The Death of a Soldier

Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1923

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Related Poems

"The Waste Land" by T. S. Eliot (1922)

Published a year before Stevens’s “The Death of a Soldier,” Eliot’s “Waste Land” describes a sterility and metaphysical disorientation of the postwar Western civilization. The long poem is a definitive piece of Modernist poetry addressing what Eliot perceived as the ethical failings of modern society. However, the poem maintains an element of hope even after so much violence and destruction, turning to Eastern spirituality and philosophy to make sense of the new, postwar world.

"Anthem for Doomed Youth" by Wilfred Owen (1917)

Written in the fall of 1917 while recovering from shellshock, Wilfred Owen’s “Anthem for Doomed Youth” is one of the most pivotal poems of World War I. The poem is a lament to the young soldiers who perished during the war, describing some of the bloodiest battles and the funerals that followed. A take on the Petrarchan sonnet, the poem flips the classic form traditionally reserved for love on its head by describing instead the violence of war and the deadly quiet that follows in its wake.

"Drummer Hodge" by Thomas Hardy (1899)

Possibly Hardy’s most famous poem about warfare, “Drummer Hodge” tells the story of the burial of a soldier named Hodge, a drummer in the British army during the Second Boer War in 1899. Not unlike “The Death of a Soldier,” “Drummer Hodge” is solemn, intent on honoring this dead soldier’s memory. It is primarily concerned with a soldier who died very far from his home. The bleak tone and complex diction of this early work reflect Hardy’s associations with the literary movement known as Realism that was still in vogue at the end of the 19th century when the poem was written.

"The Second Coming" by William Butler Yeats (1920)

One of the most seminal works of Modernist poetry, “The Second Coming” uses religious and apocalyptic imagery to describe the spiritual malaise of postwar Europe. Like Stevens, Yeats was affected by the violence of war—a preoccupation reflected in the poem’s image of a “blood-dimmed tide.” Moreover, two of the oracular poem’s most famous lines discern a cultural confusion and apathy, “The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity.”

Further Literary Resources

"The Patron Saint of Inner Lives" by Adam Kirsch (2016)

American poet and literary critic Adam Kirsch examines some of the highly distinctive and even obscure traits of Stevens’s imagination—not only as Modernist, and not only as American, but as something the poet Marianne Moore has called “beyond fathoming.” Kirsch writes, “[Stevens’s] daily existence offered no scope for self-expression, but on his walks to and from work, in the evenings up in his study, he was confronting the ultimate questions of art and life […] And he was answering in a language at once voluptuous and intellectual, elegant and eccentric—a language such as no one had spoken before.”

Wallace Stevens: Words Chosen out of Desire by Helen Vendler (1986)

One of the world’s leading scholars on Stevens, Harvard professor Helen Vendler unearths the intimacy and personhood that underpin Stevens’s deceptively abstract, impersonal poetry. From the publisher: “In this graceful book, Helen Vendler brings her remarkable skills to bear on a number of Stevens’s short poems. She shows us that this most intellectual of poets is in fact the most personal of poets; that his words are not devoted to epistemological questions alone but are also “words chosen out of desire.”

Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1891)

Hardy’s most famous novel, initially censored due to graphic content, follows a young woman named Tess who comes from less than ideal circumstances. After multiple run-ins with bad luck and amoral characters, Tess finds herself in a terrible situation. Although deeply sad, the novel makes an important statement about sexual violence and the harmful stigma surrounding this violence against women at the time. Hardy was actively challenging the double standards set for women during the period and was a pioneer in his advocacy against violence towards women. Much like “The Death of a Soldier,” Tess grapples with the tragic nature of so many human lives.