Audiobook · read by volunteers
War Is Kind
Stephen Crane (1871–1900)
Read by Alan Davis Drake (1945-2010), JemmaBlythe, featherheadfop, Kristin Hughes (1974-2021), Fox in the Stars, Mark F. Smith, Maria Morabe, bignate_2000, Peter Yearsley, Sean McKinley · 10 chapters · 18 min
About the book
On the anniversary of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, a group of volunteers chose a poem written long before the atomic age and let it speak for itself. War Is Kind, by Stephen Crane, sets an almost gentle title against a harrowing subject: the price paid by soldiers on the field and by the women and children left to mourn them. Here you will hear ten different readings of the same poem, each with its own tone, pace and emphasis. Hearing the poem again and again, you begin to notice how each phrase can bend, and how much a reader’s breath and silence shape a text. It takes only about twenty minutes in all, and it asks to be heard more than once. A short, moving lesson in what a few lines of verse can do.
Introduction
This collection brings together ten recordings of one poem, War Is Kind, by the American writer Stephen Crane, who lived from 1871 to 1900. Crane was a novelist, journalist and poet whose work about war broke with the heroic habits of nineteenth century writing. The poem appeared in a volume of the same name in 1899, and its title is deliberately ironic: nothing about the picture it paints is kind, and the refrain turns bitter as the lines go on.
The recordings come from the weekly poetry project of LibriVox, in which volunteers read the same short text and compare their results. The project was a way of marking the anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, linking a verse from the late nineteenth century with the suffering of the twentieth. Crane could not have known that history, of course, yet the poem’s central idea, that the glory spoken of in speeches does not reach the people who bear the loss, remains painfully clear.
The ten chapters are very short, and each one is labelled with the initials of its reader. Ten volunteers took part, including Alan Davis Drake, JemmaBlythe and featherheadfop. The total listening time is only about twenty minutes, so the set can be heard in a single sitting.
Listening to the same lines in different voices is a good way to see how interpretation works. Play two or three versions in a row, and you will find that the poem seems to change each time. It is also a useful exercise in listening itself, because the same words repeated ten times start to reveal patterns of sound and meaning that a single reading would hide.
Public domain
Stephen Crane died in 1900: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text