Oldest Surviving War Poet

Dearmer from article in Dutch Daily NRC (24 Mar. 1993), Michiel Hegener

Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are two of the best-known poets of the First World War; John Oxenham was the best-selling poet during the war, and Edgell Rickword, born in October of 1898, is often identified as “youngest of the soldier-poets” (Kendall’s Poetry of the First World War). But the oldest surviving soldier-poet of the Great War is a name few will recognize: Geoffrey Dearmer. 

Dearmer was born March 21, 1893, just three days after Wilfred Owen. In 1914, Dearmer enlisted with the London Royal Fusiliers, serving in Malta, Egypt, Gallipoli, and at the Somme. He was demobilised in 1920. By the time of his death on August 18, 1996 at the age of 103, he was “the oldest member of the Fusiliers Association, the Gallipoli Association, the Society of Authors and the Poetry Society.”* As he approached his 100th birthday, Dearmer was asked by a radio interviewer “‘the secret’ of reaching the century so mentally agile and in such comparatively good shape physically. He replied: ‘Bad temper shortens life. Even temper never does.’”* 

Dearmer is perhaps best-known for his poem "The Turkish Trench Dog," but his lesser-known work deserves attention as well. His poem "Resurrection," first published in Poems (1918) as the second of two “Trench Poems,” grapples with the incomprehensible deaths of millions. 

Detail "Resurrection of the Soldiers,"
Stanley Spencer NT790185 Sandham

II. Resurrection

Five million men are dead. How can the worth 

Of all the world redeem such waste as this? 

And yet the spring is clamorous of birth,

And whispering in winter’s chrysalis

Glad tidings to each clod, each particle of earth.

So the year’s Easter triumphs. Shall we then

Mourn for the dead unduly, and forget 

The resurrection in the hearts of men? 

Even the poppy on the parapet 

Shall blossom as before when Summer blows again.

—Geoffrey Dearmer

Dearmer starkly assesses the cost of war—he was no stranger to loss and death. His younger brother, Christopher, died at Gallipoli in October 1915, just one week before Geoffrey arrived there, and his mother died the same year of typhoid while nursing the wounded in Serbia (she and his father were volunteers in Serbia with the Red Cross ambulance). What sets Dearmer’s work apart from that of the canonical war poets is that he finds solace in the restorative power of nature and faith. 

Geoffrey Dearmer

Although Dearmer’s war poems were well received during the war and in its immediate aftermath, they slipped into obscurity for close to 70 years until friends and admirers arranged to have a selection of his work, A Pilgrim’s Song, published to honour his 100th birthday in 1993. In the Foreword to that book, Jon Stallworthy writes of Dearmer, “his trust in God survived the horrors, and he was sustained...by the ministering beauty of a natural world that never ceases to bind the wounds that man unnaturally inflicts.” Stallworthy notes, “One does not have to share Geoffrey Dearmer’s beliefs to respect them and to recognize that he speaks for many less articulate victims of the Western Front. No doubt his seemingly unshaken vision of this world and the next helped to sustain him and bring him safely home to make a fresh start.”**

Dearmer’s legacy lives on in the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, annually awarded by the Poetry Society for the best poem published in The Poetry Review written by a poet who doesn’t yet have a full collection. All his life a modest man, Dearmer said after the publication of A Pilgrim’s Song, “I don’t know if I like any of the poems in it very much. Some are rather worse than others. Remember, all the great poets died.”*** 

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* Laurence Cottrell, “Obituary: Geoffrey Dearmer,” Independent, 19 Aug. 1996. 

** Jon Stallworthy, “Foreword,” A Pilgrim’s Song by Geoffrey Dearmer, John Murray, 1993, vii. 

*** Dearmer quoted in “‘The Dead Turk,’ Geoffrey Dearmer (1916): Echoes of Calvary in Gallipoli,” by Nigel Steel, Telegraph special supplement "Inside the First World War: Redrawing the Middle East," 2 Feb. 2014.