hugh haughton
from the heart of the horror, including those by Pavel Fridemann, an inmate of
Theresienstadt,and Primo Levi, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau, bearing witness,
as Wilfred Owen did, to the horror of war. If these are not war poems in the usual
sense, they are instances of poetry as history, taking on the challenge laid down by
Theodor Adorno that ‘To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric’.^78
More recently, Harvey Shapiro’sPoets of World War II(2003), building on
Oscar Williams, offers a needed corrective to the British-weighted English-language
anthologies, drawing on the work of sixty-two American poets, and arguing that
they ‘produced a body of a work that has not yet been recognized for its clean
and powerful eloquence’.^79 He says that most of the book is ‘work by writers who
saw service during the war’, and ‘as many of the poems as possible were written
directly out of the experience of war’, recording ‘the sights, sounds, and emotions
of the war’. The anthology is an important record of literary responses to the war
in the USA, and includes a range of compelling poems not found anywhere else,
including Woodie Guthrie’s ‘The Blinding of Isaac Woodward’ and Gwendolyn
Brooks’s ‘Negro Hero’. There are poems by big names familiar from other con-
texts—Pound, Moore, Oppen, Zukofsky, Lowell—as well as the more usual crew
of war poets, Randall Jarrell, Louis Simpson, Anthony Hecht, and Lincoln Kirstein.
This is another pioneering book that changes the map of war poetry in English, with
Eberhard’s ‘Instruments after the War’, Ciardi’s ‘Elegy Just in Case’, James Tate’s
‘Lost Pilot’, and Hecht’s eerie ‘Still Life’ important additions to the canon. Writing
post-9/11, Shapiro notes that ‘we seem, at this writing, to be caught in the drama
of the American Century now’, arguing that the poems of ‘a war fought more than
half a century ago continue to speak to the present moment’. The ‘present moment’
was the year ofPoets Against the War, reminding us that war anthologies are always
shaped by the present as much as the past.
This is not the place to discuss my ownPoems of the Second World War(2004),
which, while building on its predecessors, also attempts to rethink the canon of war
poetry.^80 From the outset, I was keen to follow Oscar Williams in including poems
by civilians as well as combatants, and, like Graham and Schiff, poems in translation.
I also initially wanted to include some of the modern war poetry of Geoffrey Hill and
others, but for reasons of space had to restrict myself to a handful of poems by con-
temporarypoetswithchildhoodmemoriesofwartime.Havingconsideredarranging
the material chronologically, or thematically (like Graham), or dividing it up in
terms of nationality (like Weissbort), or in terms of English-language and foreign
poets, I eventually opted to put the poets in alphabetic order (like Brereton’s First
World War anthology), beginning by setting the great Russian poet Akhmatova
(^78) Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’, inPrisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry
Weber (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1981), 34.
(^79) Harvey Shapiro, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),Poets of World War II(New York: Library of
America, 2003), p. xx.
(^80) Hugh Haughton (ed.),Poems of the Second World War(London: Faber, 2004).