Andrew Motion, the Poet Laureate, has written and performed a poem to mark the birthday of Harry Patch, Britain’s only survivor of battle on the Western Front. I was all ready to be horrible and cynical about this, but Motion does seem to have been keen to write about how one – relatively brief – part of a life can come to dominate the whole of it. It might be an interesting addition to courses on the First World War and poetry.
Update: some interesting discussion on George Simmers’ site of this poem
