hugh haughton
British nation’.^85 Thedrawback of his miscellaneous scatter-gun approach is that
it confuses literary and military history. Under ‘Artillery and Big Bombs’ we find
Milton, Dibdin, and Kipling rubbing shoulders with MacNeice and Apollinaire,
while under ‘Climate’ Alan Ross rubs shoulders with Shakespeare and Aeschylus. It
is not clear what this tells us about anything.
What Eric Hobsbawm has calledThe Age of Extremeshas been understandably
preoccupied with the catastrophic impact of war, and there is a great deal at stake in
anthologies of war poetry. They represent our current ideologies of poetry and war,
but also exemplify the capacity of individual poets, working in the most intimate
grain of the language, to do what Wallace Stevens said modern poetry must do: ‘It
has to think about war|Andithastofindwhatwillsuffice.’^86
(^85) Kenneth Baker, ‘Introduction: The Purple Testament of Bleeding War’, inidem(ed.),Faber Book
of War Poetry,p.xxv.
(^86) Wallace Stevens, ‘Of Modern Poetry’, inCollected Poems(London: Faber, 1955), 240.