anthologizing war post-dated it. The posthumous collections of Owen (1920) and Rosenberg (1922)
werecomplemented by the post-war memoirs, Blunden’sUndertones of War(1928),
Graves’sGoodbye to All That(1929), and Sassoon’sMemoirs of an Infantry Officer
(1930). It was these that forged the figure of the archetypal ‘war poet’ as a battle-
traumatized soldier writing in protest against it. The first anthology to represent this
was Frederick Brereton’sAn Anthology of War Poems(1930). It had an introduction
on ‘The Soldier Poets’ by Edmund Blunden, opposing the writers in the trenches
to the ‘melodious patriots, seated at their customary tables’,^7 and it identified the
appearance of the ‘war poet’ with Sassoon, ‘the first man’ who ‘described war fully
and exactly’, closely followed by Owen.
In an essay on ‘The Poets of World War II’, Robert Graves observed that ‘war poet’
and‘warpoetry’were‘termsfirstusedinWorldWarIandperhapspeculiartoit’.^8 ‘In
previous wars’, he went on, ‘there had been patriotic verse and poems written in time
of war, and even occasional poems written by soldiers on campaign’, but not ‘war
poems in the now accepted sense’. He thought that the ‘war poetry boom’ following
the death of Rupert Brooke gradually developed from conventional expressions of
patriotic feeling to the expression of ‘war neurosis’ and critique, culminating in
ferocious documentary works like Owen’s ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’ and Sassoon’s
‘Does it Matter?’ Looking back from the Second World War, he argued that such war
poetry was unlikely to be produced again, given that conscription had done away
with the recruiting imperative and thesupport for the war against Nazism. Like
Graves, the poets and editors of the Second World War inevitably took their bearings
from the literature of the First World War, but were engaged in a very different
mechanized global war in the new literary climate of the age of Auden. In the earlier
war the soldier-poet had displaced the civilians, but in the Second World War the
line between the field of battle and ordinary life broke down, and the catastrophic
effects of aerial bombardment, Nazism, and the Holocaust affected everyone, not
onlythearmedforces.Thequestion‘WherearetheWarPoets?’wasrepeatedlyraised
in poems and newspapers, but there was no shortage of poets or anthologies, and
the real questions were ‘Whoare the war poets?’ and ‘What is a war poem?’. Keidrich
Rhys’sPoems from the Forces(1941) argued fiercely for the work of the ‘poet in
uniform’,^9 while Tambimuttu’sPoetry in War-time(1942) operated with a notion of
‘war-time’ rather than ‘war’ poetry.^10 In fact, as with the First World War, it was only
in retrospect that the scale and nature of the new war poetry came to be recognized
(and even written), and that poets such as Keith Douglas, Hamish Henderson,
(^7) Edmund Blunden, ‘The Soldier Poets of 1914–1918’, in Frederick Brereton (ed.),An Anthology
of War Poems 8 (London: W. Collins & Son, 1930), 13–14.
Robert Graves, ‘The Poets of World War II’, inThe Common Asphodel: Collected Essays on Poetry
1922–1949(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1949), 307.
(^9) Keidrich Rhys, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),Poems from the Forces: A Collection of Verses by
Serving Members of the Navy, Army, and Air Force 10 (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1941), p. xiv.
SeeM.J.Tambimuttu(ed.),Poetry in War-time: An Anthology(London: Faber, 1942).