hugh haughton
then ‘the advent of the soldier-poets in 1915’, the appearance of a ‘sterner note’ in
1917,then the ‘turning of the tide’ and ‘victory’.^34 The soldier poet’s ‘sterner vision’
remains rather minimally represented, with just Graves’s ‘Two Fusiliers’ in 1916,
Sassoon’s ‘Dreamers’ and Gibson’s ‘The Ragged Stone’ in 1917, while it is left to
W. H. Davies, de la Mare, and Lord Dunsany’s ‘Dirge for Victory’ to represent 1918.
The expanded 1923 edition took in May Sinclair’s ‘Field Ambulance in Retreat’,
Sassoon’s ‘Attack’ and ‘Remorse’, and Owen’s ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’ and
‘Greater Love’. Though Trotter claimed that ‘all the most famous war poems are
to be found in this book’, a modern reader will be surprised to see only a handful
of poems by Owen and Sassoon together, and nothing by Rosenberg, Gurney, or
Blunden. Designed to ‘recall our Nation’s purpose in the Great War’, it still excludes
what came later to be ‘the most famous war poems’.
As noted, it was not until Frederick Brereton’sAn Anthology of War Poems
(1930) that something like the now accepted view of war poetry emerged. Arranged
in alphabetical order, and prefaced by Blunden’s account of the ‘soldier poets’,
it took on board Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’, Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’, and Kipling’s
‘For All We Have and Are’ to represent the ‘official’ verse culture of the time,
but its main line goes through Aldington, Blunden, W. W. Gibson, Robert Graves,
Ivor Gurney, Ford Madox Hueffer, Wilfred Owen, Rosenberg (including ‘Killed in
Action’, and ‘Dead Man’s Dump’), Sassoon, and Edward Thomas. The women poets
have largely dropped out of the picture, and the main cast is comparable to that in
the most influential modern anthologies. It was only more than a decade after the
Armistice that Wilfred Owen finally became the representative war poet, and the
war poem a record of ‘the pity of war’.^35
III
••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••There is a certain irony in the fact that once ‘Iconoclastic’ war poetry gained the
ascendancy, the poets of the 1930s and 1940s were thrown into writing of wars they
by and large supported—the Republican cause in Spain, the Chinese fight against
Japanese invaders, and the battle against Nazism. John Lehmann and Stephen
Spender’sPoems for Spain(1939) reintroduced an idealistic, pro-war poetry that
represented the international Left’s response to the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, it
was described as a ‘literary parallel’ to the ‘International Brigade’ by its editors.^36
(^34) Jacqueline Trotter (ed.),Valour and Vision: Poems of the War, 1914–18(London: Longmans,
Green & Co., 1920), pp. vii–xi. 35
Wilfred Owen, ‘Preface’, inThe Complete Poems and Fragments, ii:The Manuscripts and
Fragments, ed. Jon Stallworthy (London: Chatto & Windus, Hogarth Press, and Oxford University
Press, 1983), 535.
(^36) Stephen Spender and John Lehman (eds.),Poems for Spain(London: Hogarth Press, 1939), 7.