War, remorse and reconciliation
Siegfried Sassoon: We left our holes and looked above the wreckage of the earth
John Scott: I hate that drum’s discordant sound
Walter Scott: War’s cannibal priest, druid red from his human sacrifice
Anna Seward: Fierce War has wing’d the arrow that wounds my soul’s repose
Shakespeare: So inured to war that mothers smile as their children are slain
William Shakespeare: Works of poetry outlast the works of war
George Bernard Shaw: Selections on war
George Bernard Shaw: The earth is still bursting with the dead bodies of the victors
George Bernard Shaw: Gadarene swine running violently into a hell of high explosives
George Bernard Shaw: Little Minds and Big Battles
George Bernard Shaw: The Long Arm of War
Militarist myopia: George Bernard Shaw’s Common Sense About the War
George Bernard Shaw: Rabid war maniacs reversed the order of nature
George Bernard Shaw: Religion of ruthless competition inevitably leads to war
George Bernard Shaw: The shallowness of the ideals of men ignorant of history is their destruction
George Bernard Shaw: War and frivolous exultation in death for its own sake
George Bernard Shaw: War and the sufferings of the sane
George Bernard Shaw: War Delirium
George Bernard Shaw: War, governments and munitions manufacturers
George Bernard Shaw: War, the Yahoo and the angry ape
George Bernard Shaw: The way of the soldier is the way of death
Mary Shelley: The fate of the world bound up with the death of a single man
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Selections on war
Juvenilia: Percy Bysshe Shelley on war
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Earth cleansed of quivers, spears and gorgon-headed shields
Percy Bysshe Shelley: Man fabricates the sword which stabs his peace
Percy Bysshe Shelley: The soldiers dreamed that they were blacksmiths
Percy Bysshe Shelley: The unholy song of war
Percy Bysshe Shelley: War with its million horrors shall live but in the memory of time
William Shenstone: Ah, hapless realms! that war’s oppression feel.
William Shenstone: Let the gull’d fool the toils of war pursue
William Shenstone: War, where bleed the many to enrich the few
James Shirley: Some men with swords may reap the field and plant fresh laurels where they kill
Edith Sitwell: Dirge for the New Sunrise
Christopher Smart: Rejoice with the dove. Pray that all guns be nailed up.
M. B. Smedley: Where is the ministry of peace?
Charlotte Turner Smith: The lawless soldiers’ victims
Charlotte Turner Smith: Statesmen! ne’er dreading a scar, let loose the demons of war
Charlotte Turner Smith: Thus man spoils Heaven’s glorious works with blood!
Charlotte Turner Smith: To bathe his savage hands in human blood
Horace Smith: Selections on peace and war
Horace Smith: The hero-butchers of the sword
Horace Smith: Manufactured to machines for killing human creatures
Horace Smith: The trade of man-butchery. The soldier and the sailor.
Horace Smith: Weapon gathering dust
Horace Smith: When War’s ensanguined banner shall be furl’d
Sydney Smith: War, hailing official murderers as the greatest and most glorious of human creatures
Tobias Smollett: War contractors fattened on the blood of the nation
C.P. Snow: As final product of scientific civilization, nuclear bomb is its ultimate indictment
C.P. Snow: Even if moral judgments are left out, it’s unthinkable to drop the bomb
C.P. Snow: Hiroshima, the most horrible single act so far performed
C.P. Snow: Hope it’s never possible to develop superbomb
Charles Hamilton Sorley: The blind fight the blind
Charles Hamilton Sorley: When you see millions of the mouthless dead
Robert Southey: Selections on peace and war
Robert Southey: The Battle of Blenheim
Robert Southey: Preparing the way for peace; militarism versus Christianity
Robert Southey: The Soldier’s Wife
Robert Southey: Wade to glory through a sea of blood
Robert Southey: Year follows year, and still we madly prosecute the war
Stephen Spender: Selections on war
Stephen Spender: Lecture on Hell: battle against totalitarian war
Stephen Spender: Ultima Ratio Regum
Stephen Spender: The Woolfs in the 1930s: War the inevitable result of an arms race.
Edmund Spenser: The first to attack the world with sword and fire
Edmund Spenser: Wars can nought but sorrows yield
Stendhal and Byron: Military leprosy; fronts of brass and feet of clay
Robert Louis Stevenson: Peace we found where fire and war had been
William Stokes: Selections on peace and war
William Stokes: The Angel of Peace
William Stokes: Can fields of blood redeem mankind from error?
William Stokes: Invocation to the Spirit of Peace
William Stokes: The peace of nations to destroy
Lytton Strachey: After the battle, who shall say that the corpses were the most unfortunate?
