hugh haughton
invisibility’ of ‘women’s poetry on the Great War’ stemmed from ‘deep in the
patriarchalmind’ and the ‘atavistic feeling that war is man’s concern’.^64 It contains
conventional poems of mourning and patriotic grief, and pieces like Vera Brittain’s
‘Lament for the Demobilised’ and Sinclair’s ‘Field Ambulance’ recording women’s
experiences of war. Some of the poems, like Ruth Comfort Mitchell’s ‘He Went for
a Soldier’, have something of Sassoon’s anger; others, like Margaret Postgate Cole’s
‘Veteran’, something of Owen’s empathy; while Eleanor Farjeon’s ‘Easter Monday’
(in memoriamEdward Thomas) offers an eerie complement to Thomas’s vernacular
resilience (‘There are three letters that you will not get’^65 ). Arranged by author
rather than theme, the anthology brings back many of the female figures from the
wartime anthologies later airbrushed out. If they do not, as Kazantzis acknowledges,
match the ‘furious magnificence of the soldier poets’ or their linguistic resistance,
the anthology at least put them back on the map. Martin Taylor’sLads: Love-Poetry
of the Trenchesoffers a complementary revisionist view. Building on the recognition
that ‘much of the best First World War poetry is characterized by a strong homo-
erotic element’,^66 Taylor’s scholarly introduction contests traditional mappings,
challenging not only the canon of war poetry but that of ‘love poetry’. The format is
traditional,withsectionson‘KilledinAction’,‘TheDead’,and‘Aftermath’,andeven
‘Mates’ and ‘Youth in Arms’, having a conventional ring. The anthology, though,
re-frames even familiar texts. Owen’s ‘Arms and the Boy’ appears alongside R. D.
Greenaway’s ‘Soldiers Bathing’, addressed to a ‘lad of April’, and F. S. Woodley’s
Housman-style elegy ‘To Lieut. O’D’, which asks Death, ‘Could you not have aimed
untruly,|Spared for me the boy I loved?’^67 The tenderness of the anthology invites
the reader to reflect again on the homosexual orientation of Owen and Sassoon and
to view the trenches as a strange meeting-place between war and love.
TimCross’smonumentalLostVoicesofWorld WarI:AnInternationalAnthologyof
Writers, Poets & Playwrights(1988) effects a different corrective view. It resurrects a
different set of lost voices, offering a broader and deeper international coverage than
other anthologies, and setting Russian, German, French, and Italian writers (with
translations) beside both familiar and unfamiliar English-speaking writers (Tom
Kettle included). A multilingual, multi-generic compilation, it represents work by
sixty writers, foregrounding German poets like Trakl and Stramm and French poets
like Apollinaire and Charles Peguy, and draws a complex international map of war ́
literature that has no precedent. Prefaced by biographical and introductory essays,
and illustrated with portraits and pictures, this is a historical anthology which
transformed the entire field, making others seem parochial.
(^64) Judith Kazantzis, ‘Preface’, in Reilly (ed.),Scars Upon My Heart, repr. in Reilly (ed.),Virago Book
of Women’s War Poetry and Verse, pp. xxi and xxix.
(^65) Eleanor Farjeon, ‘Easter Monday’, in Reilly (ed.),Virago Book of Women’s War Poetry and Verse,
36.
(^66) MartinTaylor,‘Introduction’,inidem(ed.),Lads:Love-PoetryoftheTrenches(London:Constable,
1989), 16.
(^67) F. S. Woodley, ‘To Lieut. O’D’, ibid. 134.