hugh haughton
Alun Lewis, and Randall Jarrell were acknowledged as the dominant voices. The
pioneeringanthology here was Oscar Williams’sThe War Poets: An Anthology of the
War Poetry of the 20thCentury(1945), to be followed twenty years later by a new wave
of anthologies in the 1960s and after, operating with very different models of the
war canon. The twentieth century was defined by catastrophic global wars, and the
late-century multiplication of war anthologies clearly reflects that, while providing
an index of changing views of what Geoffrey Hill calls ‘History as Poetry’.^11
II
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••Catherine Reilly records at least fifty wartime anthologies in herEnglish Poetry of
the First World War: A Bibliography, a sign of the role poetry played in constructing
Britain as an ‘imagined community’^12 in response to the unprecedented mass
war and its massive casualties overseas. As early as 1914,Poems of the Great War
appeared, with poems by Newbolt, Kipling, Binyon, and Chesterton, alongside
Songs and Sonnets for England in War Time: A Collection of Lyrics by Various Authors
Inspired by the Great War,andFoster’sLord God of Battles: A War Anthology,with
much the same patriotic cast. Foster’s book opened with a call to arms from the
Poet Laureate Robert Bridges (‘Stand, England, for honour|And God guard the
right’^13 ), but mainly recycled patriotic ammunition from Shakespeare’sHenry Vto
Wordsworth’s ‘Happy Warrior’ via ‘Rule Britannia’. In contrast,Songs and Sonnets
claimed that, while there were anthologies of ‘poems of war without number’, it
was ‘unique’ in being ‘formed during the conflict itself’.^14 Its poets were members
of the peacetime poetry establishment, and reflected the journalistic currency of the
war poem in civilian Britain rather than ‘in the conflict itself’.
Other patriotic anthologies included W. J. Haliday’sPro Patria: A Book of Patriotic
Verse(1915), C. F. Forshaw’sOne Hundred Best Poems of the European War by Poets
of the Empire(1915), and MacDonald and Ford’sA Crown of Amaranth: A Collection
of Poems to the Memory of the Brave and Gallant Gentlemen who have Given their
Lives for Great and Greater Britain(1917). Such patriotic garlands and crowns
were more various than they sound.Pro Patria, a chronological anthology running
from medieval ballads to the present, included patriotic poems of other countries,
including Russia, the USA, and Ireland. Ending with the national anthems of Allied
countries, it even made room for anti-British patriotic songs like ‘The Shan Van
(^11) Geoffrey Hill, ‘History as Poetry’, inCollected Poems(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 84.
(^12) Benedict Anderson,Imagined Communities(London: Verso, 1983), 9 ff.
(^13) Robert Bridges, ‘Stand, England, for honour’, in A. E. Manning Foster (ed.),Lord God of Battles:
A War Anthology(London: Cope & Fenwick, 1914), 8.
(^14) ‘Publisher’s Note’, inSongs and Sonnets for England in War Time(London: John Lane, The
Bodley Head, 1914), p. viii.