Lepanto (poem)

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"Lepanto" is a poem by G. K. Chesterton celebrating the victory of the Holy League in the Battle of Lepanto (1571) written in irregular stanzas of rhyming, roughly paeonic tetrameter couplets, often ending in a quatrain of four dimeter lines. The poem tells of the defeat of the Ottoman fleet of Ali Pasha by the Christian crusader, Don John of Austria. The poem was written in 1911 and published in Chesterton's 1915 collection Poems. The ballad's stirring verses helped inspire soldiers such as John Buchan during World War I. Indeed, in the opinion of Chesterton's friend and contemporary, Hilaire Belloc, the poem was "the summit of high rhetorical verse in all our generation".

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