The Idea of War Poetry as a Burst Blister

I was on BBC Radio Wales this morning, discussing the soldier-poets of Iraq and Afghanistan and comparing them, in two minutes flat, to their First World War predecessors. The BBC had taken its lead from this story in yesterday's Sunday Express: 'Like a blister burst by the unbearable chafing of the Afghanistan conflict, war poetry has come back into the public domain.' That's some image --- war poetry as a blister emptied of its, well, its contents. Or perhaps the image got out of control, and war poetry was meant to be the contents rather than the blister, which would explain why it grabbed the public's attention as it exploded everywhere.

Photograph courtesy of the excellent Photobucket.