Classics and The Dardanelles Campaign

Abstract

THE poetry associated with the First World War has been widely discussed and frequently anthologized. Considerable biographical attention has also been paid to the young officers who wrote so much of it. But less notice has been taken of the connections that some of the poets felt driven to make between contemporary warfare and the legendary conflicts invoked in the Greek classics they had quite recently studied at school and university. The Hood Naval Battalion of the Royal Naval Division and the Dardanelles campaign of 1915–16 had brought the classically educated Rupert Brooke and his friend Patrick Shaw-Stewart to the vicinity of the plains of Troy, which they greeted with some scholarly and romantic enthusiasm. The experience stimulated vivid recall of the battles of Homer's Iliad. In a posthumously published fragment Brooke imagined how it might be that Death and Sleep Bear many a young Sarpedon home. And Priam and his fifty sons Wake all amazed, and hear the guns, And shake for Troy again.1