Sometimes, war is mandatory. It is bloody, it is sad. However, at times to best express a soldier’s feeling is through a poem. That’s why we made this compilation of American war poetry.

For poems about war, consider the following:

“In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae
“The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke
“Dulce Et Decorum Est” by Wilfred Owen
“The Diameter of the Bomb” by Yehuda Amichai
“Memorial Day for the War Dead” by Yehuda Amichai
“God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children” by Yehuda Amichai
“The Fall of Rome” by W. H. Auden
“On Being Asked to Write a Poem Against the War in Vietnam” by Hayden Carruth
“Waiting for the Barbarians” by Constantine Cavafy
“Navy Field” by William Meredith
“Death Fugue” by Paul Celan
“War is Kind” by Stephen Crane
“The Czar’s Last Christmas Letter: A Barn in the Urals” by Norman Dubie
“Spoken from the Hedgerows” by Jorie Graham
“Elegy for Fortinbras” by Zbigniew Herbert
The Iliad by Homer
“Eighth Air Force” by Randall Jarrell
Dien Cai Dau by Yusef Komunyakaa
“Notes for an Elegy” by William Meredith
“War Music (an account of books 16-19 of Homer’s Iliad)” by Christopher Logue
“For the Union Dead” by Robert Lowell
“My Father on His Shield” by Walt McDonald
“The War Works Hard” by Dunya Mikhail
“I Explain a Few Things” by Pablo Neruda
“Poem” by Muriel Rukeyser
“Foundations” by Leopold Staff
“Starvation Camp Near Jaslo” by Wislawa Szymborska