themusethatfailed our perception of the significant past is determined by the preoccupations of the
present,in an infinite succession of present moments, the selections will inevitably
vary over time. While it could be argued that the burgeoning number of anthologies
of the poetry of the First World War has broadly kept pace with the changing and
increasingly complex historical understanding of that war, the same could scarcely
be said of the Second.
The popular perception of the war was established more than a generation ago, by
Angus Calder’sThe People’s War(1969) and Arthur Marwick’sBritain in a Century
of Total War(1970), social histories which argued that the War in Britain had been
fought in every sense defensively. They were followed by two now classic works of lit-
erary criticism, Robert Hewison’sUnder Siege(1977) and A. T. Tolley’sThe Poetry of
the Forties(1985), and reinforced by such remarkable recent works as Paul Fussell’s
Wartime(1989), Studs Terkel’sThe Good War(1997), and Joanna Burke’sAn Intim-
ate History of Killing(1999). According to these accounts, the ordinary soldier- or
civilian poet was unable (and perhaps unwilling) to see the full picture, and his role
was thus reduced to scribbling sardonic footnotes to the official history of the War.
The poetry of the period is barely in print, and mainly mediated through the antho-
logies. The only one of these still easily available is also the earliest, Brian Gardner’s
TheTerribleRain, first published in 1966, and consisting of poems chosen, according
to the introductory note, ‘because they seemed to express genuine and relevant atti-
tudes to the war’.^1 Catherine Reilly’sChaos of the Night(1984), the fourOasisantho-
logies published in the 1980s, and Desmond Graham’sPoetry of the Second World
War: An International Perspective(1995) all made useful additions to Gardner’s
original canon, but did not fundamentally alter hishistorical and critical perspective.
Sixty years after the cessation of hostilities, what is urgently needed is an enlarge-
ment of the canon, one which takes into account not merely the military and social
history of the War, but also its diplomatic, economic, ideological, and cultural
aspects. A wider view would build on such critical works as Adam Piette’sImagin-
ation at War(1995), Mark Rawlinson’sBritish Writing of the Second World War
(2000), and W. G. Sebald’sOn the Natural History of Destruction(2003), in order to
make a selection from the entire range of responses to war, those of Idris Davies and
Philip Larkin being seen as ‘genuine and relevant’ as are those of Keith Douglas and
Alun Lewis. In such an approach the relationship between poetry and patriotism
would be viewed not as a simple, fixed contradiction in terms, but as a changing
and complex—indeed, a deadly—struggle between private conscience and public
enterprise.
A wider angle might well reject the thematic organization of Second World War
anthologies so far and, in the manner of Jon Silkin’sPenguin Book of First World
War Poetry, offer instead a closer chronological parallel between the progress of the
(^1) Brian Gardner, ‘Introductory Note’, inidem(ed.),The Terrible Rain: The War Poets 1939–1945
(London: Methuen, 1977), p. xvii.