anthologizing war Though the introduction is haunted by Owen’s claim that ‘all a poet can do to-day
iswarn’,^37 it says the poets now have a ‘different warning to give’, that it is ‘necessary
for civilization to defend and renew itself’. The anthology embodies not anti-war
feeling but commitment to the Republican cause, and, we are told that the ‘essential
quality’ of the poems is that they are ‘written frominsideSpain’, ‘close to the
experience’ of battle. It includes Spanish and German poems as well as English
ones, and is organized under headings such as ‘Action’, ‘Death’, and ‘Romances’,
documenting the work of poets such as Spender, Louis MacNeice, Francis Cornford,
and Sylvia Townsend Warner, and ending with poems on the death of Lorca. Public
response to the anthology was politically mixed, and Valentine Cunningham’s
brilliant, retrospectivePenguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse(1980) can be
read as a historical response to its tendentiousness. Though the poems are almost
uniformly pro-Republican, the anthology is a reminder that war poetry is often
propagandist, whether from the Left or the Right, and inherently divisive.
With the declaration of the Second World War, debates about war and poetry
returned, along with new war anthologies, now built around the intertextual shadow
of First World War poetry. There was no return to the obsolete patriotic rhetoric
of 1914, but, though Keith Douglas wrote ‘Rosenberg I only repeat what you were
saying’,^38 no return to the iconoclastic mode either. A number of new anthologies
looked back from one war to the other, including George Herbert Clarke’s a more
recent achronisticNew Treasury of War Poetry: Poems of the Second World War
(1943) and the veteran J. C. Squire’sPoems of Two World Wars(1940), dedicated
to the Prime Minister Winston Churchill, reminding us that it was Churchill who
in wartime speeches and post-war prose forged the patriotic rhetoric of the new
conflict. Even Edmund Blunden, introducing Patricia Ledward’sPoems of this War
by Younger Poets(1942), said that ‘this time as last, war has not silenced the
Muses in England’, who are now ‘armed and embattled’.^39 In 1943 Robert Nichols,
another survivor from many First World War anthologies, producedAnthology of
War Poetry 1914–18, prefacing fifty pages of poems with a long introduction in
the form of a dialogue between ‘The Anthologist’ and a young man who received
his call-up in 1940. The book is effectively a conversation between soldiers from
the two wars, an equivalent of Herbert Read’s poem, ‘To a Conscript of 1940’. It
opens with Flecker’s ‘The Dying Patriot’ and Brooke’s sonnets, but follows this
with a diet of Graves (including ‘Recalling War’), Sassoon, and Owen (including
‘Spring Offensive’ and ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’). Recalling war was clearly
a way of galvanizing the poets of the new war. Field Marshal Lord Wavell’s
hugely popularOther Men’s Flowers(1944), was another ‘war baby’, conceived
(^37) Owen, ‘Preface’, 535.
(^38) Keith Douglas, ‘Desert Flowers’, inTheCompletePoems, ed. Desmond Graham (London: Faber,
2000), 108.
(^39) Edmund Blunden, ‘Introduction’, in Patricia Ledward (ed.),Poems of this War by Younger Poets
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1942), p. vii.