Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Women writers on peace and war (with regular additions)
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100 Women Writers on Peace and War
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Maria Abdy: May the gentle Dove of Peace extend her snowy pinions o’er us
Lucy Aikin: Gentle Peace with healing hand returns
Lucy Aikin: Sickening I turn on yonder plain to mourn the widows and the slain
Ellen P. Allerton: Peace After War
Joanna Baillie: And shall we think of war?
Joanna Baillie: Do children return from rude jarring war?
Joanna Baillie: Thy native land, freed from the ills of war, a land of peace!
H. Lavinia Baily: By the Sea. An Argument for Peace.
Isabella Banks: Absolve our souls from blood shed in our country’s cause
Isabella Banks: The bugle of war, the bugle of peace
Isabella Banks: “Glory, glory, glory!” As if murder were not sin!
Isabella Banks: Lay down weapons, war should cease
Anna Laetitia Barbauld: Peace and Shepherd
Anna Laetitia Barbauld: The storm of horrid war rolls dreadful on
Anna Laetitia Barbauld: War’s least horror is th’ ensanguined field
Charlotte Alington Barnard: Peace Hovers
Katherine Lee Bates: Children of the War
Aphra Behn: No rough sound of war’s alarms
Aphra Behn: The pen triumphs over the sword
Adelaide George Bennett: The Peace-Pipe Quarry
Elizabeth Bentley: On the return of celestial peace
Elizabeth Bentley: Terror-striking War shalt be banish’d far
Matilda Betham: All the horrid charms of war
Susanna Blamire: When the eye sees the grief that from one battle flows, small cause of triumph can the bravest feel
Mathilde Blind: All vile things that batten on disaster follow feasting in the wake of war
Mathilde Blind: Reaping War’s harvest grim and gory
Mathilde Blind: Widowing the world of men to win the world
Jane Bowdler: War’s deadly futility
Vera Mary Brittain: August, 1914
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: Exalt the name of Peace and leave those rusty wars that eat the soul
Elizabeth Barrett Browning: War’s human harvest
Caroline Clive: The bloody words of ruffian war
Elizabeth Cobbold: Earth’s bosom drenching with her children’s blood
Mary Elizabeth Coleridge: Lilies and Doves
Eliza Cook: Selections on peace and war
Eliza Cook: Crimson battlefield. When the world shall be spread with tombless dead.
Eliza Cook: I felt a shuddering horror lurk, to think I’d mingled in such work
Eliza Cook: No bloodstain lingers there. The plough and the spear.
Eliza Cook: Not where bullet, sword, and shield lie strown with the gory slain
Eliza Cook: Who can love the laurel wreath, plucked from the gory field of death?
Isabella Valancy Crawford: The Forging of the Sword
Isabella Valancy Crawford: War
Charlotte Dacre: Peace
Charlotte Dacre: War
Emily Dickinson: I many times thought Peace had come
Augusta Theodosia Drane: It needs must be that gentle Peace prevail!
Marguerite Duras: The civilizing mission
George Eliot: Tart rebuke of crude war propaganda
Emma Catherine Embury: Proud soldier turns from scenes of war
Maria Louise Eve: Disarm!
Laura Bell Everett: The Skein of Grievous War
Eleanor Farjeon: Now that you too join the vanishing armies
Eleanor Farjeon: Peace Poem
Marianne Farningham: Give Peace
Anne Finch: Enquiry After Peace
Mary Weston Fordham: Ode to Peace
Margaret Fuller: America, with no prouder emblem than the Dove
Charlotte Perkins Gilman: The Flag of Peace
Ellen Glasgow: Selections on war
Ellen Glasgow: The Altar of the War God
Ellen Glasgow: His vision of the future only an endless warfare and a wasted land
Ellen Glasgow: The Reign of the Brute
Ellen Glasgow: “That killed how many? how many?”
Ellen Glasgow: Then the rows of dead men stared at him through the falling rain in the deserted field
Hala Jean Hammond: War’s black hatred
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: Do Not Cheer, Men Are Dying
Felicia Hemans: Selections on peace and war
Felicia Hemans: Say to the hurricane of war, – “Be still”
Felicia Hemans: Speak not of death, till thou hast looked on such
Felicia Hemans: A thousand voices echo “Peace!”
Felicia Hemans: Thousands doomed to moan, condemned by war to hopeless grief unknown
Felicia Hemans: War and Peace
Felicia Hemans: War has still ravaged o’er the blasted plain
Mary Heron: Bid brazen-throated war and discord cease
Mary Heron: Ode on the General Peace
Martha Lavinia Hoffman: The Song of Peace
Julia Ward Howe: Mother’s Day Proclamation 1870
Jean Ingelow: And the dove said, “Give us peace!”
