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The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry
Unrivaled in its range and intensity, the poetry of World War I continues to have a powerful effect on readers. This newly edited anthology reflects the diverse experiences of those who lived through the war, bringing together the words of poets, soldiers, and civilians affected by the conflict. Here are famous verses by Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, and Wilfred Owen; poetry by women writing from the home front; and the anonymous lyrics of soldiers’ songs. Arranged thematically, the selections take the reader through the war’s stages, from conscription to its aftermath, and offer a blend of voices that is both unique and profoundly moving.
320 pages, Paperback
First published July 26, 1979
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 103 reviews
October 29, 2018
My experience with poetry anthologies is limited as an adult reader. Given my pleasant experience with this volume, that is likely to change. Over the last few years while browsing poetry sections I have discovered that this anthology is near ubiquitous. I feel grateful I finally approached it. I would be curious about corresponding verse from Turkey and the Balkans.
I discovered a few new poets I’ll approach again and my estimations of Sassoon, Owen and Blunden were undoubtedly confirmed.
I discovered a few new poets I’ll approach again and my estimations of Sassoon, Owen and Blunden were undoubtedly confirmed.
March 8, 2014
Harrowing and heartbreaking poems from WW1, mostly written by soldiers in the trenches 100 years ago.
“In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn saw sunset glow
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields
Take up our quarrel with the foe;
To you, from falling hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”
― John McCrae
“In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn saw sunset glow
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields
Take up our quarrel with the foe;
To you, from falling hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”
― John McCrae
![Profile Image for [ J o ].](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/users/1673171874i/4639825._UY200_CR4,0,200,200_.jpg)
February 7, 2017
My first read of this book of poetry was purely academically driven and that, as I've discovered in retrospect, has left me feeling nothing but a short wind blowing through a barren wasteland for poetry. Since leaving all academia behind, except via my own volition, I have found a delight in poetry I never knew existed.
Previously I was confused at the layout of this book and I retain that confusion now. Although the poetry is put in to categories, they don't seem to feel as if they should exist. It runs in order of how the War panned out, yes, but that is as far as it allows. There is no contents page to let you know even where those of this order begins and ends and the introduction is tiresome.
The poetry itself, of course, is accessible and rather transcends the giving of stars. It acts as history as much as long prose does, though there are those poems that I did not feel with my heart as much as others. Some that were almost terribly written-only because the author was not a great poet. The poetry by women is probably one of the most important parts of this book and I think they should have been collated altogether, as opposed to how it is, chronologically.
What else can you say about poetry that describes human atrocity?
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Previously I was confused at the layout of this book and I retain that confusion now. Although the poetry is put in to categories, they don't seem to feel as if they should exist. It runs in order of how the War panned out, yes, but that is as far as it allows. There is no contents page to let you know even where those of this order begins and ends and the introduction is tiresome.
The poetry itself, of course, is accessible and rather transcends the giving of stars. It acts as history as much as long prose does, though there are those poems that I did not feel with my heart as much as others. Some that were almost terribly written-only because the author was not a great poet. The poetry by women is probably one of the most important parts of this book and I think they should have been collated altogether, as opposed to how it is, chronologically.
What else can you say about poetry that describes human atrocity?
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January 9, 2014
Some very interesting information in the introduction that I hadn't realised. It's all quite obvious in retrospect but it was still a series of lightbulb moments for me so I'll make reference to it. The reason why there were hundreds of thousands of poems written and published during World War One was because:
- poetry was for most of Edwardian society, a part of everyday life;
- The media was also almost wholly print-based (cinema was still very much in its infancy);
- Victorian and Edwardian educational reforms resulted in increased literacy;
- the army which Britain sent to fight was the most widely and deeply educated in her history.
I find it very hard to imagine an era when poetry was so much a part of day-to-day life. Although I have never learnt the skill of appreciating poetry, as I read through a succession of these poems, and triggered by certain words or phrases, I started to get images of a grim, kaleidoscopic mix of lice, blood, death, patriotic songs, mad, futility, despair, absurdity, sickness, fear etc. It proved to be a powerful and moving experience.
As I was reading this book, I was also reading Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves. Sometimes the two books worked in tandem. Robert Graves describes the horror of The Battle of Loos and there - in this volume - are poems inspired by Loos.
One very small but moving moment was reading a poem written by Rudyard Kipling. When he actively encouraged his young son John to go to war he was expecting triumph and heroism. John died in the First World War, at the Battle of Loos in September 1915, at age 18. After his son's death, Kipling wrote...
If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied.
An important document of how World War One was experienced by a wide range of articulate and thoughtful people that brings the experience vividly to life.
