Lusitania Is Torpedoed off Ireland
Poet involved
What happened
The German submarine U-20 torpedoed RMS Lusitania off the coast of County Cork, Ireland, on 7 May 1915. The liner sank rapidly, killing nearly 1,200 passengers and crew, including 128 Americans. The attack intensified anti-German feeling and influenced opinion in the neutral United States.
Literary impact
Alfred Noyes's The Lusitania Waits and numerous wartime poems transformed the dead into witnesses demanding justice or revenge. Other poets resisted propagandistic certainty, using the ship to expose civilian vulnerability and the moral distortions created by total war.
Source: Wikipedia
