anthologizing war Another corrective view was offered by three international anthologies: Daniel
Weissbort’sThePoetry of Survival: Post-War Poets of Central and Eastern Europe
(1991), Desmond Graham’sPoetry of the Second World War: An International
Anthology(1995), and Hilda Schiff’sHolocaust Poetry(1995).^75 They remind us
that all the major contemporary poets of Russia and Eastern and Western Europe
wrote important poetry about the War and the Holocaust, and that this catastrophic
global conflict reshaped literature in all the war-torn and Occupied countries of
Europe. Czesław Miłosz recalls that in Poland, for example, ‘poetry was the main
genre of underground literature’, and mentions a 1,912-page anthology called
Poetry of Fighting Poland(1972). Though he relegates most of this to ‘documentary’
status, he roots the work of the greatpoets of his own generation, including Herbert,
Ro ́ ̇zewicz, and Wat, in the ‘twentieth-century hell’ of the War and the Holocaust.^76
Readers miss the scale of the radical, far-reaching impact of the Second World War
on poetry if looking from an exclusively anglophone perspective.
Desmond Graham’sPoetry of the Second World Warspreads the net wider than
any earlier anthology, drawing on translations from many languages and poets
from many countries in Europe, America, Russia, and Asia. Setting anglophone
poems in dialogue with translations chosen for their poetic force and intellectual
authority, this is an anthology that radically altered the way we perceive the poetry
of the Second World War. Refusing to be bound by received notions of war poetry,
Graham sees it as ‘an anthology of poems where the experience of the war is apparent
and central’. Organized in chronological, thematic sections with headings such as
‘Speechless you testify against us’, it sets major foreign poets like Akhmatova, Celan,
Herbert, and Radnoti beside British poets such as Auden, Douglas, and Lewis, and
Americans like Jarrell and Nemerov, resulting in a ‘communal effort, with poems
from about twenty countries and by a hundred and thirty poets’.^77 The product
of a genuinely international outlook and literary discrimination, the anthology is
a massive cross-cultural lyric exhibition based on the most powerful poems of the
Second World War. Hilda Schiff’sHolocaust Poetryhas a narrower focus, but it,
too, gathers poets of many nationalities and languages who have written about
Nazi genocide. Organized in chronological and thematic sections (‘Persecution’,
‘Destruction’, ‘Afterwards’), it creates a choric multi-authored sequence of poems
by sixty or so poets from Brecht, Auden, Celan, and Sachs to Sylvia Plath, Geoffrey
Hill, and James Fenton. As in Desmond Graham’s anthology, many of the most
powerful poems are retrospective, though a few are first-hand reports written
(^75) Daniel Weissbort (ed.),The Poetry of Survival: The Post-War Poetry of Central and Eastern
Europe(London: Anvil, 1991); Desmond Graham (ed.),Poetry of the Second World War: An Inter-
national Anthology(London: Chatto & Windus, 1995); Hilda Schiff (ed.),Holocaust Poetry(London:
HarperCollins, 1995).
(^76) Czesław Miłosz,The Witness of Poetry(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1983),
79–80. 77
Desmond Graham, ‘Introduction’, inidem(ed.),Poetry of the Second World War, p. xviii.