- poetry was for most of Edwardian society, a part of everyday life;
- The media was also almost wholly print-based (cinema was still very much in its infancy);
- Victorian and Edwardian educational reforms resulted in increased literacy;
- the army which Britain sent to fight was the most widely and deeply educated in her history.
I find it very hard to imagine an era when poetry was so much a part of day-to-day life. Although I have never learnt the skill of appreciating poetry, as I read through a succession of these poems, and triggered by certain words or phrases, I started to get images of a grim, kaleidoscopic mix of lice, blood, death, patriotic songs, mad, futility, despair, absurdity, sickness, fear etc. It proved to be a powerful and moving experience.
As I was reading this book, I was also reading Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves. Sometimes the two books worked in tandem. Robert Graves describes the horror of The Battle of Loos and there - in this volume - are poems inspired by Loos.
One very small but moving moment was reading a poem written by Rudyard Kipling. When he actively encouraged his young son John to go to war he was expecting triumph and heroism. John died in the First World War, at the Battle of Loos in September 1915, at age 18. After his son's death, Kipling wrote...
If any question why we died / Tell them, because our fathers lied.
An important document of how World War One was experienced by a wide range of articulate and thoughtful people that brings the experience vividly to life.
November 4, 2018
Some nice selections
January 31, 2018
‘He is risen now that was long asleep,
Risen out of vaulted places dark and deep.
In the growing dust the faceless demon stands,
And the moon he crushes in his strong, black hands.’
The German poet George Heym’s 'War’ was written in 1911 - predating the Great War but also prefiguring the poetry that arose from it. In 1912 Heym also wrote ‘Why do you you visit me, white moths, so often’ which concluded with the lines:
‘Who opens the countries to us after death?
And who in the gateway of the monstrous rune?
What do the dying see, that makes them turn
Their eyes’ blind whiteness round so terribly?’
The First World War had many prophets: geopolitical thinkers who believed a reckoning between Empires was inevitable; ‘race theorists’ who thought that soft Europeans could only reinvigorate themselves through war; war novelists with fantasies about their countries being invaded. This collection of First World War Poetry also shows that poets were aware of the horrific possibilities of future war prior to 1914. And they were not all taken with ‘war fever’ or patriotism. One interesting detail I learned from this book is that the famous lines from Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’
‘If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.’
Is actually a copy of the decided less patriotic ‘Drummer Hodge’ by Thomas Hardy (set during the Boer War)
‘Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree’
This is mainly a collection of English poets, but includes Germans, French, Italians, and Russians. There are only two women in this edition: the Russians Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. Editor Jon Silkin doesn’t reference Paul Fussell’s ‘The Great War and Modern Memory’ - and doesn’t seem to hold with Fussell’s arguments about the War bringing a fundamental cultural shift away from Romanticism to harsher, more ‘modern’ aesthetics. Instead he emphasises the continuities of English World War One poets with Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, etc. However something not continuous between the War poets and the Romantics is that the latter were more sceptical of patriotic calls to conflict. For example, Shelley in the ‘Revolt of Islam’ writes
‘We all are brethren - even the slaves who kill’
Whereas the far too often repeated ‘In Flanders Fields’ by John McCrae concludes (after the misleadingly pacifistic sounding ‘We are the Dead. Short days ago/We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow’)
‘Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.’
The First World War poets often combined ‘jingoism’ with a somber awareness of the consequences of war. At its worst this combination comes across as a cult of death - ‘our glorious dead’ forever judging the living on whether we measure up to their sacrifice. However the sheer scale of industrialised warfare exemplified by the First World War demonstrated that individual bravery, valour, or sacrifice mean very little if everybody is being mown down by machine guns - hero or coward alike. The nations that fought in the First World War are now far more likely to do ‘remote’ warfare: through specialists, private contractors, and drones. Modern warfare’s contradictions, as articulated in First World War poetry, are just too much to bear.
Risen out of vaulted places dark and deep.
In the growing dust the faceless demon stands,
And the moon he crushes in his strong, black hands.’
The German poet George Heym’s 'War’ was written in 1911 - predating the Great War but also prefiguring the poetry that arose from it. In 1912 Heym also wrote ‘Why do you you visit me, white moths, so often’ which concluded with the lines:
‘Who opens the countries to us after death?
And who in the gateway of the monstrous rune?
What do the dying see, that makes them turn
Their eyes’ blind whiteness round so terribly?’
The First World War had many prophets: geopolitical thinkers who believed a reckoning between Empires was inevitable; ‘race theorists’ who thought that soft Europeans could only reinvigorate themselves through war; war novelists with fantasies about their countries being invaded. This collection of First World War Poetry also shows that poets were aware of the horrific possibilities of future war prior to 1914. And they were not all taken with ‘war fever’ or patriotism. One interesting detail I learned from this book is that the famous lines from Rupert Brooke’s ‘The Soldier’
‘If I should die, think only this of me:
That there’s some corner of a foreign field
That is forever England.’
