World War I

  1. "Mesopotamia," Rudyard Kipling
  2. "Smile, Smile, Smile," Wilfred Owen 
  3. "IV: The Dead," Rupert Brooke 
  4. "Returning, We Hear the Larks," Issac Rosenberg 
  5. "Does it Matter," Siegfried Sassoon
  6. "This Is No Case of Petty Right or Wrong," Richard Thomas

Many World War I poems are widely available online, and most of these come from this Oxford online seminar on British poets of the Great War and this site at the BBC. The Oxford seminar is also connected to the Wilfred Owen Multimedia Digital Archive, which includes manuscripts and letters of the British soldier-poet Wilfred Owen, plus a wealth of World War I archive photos, video footage, and interviews, presented with the help of theImperial War Museum. 

Iraq, Now 

  1. "American Football (A Reflection on the Gulf War)," Harold Pinter
  2. Selections and Readings, Brian Turner (Army veteran, Operation Iraqi Freedom) 
  3. "The War Works Hard," Dunya Mikhail
  4. "Soldier" & "Village," Joop Bersee
  5. "State of the Union 2003," Sam Hamill
  6. "Statement of Conscience," Robert Pinsky
  7. "The School Among the Ruins," Adrienne Rich

For more contemporary war poems, check out Poets Against War, the source of many of the poems on this short list .