Jean Ingelow: Methought the men of war were even as gods
Ellen Key: Overcoming the madness of a world at war
Harriet King: Life is Peace
Zofia Kossak: Every creature has its day. War and crocodiles.
Selma Lagerlöf: The Fifth Commandment. The Great Beast is War.
Selma Lagerlöf: The mark of death was on them all
Vernon Lee: Satan’s rules of war
Lily Alice Lefevre: The Bridge of Peace
Marie Lenéru: War is not human fate
Isabella Lickbarrow: Invocation To Peace
Amy Lowell: A pattern called a war. Christ! What are patterns for?
Caroline Atherton Mason: Enemy, oh, let our warfare cease!
Alice Meynell: The true slayers are those who sire soldiers
Edna St. Vincent Millay: Conscientious Objector
Emily Huntington Miller: Hymn of Peace
Ruth Comfort Mitchell: He Went for a Soldier
Mary Russell Mitford: Sheath thy gory blade in peace
Marianne Moore: I must fight till I have conquered in myself what causes war
Hannah More: War
Lilika Nakos: Selections on war
Lilika Nakos: The dead man, the living, the house; all were smashed to bits
Lilika Nakos: Do I know what makes men kill each other?
Lilika Nakos: Do you think the war will ever end?
Lilika Nakos: The grandmother’s sin
Lilika Nakos: “Surely God didn’t intend this butchery”
Lilika Nakos: “What’s the war got to do with God?”
Adela Florence Nicolson: Doubtless feasted the jackal and the kite
Sara Louisa Oberholtzer: The dawn of peace is breaking!
Zoé Oldenbourg: War provides a feast for the vultures
Amelia Opie: Grant, Heaven, those tears may be the last that war, detested war, shall cause!
Frances Sargent Osgood: Peace and the olive branch
Lori Petri: Battleships
Adelaide A. Procter: Let carnage cease and give us peace!
Charlotte Richardson: Once more let war and discord cease
Mary Robinson: Selections on war
Mary Robinson: Anticipate the day when ruthless war shall cease to desolate
Mary Robinson: Dread-destructive power of war
Mary Robinson: Impetuous War, the lord of slaughter
Mary Robinson: The soldier sheds, for gold, a brother’s blood
Mary Robinson: Spread once more the fostering rays of Peace
Mary Robinson: The wise shall bid, too late, the sacred olive rise
Christina Rossetti: They reap a red crop from the field. O Man, put up thy sword.
Gabrielle Roy: This was the hope that was uplifting mankind once again: to do away with war
Vita Sackville-West: Man’s war on his fellow creatures
George Sand: Trader in uniformed flesh and the religion of self
Olive Schreiner: Give me back my dead!
Olive Schreiner: The bestiality and insanity of war
Anna Seghers: War enthusiasm, brewed from equal parts of age-old memories and total oblivion
Anna Seward: Fierce War has wing’d the arrow that wounds my soul’s repose
Mary Shelley: The fate of the world bound up with the death of a single man
Kate Brownlee Sherwood: This one soft whisper – Peace
Louise Morgan Sill: I am the Hell-god, War!
Edith Sitwell: Dirge for the New Sunrise
M. B. Smedley: Where is the ministry of peace?
Charlotte Turner Smith: The lawless soldiers’ victims
Charlotte Turner Smith: Statesmen! ne’er dreading a scar, let loose the demons of war
Charlotte Turner Smith: Thus man spoils Heaven’s glorious works with blood!
Charlotte Turner Smith: To bathe his savage hands in human blood
Madame de Staël: Voting for war, pronouncing their own death sentence
Sara Teasdale: Spring in War-Time
Edith Matilda Thomas: Air war: They are not humans.
Edith Matilda Thomas: The Altar of Moloch
Lucia Trent: Women of War
Lesya Ukrainka: Do you understand that word called war?
Rebecca West: The dreams of Englishwomen during war
Phillis Wheatley: From every tongue celestial Peace resounds
Margaret Widdemer: After War
Ellen Wheeler Wilcox: The Paean of Peace
Ella Wheeler Wilcox: A Plea To Peace
Jane Wilde: Peace with the Olive, and Mercy with the Palm
Helen Maria Williams: Heaven-born peace
Helen Maria Williams: Now burns the savage soul of war
Sarah Williams: Groaning for him they slew
Margaret L. Woods: The forgotten slain
Ann Yearsley: The anarchy of war
Marguerite Yourcenar: Fruits of war are food for new wars
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