hugh haughton
Even George Clarke’s massiveTreasuryof War Poetry(1918), published at the
end of the war, represents conventional patriotic views of war and poetry, throwing
into relief the resistance represented by the best poetry of Owen, Rosenberg,
Sassoon, and Graves. Of these, only Sassoon, with ‘The Troops’ and ‘Trench Duty’,
and Graves, with ‘The Last Post’, figure at all, and their poems scarcely ruffle its
monumental surface. Again, lots of the poems come from newspapers, and the
poets with the biggest representation continue to be Henry Newbolt (exemplified
by ‘The Vigil’), Lawrence Binyon (typified by ‘For the Fallen’), and Katherine
Tynan (represented by ‘The Mother’, with its vision of boys ‘Homing like pigeons
to her door’^28 ). Clarke argues against the view that ‘the soldier-poet’ has ‘more
authentic power as an interpreter of war’ than his ‘non-militant fellow’,^29 calling
on ‘the history of war poetry’ from Drayton’sAgincourtto Hardy’sThe Dynastsin
support. ‘The first duty of the war poet’, he says, is ‘to discover the timeless and
the placeless in the momentary and parochial.’ A modern reader would welcome
more of the ‘momentary and parochial,’ and less of the ‘timeless and placeless’,
and fuller representation of what the editor calls the ‘Realist’ as against ‘Romantic’
poetry of war. Herbert Asquith’s sonnet ‘The Volunteer’ is symptomatically caught
between the two. It opens in a vein of realism: ‘Here lies a clerk who half his life had
spent|Toiling at ledgers in a city grey’, ‘With no lance broken in life’s tournament.’^30
The sestet switches to a Romantic key, reporting that ‘From twilight to the halls of
dawn he went’ and now ‘lies content|With that high hour’, having gone ‘to join the
men of Agincourt’. The Prime Minister’sson’s ‘timeless’ Agincourt seems a jarring
epitaph for a modern clerk who has exchanged a city desk for death in the trenches.
Farfrombeing‘placeless’,theanthologyisorganizedintermsofplaces,withpoems
on ‘England’, ‘Scotland’, ‘Ireland’, and ‘Australia’, moving on to ‘Belgium’, ‘France’,
and ‘America’, then ‘Li`ege’, ‘Ypres’, ‘Verdun’, and (incongruously) ‘Oxford’. These
geographical categories remind the reader of the participation of forces from across
the Empire, as well as confirming ‘Oxford’ as poetic capital (there is no section on
London). Later sections include ‘Poets Militant’, ‘Auxiliaries’, and ‘The Airmen’,
before the anthology concludes with ‘The Wounded’, ‘The Fallen’, ‘Women and the
War’, and finally ‘Peace’. The poems on ‘Airmen’, ‘Auxiliaries’, and ‘Keeping the
Seas’ foreground people not usually represented in war poetry, and the extended one
on ‘Women and the War’ draws mainly on women poets. In fact, the role of women
goesfarbeyondthat,withatleastthirty-fiverepresented,includingKatharineTynan,
Edith Wharton, and Amy Lowell. Introducing a more recent anthology of women’s
warpoetry,CatherineReillyhadapointwhenshearguedthatinpreviousanthologies
‘contributionswerelargelybymen’,butthatwasnottrueinthewaritself.^31
(^28) Katherine Tynan, ‘The Mother’, in George Clarke (ed.),A Treasury of War Poetry(London:
Hodder & Stoughton, 1918), 408.
(^29) George Clarke, ‘Introduction’, ibid. 33–41. (^30) Herbert Asquith, ‘The Volunteer’, ibid. 275.
(^31) Catherine Reilly,idem(ed.),The Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry and Verse(London: Virago,
1997), p. vii.