ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Homer
Little is known about the life of Homer; the author credited with...More >
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Poems About War
Henry V , Act III, Scene I [One more unto the breach, dear friends] by William Shakespeare
War Music [Down on your knees, Achilles] by Christopher Logue
A Wedding at Cana, Lebanon, 2007 by Tom Sleigh
April 27, 1937 by Timothy Steele
Bagram, Afghanistan, 2002 by Marvin Bell
Before the Deployment by Jehanne Dubrow
Death Fugue by Paul Celan
Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen
Eighth Air Force by Randall Jarrell
For the Fallen by Laurence Binyon
For the Union Dead by Robert Lowell
Grass by Carl Sandburg
I Have a Rendezvous with Death by Alan Seeger
I Hear an Army by James Joyce
i sing of Olaf glad and big by E. E. Cummings
Memorial Day for the War Dead by Yehuda Amichai
Mosul by David Hernandez
My Father on His Shield by Walt McDonald
Peace by Henry Vaughan
Peace by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Phantom Noise by Brian Turner
Poems about War
Romance by Charles Reznikoff
Ships That Pass in the Night by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Some People by Wislawa Szymborska
Spoken From the Hedgerows by Jorie Graham
The Battle Hymn of the Republic by Julia Ward Howe
The Coming of War: Actæon by Ezra Pound
The Czar's Last Christmas Letter: A Barn in the Urals by Norman Dubie
The Fall of Rome by W. H. Auden
The Mask of Anarchy [Excerpt] by Percy Bysshe Shelley
The War After the War by Debora Greger
The War Works Hard by Dunya Mikhail
The Wound-Dresser by Walt Whitman
Untitled [1950 June 27] by Don Mee Choi
Veterans of Foreign Wars by Edward Hirsch
War and Hell, XVI [I am a great inventor] by Ernest Crosby
War Is Kind [excerpt] by Stephen Crane
Web Prayer for Milosz by David Wojahn
Other Epics
Don Juan [If from great nature's or our own abyss] by George Gordon Byron
Inferno , Canto I by Dante Alighieri
Inferno , Canto XXXIV by Dante Alighieri
The Aeneid , Book I, [A grove stood in the city] by Virgil
The Aeneid , Book IV, [So, you traitor] by Virgil
The Aeneid , Book VI, [First, the sky and the earth] by Virgil
The Iliad , Book I, Lines 1-14 by Homer
The Iliad , Book I, Lines 1-16 by Homer
The Iliad , Book I, [A Friend Consigned to Death] by Homer
The Odyssey , Book I, Lines 1-20 by Homer
The Odyssey , Book XXIII, [The Trunk of the Olive Tree] by Homer
The Iliad , Book I, Lines 1-15
by Homer translated by Stanley Lombardo
RAGE:
Sing, Goddess, Achilles' rage,
Black and murderous, that cost the Greeks
Incalculable pain, pitched countless souls
Of heroes into Hades' dark,
And left their bodies to rot as feasts
For dogs and birds, as Zeus' will was done.
Begin with the clash between Agamemnon--
The Greek warlord--and godlike Achilles.
Which of the immortals set these two
At each other's throats?
Apollo
Zeus' son and Leto's, offended
By the warlord. Agamemnon had dishonored
Chryses, Apollo's priest, so the god
Struck the Greek camp with plague,
And the soldiers were dying of it.
From The Iliad , lines 1-17, by Homer, translated by Stanley Lombardo and published by Hackett Publishing. © 1997 by Stanley Lombardo. Used with permission of Hackett Publishing Co., Inc., Indianapolis, IN and Cambridge, MA. All rights reserved.