anthologizing war There have been numerous other anthologies, though none has changed the
canonicmap so drastically.^68 Among them is the Poet Laureate Andrew Motion’s
First World War Poems(2003), where he says, ‘It’s easy and difficult’ to make
an anthology of First World War poetry—‘easy because the best poems are well
known, and difficult for the same reason: what new is there to show?’^69 Arguing
that the archetypal poems of the war ‘risk becoming less and less intimate as
poems’ and more like ‘state furniture’, he sets out to ‘re-present the poems as living
things’. It is hard to do this in a modest-scale book, but, while he puts the spotlight
on the familiar verse of Thomas, Sassoon, Owen, and Gurney, he also pulls in
work by the modernists Yeats, Eliot, and Pound, a handful of popular songs by
‘Anon.’, and, following Catherine Reilly, women poets like Postgate and Farjeon.
All this reflects the changing consensus. More challengingly, he includes a sequence
of late twentieth-century First World War poems by Philip Larkin, Ted Hughes,
Michael Longley, and others, which shows that the long march of that war’s poetry
continues with new poems as well as new anthologies engaging with what Ted
Hughes, reviewing one, called the ‘National Ghost’.^70
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Though the ghost of the First World War still dominates the anthology market,
Gardner’s and Hamilton’s 1960s anthologies of Second World War verse reopened
thedebateabouttheliteratureofthatverydifferentwar.GardnerandHamilton
included many of the same poets, grouped under comparable headings, but with
different criteria in play. Hamilton, as poet and pugnacious editor ofThe Review,
used his anthology to offer not only a retrospect but an epitome of the tough, realistic
poetry he was championing at the time. Its purpose was to ‘do justice’ to ‘poets
who did not rush to extremes’ but attempted ‘to confront a disintegrating world
in personal terms’.^71 He restricted himself to British poets in the Services—Alun
Lewis, Roy Fuller, Keith Douglas, Bernard Gutteridge, and Alan Ross—but ended
with a short selection of Americans, including Jarrell, Louis Simpson, and Richard
Wilbur. The overall impression is of formally tight, journalisticReview-style verse of
(^68) These include Dominic Hibberd and John Onions (eds.),Poetry of the Great War: An Anthology
(Basingstoke: Palgrave, 1986); Martin Stephen (ed.),Never Such Innocence Again: A New Anthology of
Great War Verse(London: Buchan and Enright, 1988); David Roberts (ed.),Minds at War: Essential
Poetry of the First World War in Context(Burgess Hill: Saxon, 1998); and George Walter (ed.),In
Flanders Fields: Poetry of the First World War(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2004).
(^69) Andrew Motion, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),First World War Poems(London: Faber, 2003),
p. xi.
(^70) Ted Hughes, ‘National Ghost’, inWinter Pollen: Occasional Prose, ed. William Scammell (London:
Faber, 1994), 70. 71
Hamilton, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),Poetry of War 1939–45,1.