Jonathan Swift: Brutes more modest than men in perpetuating war against their own species
Jonathan Swift: Lemuel Gulliver on War
Algernon Charles Swinburne: Death made drunk with war
Algernon Charles Swinburne : A gospel of war and damnation for the bestial by birth
Algernon Charles Swinburne: There shall be no more wars nor kingdoms won
Frank Swinnerton: Aerial bombardment, the most stupid and futile aspect of war
John Addington Symonds: Nation with nation, land with land unarmed shall live as comrades free
Arthur Symons: A great reaction: people will be tired of wars
Charles Tennant: Nor shall they learn war
William Tennant: While some sing of Mars’s bloody game…
Alfred Lord Tennyson: Selections on war and peace
Alfred Lord Tennyson: The brazen bridge of war
Alfred Lord Tennyson: I would the old God of war himself were dead
Alfred Tennyson: Ring out the thousand wars of old, ring in the thousand years of peace
Tennyson: Till the war-drum throbb’d no longer, and the battle-flags were furl’d
Alfred Lord Tennyson: When shall universal peace lie like light across the land?
William Makepeace Thackeray: Millions of innocent hearts wounded horribly
William Makepeace Thackeray: “Pax in bello.” The death of a single soldier.
William Makepeace Thackeray: War taxes men and women alike
Dylan Thomas: The Hand That Signed the Paper
James Thomson: Despise the insensate barbarous trade of war
James Thomson: Peace is the natural state of man; war his corruption, his disgrace
James Thomson: Philosophy’s plans of policy and peace
Henry Vaughan: Let us ‘midst noise and war of peace and mirth discuss
Henry Vaughan: What thunders shall those men arraign who cannot count those they have slain?
Edmund Waller: Less pleasure take brave minds in battles won
Rex Warner: These guns were sent to save civilisation
Thomas Warton: Not seek in fields of blood his warrior bays
William Watson: Curse my country for its military victory
William Watson: Dream of perfect peace
Isaac Watts: Clamor, and wrath, and war, begone
Edwin Waugh: Who strives to make the world a home where peace and justice meet
H.G. Wells: The abolition of war will be a new phase in the history of life
H.G. Wells: Armaments: Vile and dangerous industry in the human blood trade
H.G. Wells: Either man will put an end to air war or air war will put an end to mankind
H.G. Wells: For the predetermined losing side, modern wars an unspeakable business
H.G. Wells: Mars will sit like a giant above all human affairs and his speech is blunt and plain
H.G. Wells: Massacres of boys! That indeed is the essence of modern war.
H.G. Wells: Nearly everybody wants peace but nobody thinks out the arrangements needed
H.G. Wells: None so detestable as the god of war
H.G. Wells: A number of devoted men and women ready to give their whole lives to great task of peace
H.G. Wells: The progressive enslavement of the race to military tyranny
H.G. Wells: Universal collapse logically follows world-wide war
H.G. Wells: War is a triumph of the exhausted and dying over the dead
H.G. Wells: War, road to complete extinction or to degradation beyond our present understanding
H.G. Wells: War will leave the world a world of cripples and old men and children
H.G. Wells: When war comes home
H.G. Wells: Why did humanity gape at the guns and do nothing? War as business
H.G. Wells: The world is weary of this bloodshed, weary of all this weeping
H.G. Wells: The young are the food of war
Rebecca West: The dreams of Englishwomen during war
Oscar Wilde: Crimson seas of war, Great Game in Central and South Asia
Oscar Wilde: Who would dare to praise the barren pride of warring nations?
Helen Maria Williams: Heaven-born peace
Helen Maria Williams: Now burns the savage soul of war
Sarah Williams: Groaning for him they slew
John Wilmot: With war I’ve not to do
Margaret L. Woods: The forgotten slain
William Wordsworth: Selections on peace and war
William Wordsworth: All merit centered in the sword; battle’s hecatombs
William Wordsworth: Earth’s groaning field, where ruthless mortals wage incessant wars
William Wordsworth: If men with men in peace abide, all other strength the weakest may withstand
William Wordsworth: Peace in these feverish times is sovereign bliss
William Wordsworth: Proclaimed heroes for strewing meadows with carcasses
William Wordsworth: Prophetic harps were singing, “War shall cease”
William Wordsworth: Spreading peaceful ensigns over war’s favourite playground
Wordsworth: We felt as men should feel at vast carnage
Philip Stanhope Worsley: Not with iron steeped in slaughter
Henry Wotton: Pastorale. No wars are seen.
Thomas Wyatt: Children of the gun
Thomas Wyatt: Wax fat on innocent blood: I cannot leave the state to Caesar
Ann Yearsley: The anarchy of war
William Butler Yeats: The Rose of Peace
Edward Young: Selections on peace and war
Edward Young: Draw the murd’ring sword to give mankind a single lord
Edward Young: End of war the herald of wisdom and poetry
Edward Young: Reason’s a bloodless conqueror, more glorious than the sword
Edward Young: Such a peace that follows war
