Joseph Pearce
The positive secular reviews that have come in for my off-Broadway verse drama, “Death Comes for the War Poets,” show the power of art to touch hearts even in enemy territory, in the secular art community of New York City, that most “woke” of communities in that most “woke” of cities. This shows the evangelizing power of beauty in action.

Back in 2017, before the covidious cloud descended like madness, the world might have seemed a saner and simpler place. It wasn’t. It was the same dark and dismal place it is today, a vale of tears and a land of exile, with only the same glimmers of lifegiving grace to lighten the load and enlighten the eye. In that year of 2017, Death Comes for the War Poets, a verse drama that I wrote to commemorate the centenary of World War One, was performed off-Broadway. To be more precise, the play was not simply a commemoration of the centenary of war but was also a celebration of the life, work and conversion to Catholic Christianity of the war poet, Siegfried Sassoon, who had died fifty years earlier, in 1967, and had been received into the Church ten years prior to that, in 1957.
Sassoon is one of only three characters in the play. The others are Wilfred Owen, Sassoon’s friend and fellow poet, and the female figure of Death who, as the title proclaims, will come for both poets before the conclusion of the drama. It is Death herself who provides metaphysical depth to the drama on the stage, as it is death itself which provides metaphysical depth to the drama of the life we are all living. Her presence, both repulsive and yet seductive, serves to make the play a memento mori, reminding each member of the audience of his own mortality.  » Read More
https://theimaginativeconservative.org/2025/01/death-comes-war-poets-conversion-lifegiving-power-beauty-joseph-pearce.html