Many of the most powerful poems about courage and bravery are themselves courageous because they don’t shy away from facing the fear which is a feature of many people’s lives. Courage is an idea that runs through much of his slim oeuvre, and this fine villanelle – a form which Empson made his own in the late 1920s and 1930s – offers a taut, powerful account of the disappearance of ‘torment’ and ‘fear’ from one’s life.ĩ. Many poems by the modern metaphysical poet and critic William Empson (1906-84) are about fear and the need to acknowledge it without allowing it to control us. In this angry poem, Sassoon tells it how it is: Jack was just an ordinary young lad who tried his best to avoid being killed in the war, but back home, his grieving mother has to tell herself the lie that her boy was brave – was, indeed, a hero. The First World War wasn’t the most heroic of wars, although many individual acts of bravery were witnessed. The title of this poem says it all: no matter how tough things get, no matter how uphill the struggle may be, we should keep going and not quit.

The British-born American poet Edgar Albert Guest (1881-1959) became known as the People’s Poet, and this poem, written in a clear and direct manner, is a fine example of how he acquired such an epithet. This is summed up well in the reference to meeting with triumph and disaster and ‘treat those two impostors just the same’ – in other words, be magnanimous in victory and success (don’t gloat or crow about it) and be dignified and noble in defeat or times of trouble (don’t moan or throw your toys out of the pram). Stoicism looms large in Kipling’s famous poem – that is, the acknowledgment that, whilst you cannot always prevent bad things from happening to you, you can deal with them in a good way.

What is a name for brave words