Jessie Pope
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Jessie Pope (1870 - 1941) was an English poet best known for her poems about World War I. Detractors of her work accuse her of being a pro-war propagandist who trivialized the war through her use of simple rhyme schemes (similar to those in nursery rhymes) and allusions to sports, games and heroism. (Her poem, "My Bit," for instance, likens her swatting of a housefly to the British soldiers' killing of Germans.) Having spent the war years in Britain, she never experienced life in the trenches, a fact some commentators have identified as a limitation on her poetry.[citation needed] Yet other commentators have thought it unnecessary to assert that poets who have never experienced war face numerous limitations in writing pro-war poetry. A lesser-known literary contribution of Pope's was the editorship and partial bowdlerization of Robert Tressell's posthumously published novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, a book of considerable significance to the history of socialist and trade union movements.
Pope was widely published during the war as a result of her pro-war stance and motivational style. However, many soldiers writing poetry at the time found her work distasteful - Wilfred Owen's poem Dulce et Decorum Est was a direct response to her writing, originally dedicated "To Jessie Pope."
There follow several representative samples from her books Jessie Pope's War Poetry and More War Poems.
"A gun, a gun to shoot the Hun,
A cudgel of oak to clout him,
A Jellicoe's ship to give him gip,
And a Kitchner's boy to out him....
If all the world were German made
As well as all the sky,
If all the words were deutsch, and wacht
And ach and Hoch and zwei--
We, too, would gulp down lager beer,
Our throats would be so dry."
--from "Simple Rhymes for Stirring Times"
"Football's a sport, and a rare sport too,
Don't make it a source of shame.
To-day there are worthier things to do.
Englishmen, play the game!
A truce to the League, a truce to the Cup,
Get to work with a gun.
When our country's at war we must all back up--
It's the only thing to be done!"
--from "Play the Game"
"And what of the girl who is left behind,
And the wife who misses her mate?
Oh, well, we've got our business to mind
Though it's only to watch and wait.
So we'll take what comes with a gallant heart
As we busily knit and sew,
Trying, God help us, to do our part,
'Are we downhearted?--NO!'"
--from "NO!"
It is instructive to compare these with any of the poems of Owen, Sassoon, or Rosenberg.
Pope was born in 1870 in Leicester. In 1930, at age 60, she married a retired bank manager named Edward Lenton, and died in Devon in 1941.