Is actually a copy of the decided less patriotic ‘Drummer Hodge’ by Thomas Hardy (set during the Boer War)
‘Yet portion of that unknown plain
Will Hodge forever be;
His homely Northern breast and brain
Grow to some Southern tree’
This is mainly a collection of English poets, but includes Germans, French, Italians, and Russians. There are only two women in this edition: the Russians Anna Akhmatova and Marina Tsvetaeva. Editor Jon Silkin doesn’t reference Paul Fussell’s ‘The Great War and Modern Memory’ - and doesn’t seem to hold with Fussell’s arguments about the War bringing a fundamental cultural shift away from Romanticism to harsher, more ‘modern’ aesthetics. Instead he emphasises the continuities of English World War One poets with Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth, etc. However something not continuous between the War poets and the Romantics is that the latter were more sceptical of patriotic calls to conflict. For example, Shelley in the ‘Revolt of Islam’ writes
‘We all are brethren - even the slaves who kill’
Whereas the far too often repeated ‘In Flanders Fields’ by John McCrae concludes (after the misleadingly pacifistic sounding ‘We are the Dead. Short days ago/We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow’)
‘Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.’
The First World War poets often combined ‘jingoism’ with a somber awareness of the consequences of war. At its worst this combination comes across as a cult of death - ‘our glorious dead’ forever judging the living on whether we measure up to their sacrifice. However the sheer scale of industrialised warfare exemplified by the First World War demonstrated that individual bravery, valour, or sacrifice mean very little if everybody is being mown down by machine guns - hero or coward alike. The nations that fought in the First World War are now far more likely to do ‘remote’ warfare: through specialists, private contractors, and drones. Modern warfare’s contradictions, as articulated in First World War poetry, are just too much to bear.
April 6, 2020
everyday for the past few weeks i've gone out into the backyard to sit in the grass, drink some iced coffee, and read this book. sometimes i'd tear through dozens of poems in a single go, other times just a handful, glancing up every few lines to admire the daffodils and duck as a bumblebee went tumbling by.
this is a book best read in a warm and kindly place, trust me - the poems littering its pages will pull and tear at your heartstrings until they come to pieces in your hands. war, death, loneliness, grief, loss... each of them in every word, and between every line. you will come to know these writers intimately: rupert brooke, the idealist; robert graves, sharp-tongued but weary; siegfried sassoon, indefatigable; wilfred owen, unflinching; charles sorley, the bright-eyed darling of the trench poets; vera brittain, the nurse whose heart encompassed the world entire. and leagues of others. the sweat and the grime and the sorrow and the hope and the misty light of the dawn are crusted onto every word in this book — you feel like you're right there with them, sunk in the mud, nudging your mate in the ribs, giving a wan smile despite it all.
lord, do i love this book. looking at it, you can tell: its spine is worn, it's bruised and blue all over from stanzas underlined in crooked ink and smudges from my thumb, every one of sorley's poems are dog-eared, grass stains and errant drops of melted iced coffee all over. it's just one of those books. the kind that sits on your shelf and vibrates, glows, because it knows it's loved. because it can't wait to be in your hands, your kindly, familiar hands, and read all over again.
light many lamps and gather round his bed.
lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live.
speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet.
he's young; hated war; how should he die
when cruel old campaigners win safe through?
but death replied: 'i choose him,' so he went,
and there was silence in the summer night;
silence and safety; and the veils of sleep.
then, far away, the thudding of the guns.
— siegfried sassoon
this is a book best read in a warm and kindly place, trust me - the poems littering its pages will pull and tear at your heartstrings until they come to pieces in your hands. war, death, loneliness, grief, loss... each of them in every word, and between every line. you will come to know these writers intimately: rupert brooke, the idealist; robert graves, sharp-tongued but weary; siegfried sassoon, indefatigable; wilfred owen, unflinching; charles sorley, the bright-eyed darling of the trench poets; vera brittain, the nurse whose heart encompassed the world entire. and leagues of others. the sweat and the grime and the sorrow and the hope and the misty light of the dawn are crusted onto every word in this book — you feel like you're right there with them, sunk in the mud, nudging your mate in the ribs, giving a wan smile despite it all.
lord, do i love this book. looking at it, you can tell: its spine is worn, it's bruised and blue all over from stanzas underlined in crooked ink and smudges from my thumb, every one of sorley's poems are dog-eared, grass stains and errant drops of melted iced coffee all over. it's just one of those books. the kind that sits on your shelf and vibrates, glows, because it knows it's loved. because it can't wait to be in your hands, your kindly, familiar hands, and read all over again.
light many lamps and gather round his bed.
lend him your eyes, warm blood, and will to live.
speak to him; rouse him; you may save him yet.
he's young; hated war; how should he die
when cruel old campaigners win safe through?
but death replied: 'i choose him,' so he went,
and there was silence in the summer night;
silence and safety; and the veils of sleep.
then, far away, the thudding of the guns.
