Lepanto (poem)

"Lepanto" was published in 1915, and is in line with the author's other works of early decades of the century as representing a spirited rejection of the fin de siècle Decadent Fatalism which was the dominating philosophy in his youth.^[3] As in the author's "The Ballad of the White Horse," the non-Christian forces are made representative of the determinist or fatalist philosophy that (in Chesterton's view) denied the value of human struggle and free will, and which he variously personified as pagan or Germanic (as in "The Ballad of the White Horse") or Mohammedan or Calvinist (as in this poem).^{[citation needed]}

In World War I, the Turkish Ottoman Empire had become an ally of the Prussian enemy whom Chesterton saw as the perfect epitome of Paganism, Germanism, Imperialism, and Determinist Materialism. In this context, the victory of Christian Europe over its Turkish enemy depicted by Chesterton in vividly blood-stained terms became readily acceptable to those sympathetic to the British cause as a straightforward allegory of right — the Allied nations representing the traditional morality of Christendom — triumphing over wrong — the Central Powers representing the rejection of that morality in the name of the previously mentioned "-isms".^[4]

English Wikisource has original text related to this article:

Poems (Chesterton, 1915)/Lepanto

• Lepanto public domain audiobook at LibriVox