anthologizing war The modern reader is likely to see such anthologies through the eyes of Owen
andSassoon as embodiments of the assembly-line poetry of war they needed to
dismantle. Nevertheless, they represent a range of poetic responses greater than
the now routine opposition between patriotic rhetoric and realistic anti-war verse
allows, documenting the ideological fantasies and patriotic myths invested in the
war as well as the hideous challenge it presented to poets, at home and in the
trenches, who wanted to be consoled, uplifted, or left with faith intact. If the bulk of
the poets, with their routine Agincourts and Golgothas, fail, this is not surprising,
given the scale of the catastrophe and the obsolete nature of their poetic equipment.
A Treasuryincludes embarrassing poems such as ‘The Cricketers of Flanders’, telling
‘How Britain’s fighting cricketers|Helped bomb the Germans out of France’, but
also Gilbert Frankau’s ‘Ammunition Column’, with its documentary-style glimpse
of planes ‘strafingan empty sky;|Puff and flash on the far-off blue round the
speck one guesses a plane’. And if there is ‘Cambrai and Marne’ celebrating ‘the
day|When Marne so well avenged Cambrai’, there is also James Knight-Adkin’s
‘No Man’s Land’, with its re-creation of the moment when ‘the ‘‘rapid’’, like fireflies
in the dark,|Flits down the parapet spark by spark,|And you drop for cover to
keep your head|With your face on the breast of the four months dead’.^32
The first anthology to be directed against ‘the false glamour of war’ also came
out in 1918: Bertram Lloyd’sPoems Written during the Great War 1914–1918.
Quoting a German poem saying ‘The glamour from the sword is gone’, it sets itself
against ‘our newspaper-warriors’, ‘The Cheerful Patriotic Citizen’, and ‘professional
diplomatists, politicians and statesmen’, speaking of the ‘increasing stream of
recruits’ who swell ‘the ranks of the Iconoclasts of Military Glory’.^33 Recruiting A. E.,
Israel Zangwill, and Eva Gore-Booth, as well as German, French, and Russian poets,
for its iconoclastic cause, it includes a couple of poems by W. W. Gibson and five
by Sassoon, including ‘Does it Matter?’ The editor takes his bearings from ‘the
tragic irony’ of Sassoon, and, though much of its rhetorical idiom is dated, his is
the earliest anthology to anticipate the post-war view of war poetry. He followed
it withThe Paths of Glory: A Collection of Poems Written during the War, 1914–18
(1919), which, under its ironic title, included more Sassoon poems as well as work
by Richard Aldington, Herbert Read, and Eleanor Farjeon.
Jacqueline Trotter’s post-warValour and Vision: Poems of the War, 1914–18
(1920) was the first anthology to include, among the usual poetic personnel,
Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas. Organized year by year, its ‘primary object’
was ‘to present the poet as the historian’ by illustrating ‘the different aspects and
phases of the war by contemporary poetry’: first the initial ‘chorus of patriotic verse’,
(^32) James Norman Hall, ‘The Cricketers of Flanders’; Gilbert Frankau, ‘Ammunition Column’;
CharlesG.D.Roberts,‘CambraiandMarne’;JamesH.Knight-Adkin,‘NoMan’sLand’;inClarke
(ed.),Treasury of War Poetry, 286, 294, 310, 272.
(^33) Bertram Lloyd, ‘Preface’, inidem(ed.),Poems Written during the Great War 1914–1918: An
Anthology(London: Allen & Unwin, 1918), 5–10.