Gallipoli to Vietnam

War poetry is a global tradition, not merely a British one. The Turkish poet Mehmet Akif Ersoy wrote "To the Martyrs of Canakkale," an elegy for the dead of the Gallipoli campaign. Anna Akhmatova turned Stalin's Great Terror into testimony in Requiem, composed from the Leningrad prison queues where she waited for word of her imprisoned son. Hiroshima poets recorded nuclear devastation in haiku that stripped language to its essence.

Yusef Komunyakaa, a Black American soldier in Vietnam, wrote with double consciousness — experiencing war both as a military journalist who witnessed the fighting firsthand and as a member of a minority serving a country that denied him full citizenship.