Nowadays, in a Britain that tends to frown upon anything more patriotic than an international soccer friendly, poets such as Jessie Pope are considered outdated and jingoistic. Perhaps this is because the past really is what L.P. Hartley claimed it to be in his novel The Go-Between; a foreign country, where things are done differently. Initially her poetry was an inspiration to the young men going off to war, and to the women left behind to keep everything going, but subsequently, soldier poets putting their front-line experiences into verse began to tell a different story. Pope has fallen out of favor, and into relative obscurity when compared to universally known voices belonging to poets such as Rupert Brooke and Wilfred Owen who put their experiences on the front lines into verse. Owen actually wrote one of his poems in direct response to her; dulce et decorum est was written in 1917 and posthumously published with the poets ironic dedication to Pope before it.
Who was Jessie Pope? Born in the late Victorian era, Pope saw two World Wars, passing away halfway through World War Two in December 1941. A successful writer and journalist in peace-time, her poetry was often used as a motivational tool by the War Office because it encouraged young people to enlist and become part of the war effort. Pope was also instrumental in introducing the practice of giving a white feather, a symbol of cowardice, to those who chose not to join up. Often her verses were almost goading, challenging young men to prove their patriotism and their courage by joining the army. Another tactic was to minimize the monumental thing that they were signing up for, and to make the war sound more like a game of rugby than an international conflict from which they were highly unlikely to return alive.
After the war, when the anti-war stance of Owen, Sassoon and Nichols had come to represent the soldiers' experience of the war far more accurately than Pope's, she became viewed as more of a political propaganda writer than an actual literary figure. There were several other women poets in the same boat. Like Pope, these women championed the new identity of women, who were basically running the Home Front whilst the men were at war, and making rather a good job of it. In this way, she was something of a pioneer, as her poetry told women not to sit at home and mope whilst their men were at war, but to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and keep the home fires burning; she was one of the first people to highlight the very important contribution that women made to the war.
After the war, Pope returned to her first love, writing children's books and verses, but never managed to shake off her reputation as a pro-war propagandist. But here is the paradoxical thing about her work, as out of favor as it has become. Not surprisingly, the two most studied poets in British schools are Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, but the third in this list is Pope; in fact, Jessie Pope is studied more in English high schools than Ernest Hemingway and Robert Graves, to name but two. Unfortunately she is studied for all the wrong reasons. She is the poet students love to hate, condemning her as crass and light-hearted in the face of a conflict so terrible and atrocious.
Teachers and many poetry critics, though, feel this to be unfair. Pope wrote what people wanted to hear at the time - that they were doing a good thing, saving the country, making a difference. It is only with the benefit of hindsight that we are able to see just how devastating the battles of World War One actually were. To look at Jessie Pope's poetry and it's genuinely positive intent as a propaganda tool is to unfairly judge her based on the knowledge that we have today about the conflict.
