anthologizing war represented foreign-language poets, and, while Charles Hamblett included five
women,Gardner’s and Hamilton’s selections were exclusively male. In this respect,
the 1960s anthologists packaged war poems from both wars in the same way.
In the competition between the wars the First World War continued to win.
Jon Silkin’sThe Penguin Book of First World War Poetry(1979), following his
critical study of the war poets,Out of Battle(1972), was part of a wider intellectual
revaluation that culminated in Paul Fussell’sThe Great War and Modern Memory
(1975). As poet and combative editor ofStand, Silkin presented his anthology less as
a‘historical’workthanasanembodimentofanembattledpoetics,akintoAlvarez’s
The New Poets(1966). Steering clear of the prevalent thematic slant, Silkin organ-
ized the material by poets, offering a substantial selection of poems by his major
figures—Edward Thomas, Blunden, Gurney, Sassoon, Read, Owen, and Rosenberg,
supplemented by the modernists David Jones, T. E. Hulme, and F. S. Flint. The book
is prefaced by a long, strenuously argued introduction, which takes its bearings from
the ‘exploratory’ work of Rosenberg, and stresses the aesthetic integrity and com-
plexity of the material. Silkin insisted on ‘judging poetry as poetry’, not as historical
or sentimental documents, and though he included a small number of ‘anthology
poems’ by Brooke and Grenfell for ‘historical’ rather than aesthetic reasons, he gave
them a health warning in the form of an asterisk.^60 Though he included no poems
by women, he takes the small but crucial step of making room for twenty-one
translated poems by Trakl, Apollinaire, and others. Despite a lot of competition,
Silkin’s anthology remains the most influential representation of the poetry of the
First World War, and has gone through three editions, with revisions which tell
us something about the changing critical climate. In the second edition (1982),
he expanded the number of translated poems, and in the third (1996), he finally
addressed the exclusion of women, adding five new female poets, including Mina
Loy, explaining his change of heart in a defensive prefatory note.^61 These later revi-
sions do not significantly change its complexion, but underline the ways the canon
was changing in what Edna Longley tendentiously calls the ‘anthological third wave
that subordinated aesthetics to social history rather than patriotism or protest’.^62
Like that of Silkin, the First World War anthologies of the third wave had their
own battles to fight, all offering revisionist readings of the familiar English canon.
Catherine Reilly launchedScars Upon My Heart: Women’s Poetry and Verse of the
First World War(1981) to counter the fact that ‘anthologies of both wars’ were
‘largely’ stocked with poetry by men.^63 In it Judith Kazantzis argued that ‘the
(^60) Jon Silkin, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry(Har-
mondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 72. 61
Silkin, ‘A Note on the 1996 Edition’, inidem(ed.),The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry,
3rd edn. (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1996), 13–14.
(^62) Edna Longley, ‘The Great War, History, and the English Lyric’, in Sherry (ed.),Cambridge
Companion to the Literature of the First World War, 59.
(^63) Reilly, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),Scars Upon My Heart;repr.inidem(ed.),Virago Book of
Women’s War Poetry and Verse, p. vii.