hugh haughton
and anthologies have played a central role in the construction and reconstruction
ofthe ‘war poem’ and ‘war poet’. Though war, like love, has been the subject of
poetry since the Bible and classical epic, ‘war poetry’ is a largely twentieth-century
invention. It is only in our time that Mars, the god of Battles, has joined Venus as
presiding deity of anthologies.
In the 1920s Robert Graves, a poet who figured in several First World War
anthologies, co-wrote (with Laura Riding) A Pamphlet Against Anthologies,a
caustic attack on anthologies of all kinds, and particularly the ‘anthology poem’.
It came out the same year asGoodbye to All That(1928), and alludes to ‘Living-
Poet’ compilations which deal in ‘marketable sentiment’ aroused by public events
such as ‘the Outbreak of War’ or ‘Victory’, but it avoids war poetry.^4 The war
anthology, however, represents one of the most marketable, though contentious,
literary institutions of our time. It is a place where potentially opposed notions of
patriotism and idealism are fought out, but also different models of the role of poet
and poetry in terms of aesthetic and political values.
Were it not for the immense investment in war poetry as ‘marketable sentiment’
in newspapers and anthologies, it is unlikely that we would have the First World
War poems of Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg, and Gurney, or even the Second World
War poems of Keith Douglas, Randall Jarrell, and Auden. It was during the middle
of the First World War that the ‘soldier-poet’ first appeared on the scene, testing the
poetic rhetoric of the past against the realities of modern warfare. InThe Missing
of the Somme, Geoff Dyer argues that the image of Owen as war poet, like the War
Memorial, was one of the war’s enduring symbolic legacies: ‘our memory of the
Great War depends’, he says, ‘on two ostensibly opposed coordinates: the Unknown
Soldier and the poet everyone knows’.^5 Like the memorials and the tomb, however,
it was largely constructed in the wake of the conflict. Apart from Rupert Brooke,
Thomas Hardy, Julian Grenfell, and Alan Seeger, whose ‘anthology poems’ ‘The
Soldier’, ‘Men Who March Away’, ‘Into Battle’, and ‘I Have a Rendezvous with
Death’ were represented in anthologies then as now, the poets we see as typical
of the war—Owen, Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, David Jones, and
Edmund Blunden—were largely absent from contemporary compilations. Even
late in the war, the popular anthologies contained few of the poets or poems
that make up the canon, and plenty of names that are now forgotten. As Edgell
Rickword said, ‘for the most part, the valuable war books were written after the
Armistice,’ and ‘it was not until after the war that the fighting soldier could get
square with his bitterest enemy, the journalist.’^6 Owen published only five poems
during the war, while the best war poetry of Gurney, Jones, Blunden, and others
(^4) Laura Riding and Robert Graves,A Survey of Modernist Poetry and A Pamphlet Against Anthologies,
ed. Charles Mundye and Patrick McGuinness (Manchester: Carcanet, 2002), 239.
(^5) Geoff Dyer,The Missing of the Somme(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1995), 29.
(^6) Edgell Rickword, ‘War and Poetry (1914–1918), Part 2: From Rhetoric to Realism’,Life and
Letters Today, 35 (July 1940), 26.