An English professor, Elizabeth D. Samet, writes in today’s Sunday Times Magazine about teaching poetry to West Point Cadets. Among the poems are Shakespeare's sonnets 30 and 73, wisps of which probably drift around the recesses of most of our minds from high school or college.
Download shakespeares_sonnets_30_and_73.doc
They also read poems of war by people such as Thomas Hardy and Donald Hall and the Chinese poet Li Po.
The students, as Samet shows us, take these poems to heart, responding with openness and depth. They will be military leaders I suspect with insight as well as courage.