anthologizing war Wars and the Spanish Civil War, it opens with forty-five pages of First World War
versedominated by Owen and Sassoon. The core is devoted to ‘Poems by the Men
in the Armed Forces of England and America’, with poets given name and rank. The
biggest allocations go to Trooper Julian Symons (eleven), Flight Lieutenant Henry
Treece and the Australian Captain John Manifold (nine), followed by Sergeant
Randall Jarrell (eight), Lieutenant Roy Fuller, and Sergeant Karl Shapiro with six
each. It offers a strong selection of fifty-eight US and British poets, though a modern
reader will be struck by the under-representation of Alun Lewis and the absence
of Douglas, Henderson, and MacLean. The last section on ‘War Poems by the
Civilian Poets’ is almost as substantial, opening with Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’
and enlisting a wide range of poets from both sides of the Atlantic. The forty-one
civilians include five women poets and such important figures as Barker, Berryman,
Frost, Marianne Moore, MacNeice, Spender, Dylan Thomas, Wallace Stevens, and
Muriel Rukeyser. Williams argues plausibly, on the basis of ‘Spain’, ‘August for
the people and their favourite islands’, and ‘September 1, 1939’, that Auden is ‘the
major war poet of the first half of this century’, and it is the ‘civilian section’ which
the editor thought contained the poems which will best ‘communicate the realities
of war to the generations to come’.^54 The impressive introduction maintained that
the popular press’s hand-wringing about the lack of war poets was really a sign
of the ‘resistance to true poetry’ that was ‘still contemporary’. It also printed a
series of thoughtful statements on war and poetry by twenty poets, which includes
Richard Eberhart’s claim that ‘in a dialectical sense, all poetry is war poetry’ and
Selden Rodman’s variation that ‘All serious war poetry is anti-war poetry’. Quoting
Berryman’s remark that ‘The poet’s poem has always outlived the names of battles,
generals and statesmen’, the editor argues that ‘our war poetry as a whole is perhaps
the document of our time that will outlive the rest’. The anthology substantiates
the claim remarkably well.
The same year sawWar and the Poet: An Anthology Expressing Man’s Attitudes
to War from Ancient Times to the Present, edited by Richard Eberhart and Selden
Rodman (1945). This offered a reassessment of war poetry in longer perspective.
Not predominantly a record of contemporary writing, it is a transhistorical and
international collection, returning to ancient Egypt, the Bible, Homer, and the
Greek tragedians, while also drawing on poets from other countries, such as Basho, ̄
Rimbaud, Nicolai Gumilev, Rilke, and Alexander Blok. One section, however, is
devoted to mainly non-combatant contemporaries like Auden, George Barker, and
Dylan Thomas beside a sprinkle of combatants such as Roy Fuller, Alan Lewis,
and the Australian John Manifold, as well as American poets. Though there is no
Brecht, nothing on the Holocaust, and no Douglas or Louis Simpson, this is a highly
cosmopolitan, historically rich anthology, using the War to reflect on the changing
relationship between war and poetry across time.
(^54) Ibid. 6–9.