hugh haughton
Valley’. As with the First World War, the post-war anthology is poetically richer
thananthologies produced in the heat of battle.
Tambimuttu’sPoetry in War-time(1942), sponsored by Poetry London, was
published under the aegis of T. S. Eliot as a collection of ‘the best poems written
since the beginning of the war—some of which are also ‘‘war poems’’ ’.^47 Reviewing
it in theListener, a critic argued that ‘most wartime anthologies of poetry will
survive, if they survive at all, merely as historical or sociological documents’, but
thoughtPoetry in War-timea ‘brilliant exception’.^48 Most wartime anthologies are
indeed ‘historical or sociological documents’, yet Tambimuttu’s anthology of poems
written between September 1939 and 1942 stands up remarkably well. With poets
published in alphabetical order rather than groupings, it does justice to an eclectic
collection of individual writers. It prints Read’s fraught ‘To a Conscript of 1940’ and
a war poem by each of the leading poets of the Thirties: Auden’s ‘September 1, 1939’,
MacNeice’s ‘Bar-Room Matins’ (with its chilling refrain, ‘Die the soldiers, die the
Jews,|And all the breadless homeless queues,|Give us this day our daily news’^49 ),
Day Lewis’s ‘Stand-to’, Spender’s ‘Poets and Airmen’, and William Empson’s
‘Aubade’ (‘Only the same war on a different toe.|The heart of standing is you
cannot fly’^50 ). It mixes these with poems by New Apocalypse writers, including
George Barker’s ‘Sonnets from America’, Treece’s ‘Confessions in Wartime’, David
Gascoyne’s wonderful ‘Wartime Dawn’, the underrated Nicholas Moore’s ‘The Ruin
and the Sun’, Dylan Thomas’s ‘Deaths and Entrances’, and W. R. Rodgers’ ‘Summer
Holiday’, with its reflections on ‘what will be left of us then but our faces|In albums,
our names on war’s memorials’.^51 Of enlisted poets, there is a run of poems by Alun
Lewis (including ‘All Day It Has Rained’), an Audenesque piece by Roy Fuller, and
a couple of poems by Gavin Ewart and Terence Tiller. There is no Keith Douglas,
however. Just as First World War anthologies had nothing by Owen, so anthologies
of the Second have almost nothing by the great soldier-poet of the war, whose
reputation post-dated his death. Though the New Apocalypse poets have fallen out
of vogue, the resistant quality of the best poems is remarkable, and, in opening the
boundary between wartime and war poems, this anthology includes some of the
best poems written by British civilians and combatants during the war years.^52
At the war’s end Oscar Williams publishedThe War Poets: An Anthology of the
War Poetry of the 20thCentury, probably the most important wartime anthology.
After six years of war, it was still dedicated to Wilfred Owen, and opened with his
preface stating ‘All a poet can do today is warn’.^53 Though it spans the two World
(^47) Tambimuttu (ed.),Poetry in War-time, cover blurb. (^48) Listener, 10 Sept. 1942, 344.
(^49) Louis MacNeice, ‘Bar-Room Matins’, in Tambimuttu (ed.),Poetry in War-time, 99.
(^50) William Empson, ‘Aubade’, ibid. 191–2. (^51) W. R. Rodgers, ‘Summer Holiday’, ibid. 141.
(^52) See Holga Klein, ‘Tambimuttu’sPoetry in War-time’, in Ian Higgins (ed.),The Second World War
in Literature(Edinburgh and London: Scottish Academic Press, 1986), 1–18.
(^53) Oscar Williams, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),The War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of
the 20thCentury(New York: John Day, 1945), 3.