anthologizing war represents an impressive harvest of ‘the most interesting younger war-poets’. They
includemost of those now recognized as significant: Keith Douglas (‘Soissons
1940’), Gavin Ewart, Roy Fuller, Alun Lewis (‘All Day It Has Rained’), John Mani-
fold (‘The Recruit’), Patricia Ledward, F. T. Prince (‘Soldiers Bathing’), Henry Reed
(‘Naming of Parts’), and Henry Treece. As an instance of the Muse in Arms, it is
actually more impressive than any of the First World War anthologies, combining
support for the war with real aesthetic sophistication.
Other Forces anthologies include John Pudney and Henry Treece’sAir Force
Poetry(1944) andPoems from Italy: Verses by Members of the Eighth Army in
Sicily and Italyintroduced by Siegfried Sassoon (1945), most of which draw on
little-recognized poets. Two were devoted exclusively to women, Peter Ratazzi’s
Little Anthology: The First Girl Writers in Battledress(1944), which included work
by Ledward, andPoems of the Land Army: An Anthology of Verse by Members of
the Women’s Land Army, with a foreword by Vita Sackville-West (1945). This
included verse by eight poets, including the talented Alice Coats, who is represented
by her wittily satirical ‘Monstrous Regiment’ and a jarring wartime pastoral called
‘October, 1940’ (‘To-day I gather from the orchard grass|Apples and shrapnel’^45 ).
The quality of such anthologies varied wildly from routine compilations represent-
ing soldiers who wrote rather than writers in uniform, to quality literary collections
such asOASIS: The Middle East Anthology of Poetry from the Forces(1943),
which printed work by Hamish Henderson and G. S. Fraser (though not Keith
Douglas, curiously), and Patrick Dickinson’sSoldiers’ Verse(1945), a distinctively
literary, if rather upbeat selection which, despite its title, mixed combatants and
non-combatants, setting work by W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Sidney Keyes, Alun Lewis,
and Dylan Thomas side by side. Perhaps the most original of these wasPersonal
Landscape: An Anthology of Exilecompiled by Robin Fedden (1945), which printed
work by civilians and soldiers from Egypt. English writers included Keith Douglas
(with five poems, including ‘Cairo Jag’, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’, and ‘Desert Flowers’),
Lawrence Durrell, Olivia Manning, and Bernard Spencer, but there were also poems
by the Greek writers Seferis and Papadmitriou and an essay on Cavafy. ‘Landscape’
and ‘exile’ move beyond the conventional terms of war poetry. In fact, the North
African campaign generated an astonishing poetic harvest, though it was not until
Victor Selwyn’s retrospectiveReturn to Oasis: War Poems and Recollections from the
Middle East(1980), that the scale of literary invention in this particular theatre of
war could be fully documented.^46 It included some of the definitive poems of the
Second World War, such as Douglas’s ‘How to Kill’ and ‘Cairo Jag’, Henderson’s
‘End of a Campaign’, F. T. Prince’s ‘Soldiers Bathing’, and Sorley MacLean’s ‘Death
(^45) Alice Coats, ‘Monstrous Regiment’, inPoems of the Land Army: An Anthology of Verse by Members
of the Women’s Land Army 46 , with a foreword by Vita Sackville-West (London: ‘The Land Girl’, 1945), 33.
See Victor Selwyn, Erik De Mauny, Ian Fletcher, G. S. Fraser, and John Waller (eds.),Return
to Oasis: War Poems and Recollections from the Middle East 1940–1946(London: Shepheard-Walwyn,
1980).