the poetry of pain large-scale reckonings with pain, writ across bodies, communities, and landscapes,
thatinterest me here. War’s pain demands expression; this is a premiss of my
discussion. Poetry works to articulate that pain, in a variety of forms that we can
trace; this will be a central line of inquiry. That articulation often hearkens back
to theIliad; this is where we can locate our unifying terms. In what follows, I
will isolate in theIliadfour consolidating elements, in an escalating scale, and
these features, in turn, will ground and orientate my analysis of modern lyrics: the
energizing duality of anger and grief, two sides of war’s emotional spectrum; an
aesthetics of rest, which grows out of the expression of grief; and, overseeing the
whole operation, the fact of force.^12
It is no secret that theIliadtakes anger as a primary human and martial category,
given its celebrated opening invocation, ‘Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus’ son
Achilleus’ (1. 1), and its encyclopedic accounting for a nearly infinite range of human
and divine forms of anger.^13 As scholars remind us, the poem contains no fewer
than thirteen different words that convey the concept of anger, and its attention
to the diversity of anger’s instantiations in the setting of war is correspondingly
nuanced. Thus we have, for example, a specific form of wrath that accrues to the
death of friends in battle, which calls forth the ferocious instinct of revenge; another
that attaches to the problem of prideful language; anger defined in terms of its
specific temporality versus anger that carries a tendency to smoulder; and so on.^14
In terms of the poem’s dramatic action, Homer elaborates extended formulations
of fury, not only in the opening conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon, but
also in such climactic passages as the return of Achilles to combat, when his violent
energy has a boundlessness that justifies such epithets as ‘godlike’ and ‘insatiate of
battle’. This bloody sequence (in which Achilles slaughters hundreds of Trojans,
confronts nature itself in the form of the inflamed river, and finally kills Hector)
culminates in the desecration of Hector’s body in view of the citizens of Troy, who
watch aghast from the city walls. All of this follows from Achilles’ fury at Hector
as a person (rather than, say, from the ordinary enmities of war), an individual
who ‘will pay in a lump for all those|sorrows of my companions you killed in your
spear’s fury’ (22. 271–2). It is nearly tautological, indeed, to say that for Homer,
war and anger have something important to do with one another; every element in
(^12) For a short essay, one must make choices: it isimpossible to account for all elements in such a
broad rubric as ‘the poetry of pain’. I hope that my four categories—anger, grief, peace, force—help
to establish a varied language of pain; but they are not meant to be comprehensive. So, e.g. I give scant
attention to several important topics that I would, ideally, consider in more detail: shell-shock and its
literary manifestations, the often tortuous operations of memory and commemoration, graphic and
gruesome depictions of the mutilated body (these are especially important for contemporary poetry),
and dynamics of gender that are often complex and contradictory. 13
Homer,The Iliad, trans. Richard Lattimore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961). I use
Lattimore’s translation (the canonical choice) throughout this essay.
(^14) See Thomas R. Walsh,Fighting Words and Feuding Words: Anger and the Homeric Poems(Lanham,
Md.: Lexington Books, 2005).