Poetry Against Forgetting

War poetry's most important job may be preserving individual experience against the abstraction of statistics. A number — 60 million dead in WWII — is too large to grasp. A single poem about one soldier's last morning makes the loss real in a way no statistic can. This is why governments fund war memorials but stay uneasy about war poetry: memorials can be controlled and their messages managed. Poetry resists management. It says what the poet saw and felt, not what the government wants remembered.