hugh haughton
‘during campaigns in the East’, though it largely steers clear of ‘war poetry’.^40 Its
militaryeditor thought war ‘a dull business’ which did not ‘tend to inspire poetry
in those who practise it’, and the section on ‘Good Fighting’ included traditional
historical pieces by Scott, Kipling, and Shakespeare and only four ‘anthology poems’
from the First World War (typified by ‘Magpies in Picardy’). Only Sassoon’s ‘The
General’ (1917) might have given the serenely anti-modernist Field Marshal pause.
Julian Symons’sAnthology of War Poetry (1942) was another retrospective
wartime anthology, aiming to ‘make a little history of war poems, reflecting in
miniature...the history of the wars of the British Isles’.^41 Only twenty-two of its
188 pages are devoted to the poets of the First World War (with Hardy, Owen,
Sassoon, and Graves, supported by Yeats and Ford), while it travels through the
French and Napoleonic Wars (via the Romantics), the nineteenth century (with
Clough, Housman, and Hopkins), and on to the Spanish Civil War and Sino-
Japanese War (drawing on Auden, Spender, and their generation), concluding
with nine poets from the Second World War, mainly from the Auden gang. In his
introduction, Symons notes that there are ‘many poems about war by living writers’,
but that ‘war poets’ as such ‘do not exist’. ‘War poetry is not a special department
of poetry,’ he says, but ‘the poetry...of people affected by the reality of war.’
Apart from such retrospective compilations, there were also a number of influ-
ential anthologies of new war poems. In herEnglish Poetry of the Second World War:
A Bibiography, Catherine Reilly concludes that while the First World War ‘pro-
duced some outstanding poetry by a relatively small number of poets’, the Second
‘produced a great deal more good poetry’.^42 Of the wartime anthologies she lists,
however, relatively few were of war poetry as such. They include a number of antho-
logies of verse for the forces, led by Keidrich Rhys’sPoems from the Forces: (1941)
andMore Poems from the Forces(1943). Rhys’s combative introduction opened
with the question ‘asked by our Sunday newspapers’, ‘Where are the war poets?’,
and his answer was ‘Under your nose’.^43 Objecting to the ‘pre-war, editorial-chair
attitude ofHorizon’s editor’ that ‘war is the enemy of creative activity’, and that
‘the soldier-artist of the type of Wilfred Owen or David Jones’ was fundamentally
‘pacifist’, Rhys collects an impressive selection of work by ‘the man in uniform’.
Calling the anthology ‘an act of faith’ begun in the wake of Dunkirk, he says that the
‘poet in uniform’ finds himself ‘in a thankless position’, born into the wrong times,
accepting conscription with grace, with a bunchof tame versifiers on one side and
on the other ‘the intellectuals of the depression’ who have ‘betrayed him’.^44 He calls
the war ‘the most justified in history’, and his alphabetically organized anthology
(^40) A. P. Wavell, ‘Preface to Revised Edition’ (April 1947), inidem(ed.),Other Men’s Flowers
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1960; 1st pub. 1944), 19.
(^41) Julian Symons (ed.),An Anthology of War Poetry(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1942), p. vii.
(^42) Reilly, (ed.),English Poetry of the Second World War: A Bibliography(London: Mansell, 1986),
p. xiv.
(^43) Rhys, ‘Introduction’, p. xiii. (^44) Ibid. pp. xx–xxi.