hugh haughton
high quality but little range (there are no Scots, for example). By contrast, Gardner
includes119 poets with ‘genuine and relevant attitudes to the war’, including
civilians like Auden, MacNeice, and Gascoyne, as well as the best war poets from
the Forces, mixed in with ‘lesser known and forgotten’ poets.^72 Though it offers
a broader sample, the best poems get diluted by acres of neat, middle-of-the-road
documentary-style poems, robbing them of some of their force. The two anthologies
play out the familiar contest between ‘wartime’ and ‘war’ poems, civilians and
combatants, while dramatizing the endemic conflict between commitment to the
historically ‘representative’ and the aesthetically important. Hamilton’s highly
selective record of combatant verse was later countered by two indispensable
anthologies,Return to Oasis(1980), a dazzling record of the poetry written by British
poets from the Forces in just one of the theatres of war, the North African desert,
and Victor Selwyn’s more wide-rangingThe Voice of War: Poems of the Second World
War(1996), which draws on the work of the British Forces more generally, arranged
thematically in terms of the different theatres of operation (such as ‘The Middle
East’, ‘The Mediterranean’, ‘Normandy to Berlin’, ‘South-East Asia and the Pacific’).
A corrective to the overwhelmingly masculine constitution of these books was
again provided by Catherine Reilly with herChaosoftheNight:Women’sPoetryand
Verse of the Second World War(1984), reinforced by Anne Powell’sShadows of War
(1999). Though limited to women poets from the British Isles, they draw attention
to systematic under-representation. Reilly’s fifty poets include the eccentric voices
of Edith Sitwell (with ‘Still Falls the Rain’) and Stevie Smith (with ‘Voices against
England in the Night’), as well as Sylvia Townsend Warner, Naomi Mitchison, and
Anne Ridler, but most are little known. Some of the sharpest poems offer snapshots
of ordinary Britain at war, including Ruth Pitter’s ‘To a Lady, in a Wartime Queue’
and Patricia Ledward’s ‘Air-Raid Casualties: Ashridge Hospital’, while others speak
directly from a woman’s viewpoint, including Ackland’s ‘7 October 1940’, with its
sardonic hymn to fertility (‘Reflect! There is no need for grief nor gloom,|Nature
has ever another in Her womb’), and E. J. Scovell’s maternal aubade ‘Days Drawing
In’ (‘Sweet the grey morning and the raiders gone’).^73 By restricting the number of
poems by genuine poets such as Scovell, Smith, and Ackland in the name of coverage,
the book is of greater documentary than poetic interest. The same can be said of
Anne Powell’s chronologically organizedShadows of War: British Women’s Poetry
of the Second World War, but, with its larger scale, fuller cast, and wider range of
styles, it has a higher proportion of hits as well as misses, including some fine squibs
by ‘Sagittarius’ such as ‘The Passionate Profiteer to his Love’ and Alice Coats’s ‘The
Monstrous Regiment’, with its ironic ‘War lends a spurious value to the male’.^74
(^72) Gardner, ‘Introductory Note’, inidem(ed.),Terrible Rain, p. xvii.
(^73) Valentine Ackland, ‘7 October, 1940’, and E. J. Scovell, ‘Days Drawing In’, in Reilly (ed.),Virago
Book of Women’s War Poetry and Verse, 131 and 241.
(^74) Alice Coats, ‘The Monstrous Regiment of Women’, in Anne Powell (ed.),Shadows of War: British
Women’s Poetry of the Second World War(Stroud: Phoenix Mill, 1999), 83.