War is the great contradiction. It is a horror, murderer of people and destroyer of lands. A scourge. And yet we don't seem to be able to get along without it. It's been our nearly constant companion since somebody picked up the first stick and realized he could use it to flail on his neighbor and probably get something he coveted.

It's that contradiction that makes war a ripe subject for poetry, as it has been now for centuries.

"Anger be now your song ..." begins Robert Fitzgerald's translation of "The Iliad," the Homeric epic about the final year of the Greeks' siege of Troy. It has more gore than a "Predator" movie and heroes are praised left and right, anger and song being the operative combination.

But over the years, war poetry has taken some turns. Fast forward -- and I realize this is quite a jump cut -- to a battlefield in, say, Virginia and we have a somewhat different view of war. Walt Whitman, in his book "Drum Taps," might admire the pageantry of men and horses in a poem such as "Cavalry Crossing a Ford," but he makes war terribly intimate in other poems such as "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night." "Vigil for boy of responding kisses, (never again on earth responding,)/Vigil for comrade swiftly slain, vigil I never forget, how as day brighten'd,/I rose from the chill ground and folded my soldier well in his blanket,/And buried him where he fell."

One of the all-time greatest, terribly greatest, war poems is Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est." Owen's work chronicles the trenches and gas attacks of World War I, and the final scene in this poem after one such shelling gives us the horrors of war in searing detail. "If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood/Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,/Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud/Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -- /My friend, you would not tell with such high zest/To children ardent for some desperate glory,/The old lie: Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori."

The translation of the Latin is "Sweet and fitting it is to die for one's country," and what would be really sweet is to have the entire poem carved on George W. Bush's desktop so that in the comfort of his office every day, he would be afflicted with its images.

Two of our former poets laureate have in a way taken on the task of responding to the current conflicts our young men and women find themselves fighting. Both Robert Pinsky and Robert Hass in new books include poems that sometimes slantly and sometimes directly address the war in the Middle East. It's tricky ground for poets. How do you write a poem that, like Wilfred Owen's, rises to the level of art and doesn't become mere soapbox ranting?

Pinsky goes after the collateral damage war can do to the souls of those caught in its grip. He tackles with collage the problem of torturing prisoners. In his "Poem of Disconnected Parts," the first poem in "Gulf Music," he uses a string of couplets to catalog instances of torture from a number of bad situations: the prisons of South Africa, Argentina and Guantanamo. The poem disorients and gives the reader the surreal sense of time that prisoners in those situations must feel. He even recalls Homer in his litany: "I have a small-town mind. Like the Greeks and Trojans." And what is the danger of a small-town mind? "You either for us or against us."

Hass's poem "Bush's War" from "Time and Materials" uses a similar technique but in a scroll of history that is set against lush, sensuous details of nature. He mentions the current administration in only the title and opening line, then rolls through scenes from World War II, Vietnam and the Middle East. His poem gets at the underpinning of the Homeric line about anger: "And the us who are injured,/or have been convinced that we are injured,/Are always identified with virtue. It's/That -- the rage to hurt mixed up/With self-righteousness -- that's murderous."

There are times when war may be unavoidable, but it is sweet and fitting that we have poets to remind us that it is always a terrible thing.