Jessie Pope

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Jessie Pope (1868 - 1941)^[1] was an English poet, writer and journalist best known for her patriotic motivational poems published during World War I.

Born in Leicester, she was educated at Craven House, Leicester, and North London Collegiate School. She was a regular contributor to Punch, The Daily Mail and The Daily Express,^[1] also writing for Vanity Fair,^[2] Pall Mall Magazine^[3] and the Windsor,^[4]

A lesser-known literary contribution was Pope's discovery of Robert Noonan's novel The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, when his daughter mentioned the manuscript to her after his death. Pope recommended it to her publisher, who commissioned her to abridge it before publication. This, a partial bowdlerization, moulded it to a standard working-class tragedy while greatly downgrading its socialist political content.^[5]

Other works include Paper Pellets (1907), an anthology of humorous verse.^[6] She also wrote verses for children's books,^[5] such as The Cat Scouts (Blackie, 1912), a collaboration with the illustrator Louis Wain.

[edit] War poetry

Pope's war poetry, now perceived as jingoistic,^[7]^[8] was originally published in The Daily Mail and focused on encouraging recruitment. Who's for the Game? is typical in style:

Who’s for the game, the biggest that’s played,
The red crashing game of a fight?
Who’ll grip and tackle the job unafraid?
And who thinks he’d rather sit tight?

Other poems, such as The Call (1915)^[9] - "Who’s for the trench — Are you, my laddie?" - expressed similar sentiments. Pope was widely published during the war, apart from newspaper publication producing three volumes: Jessie Pope's War Poems (1915), More War Poems (1915) and Simple Rhymes for Stirring Times (1916).^[10]

Her treatment of the subject is markedly in contrast to the anti-war stance of soldier poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, the latter in particular finding her work distasteful. His poem Dulce et Decorum Est was a direct response to her writing, originally dedicated "To Jessie Pope". A later draft amended this to "To a certain Poetess".^[11]

[edit] References

^ ^a ^b Minds at War'" the Poetry and Experience of the First world War', David Roberts, Saxon Books, 1996, ISBN 0952896907
^ Songs of Good Fighting, Eugene Richard White & Harry Persons Taber, Elkin Mathews, 1908
^ Reviews and magazines, The Times, December 1, 1910
^ Reviews and magazines, The Times, May 1, 1912
^ ^a ^b The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists, Robert Tressett, introduction by Peter Miles, Oxford World's Classics, OUP, 2005, Google Books
^ Paper Pellets, Internet Archive
^ Jon Stallworthy "Owen, Wilfred (Edward Salter)", The Oxford Companion to Twentieth-Century Poetry in English, Ian Hamilton, Oxford University Press, 1996.
^ Women's Poetry of the First World War, Nosheen Khan, University Press of Kentucky, 1988, ISBN 0813116775
^ The Call, Norton Anthology of English Literature
^ The Works of Wilfred Owen, Wilfred Owen, ed. Douglas Kerr, Wordsworth Editions, 1994, ISBN 1853264237
^ The Old Lie: The Great War and the Public-school Ethos, Peter Parker, Constable, 1987