Writing War and Empire: Poetry, Patriotism, and Public Claims-Making in the British Caribbean

The outbreak of World War One fueled a groundswell of poetic writing in Jamaica, Trinidad, Grenada, and elsewhere in the British Caribbean. While many of the region’s established authors published works of war verse, the outpouring of war-themed poetry emerged from soldier-poets and civilian writers outside of the elite class of professional writers. This chapter offers the first sustained treatment of Anglophone Caribbean war verse, examining previously uncited poems culled from newspapers, archives, and autograph books. It argues that war poetry functioned as a form of public claims making during and after the war years, allowing writers from the colonial peripheries to render visible their place in the British Empire and to (re)negotiate their relationship to the metropole.