"In Flanders Fields" is a war poem in the form of a rondeau, written during the First World War by Canadian physician Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae. He was inspired to write it on May 3, 1915, after presiding over the funeral of friend and fellow soldier Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, who died in the Second Battle of Ypres. According to legend, fellow soldiers retrieved the poem after McCrae, initially dissatisfied with his work, discarded it. "In Flanders Fields" was first published on December 8 of that year in the London magazine Punch. Flanders Fields is a common English name of the World War I battlefields in Belgium and France.
Inscription of the complete poem in a bronze book at the John McCrae memorial at his birthplace in Guelph, Ontario
Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae was a soldier, physician and poet.
Aspects of the poem were used in propaganda, such as this Canadian war bonds poster
The Vimy Memorial and part of "In Flanders Fields" on a Second World War recruitment poster
Lieutenant-Colonel John McCrae was a Canadian poet, physician, author, artist and soldier during the First World War and a surgeon during the Second Battle of Ypres, in Belgium. He is best known for writing the famous war memorial poem "In Flanders Fields". McCrae died of pneumonia near the end of the war. His famous poem is a threnody, a genre of lament.
McCrae c. 1914
Birthplace of John McCrae
John McCrae in 1912
McCrae's medals for the Boer War and First World War