— siegfried sassoon
March 7, 2014
Not my usual reading, but I really enjoyed it! This anthology contains poetry that was written during WWI or soon after, the poets all having experienced some aspect of the war. Because the poetry was written during that era, it has poetry forms that were popular during that time, many poems made up of quatrains and some sonnets. I enjoy these forms better than some of the more modern forms used today. It made for easier reading for me, while I was still challenged and moved by the subject matter of the poems.
This arrangement is good for someone not experienced in poetry because I know other readers were bothered by the fact of publication dates being hard to find (they are in the back of the book! ) or that there should have been more poems by a certain poet. I was not such a specialist to care for either of those things. The anthology is arranged in five sections from " I.Your Country Needs You " which covered everything from responses to the war, recruitment, and training to section" V. Peace " which covers the end of the war and it's aftermath. The poems covered a wide variety of perspectives and issues. It was thought-provoking and not the depressive downer I thought it would be. I started at the beginning and read through the sections; the benefit to this being that you feel as though you experience these emotions and feelings in the poems from the beginning of the war to the end. I've been a lover seeing her soldier off to war, I have listened as God hears prayers from both sides of the war asking Him for the same things, And I have watched a soldier wonder if he can just drag his fellow farmer/soldier in the sun so that it will it bring him back to life like it has every morning to plant. They were beautiful.
This arrangement is good for someone not experienced in poetry because I know other readers were bothered by the fact of publication dates being hard to find (they are in the back of the book! ) or that there should have been more poems by a certain poet. I was not such a specialist to care for either of those things. The anthology is arranged in five sections from " I.Your Country Needs You " which covered everything from responses to the war, recruitment, and training to section" V. Peace " which covers the end of the war and it's aftermath. The poems covered a wide variety of perspectives and issues. It was thought-provoking and not the depressive downer I thought it would be. I started at the beginning and read through the sections; the benefit to this being that you feel as though you experience these emotions and feelings in the poems from the beginning of the war to the end. I've been a lover seeing her soldier off to war, I have listened as God hears prayers from both sides of the war asking Him for the same things, And I have watched a soldier wonder if he can just drag his fellow farmer/soldier in the sun so that it will it bring him back to life like it has every morning to plant. They were beautiful.
March 26, 2008
One of the books from my semester-o'-world-war-one, in the spring of 1990. This one was, I think, from the English class, though it may have also been assigned reading for the history class as well. The poetry itself runs the gamut, from the conventional and sentimental "pep" works from early in the war (some from poets, like Rupert Brooke, who died before ever seeing combat at all, and others from poets too old for combat, like Kipling), to full fledged "trench poetry" by the likes of Wilfrid Owen, Robert Graves, and Siegfried Sassoon. There is also a nice sampling of work by German and French Poets. There isn't much in the way of effective commentary or organization, but the raw material is all here, at a moderate price and a convenient size.
October 27, 2017
As a fan of both poetry and World War I, I was not a little disappointed by this collection. Honestly, most of the poems here are not very good. Never a fan of rhyming poems or strict literalism, I maybe should've known better. These are almost stiflingly thematic and while some good poets are represented here, it's not their best work that's represented here. Plus, it's all British poets, which doesn't seem quite right since there were other countries involved in the war as far as I can recall...I mean, I wasn't there.
March 28, 2017
"What passing bells for these who die as cattle?"
Picked this up after singing the Britten War Requiem and experiencing the power and depth of emotion in Wilfred Owen's poetry. Took me forever to read, but it's an incredible collection.
Picked this up after singing the Britten War Requiem and experiencing the power and depth of emotion in Wilfred Owen's poetry. Took me forever to read, but it's an incredible collection.
May 19, 2022
A miña comfort read. podería falar disto durante 48 horas solo pausando para darlle un sorbito ao meu mencía.
August 24, 2011
8/23/11: Jeezus, this took forever. I couldn't review this if I tried b/c it ended up being the book I carried around for reading on the subway, and I don't actually go into the city that much, so I'm rarely on the subway. The introduction was really long, and the editor suggests that Rosenberg is the superior poet to Owen (the other "great" WWI poet), but I liked Owen's poems the best. I would like to read more of his work. This was also a lesson that I can't read big collections of poetry. I need to read little bits instead. (See what happened to my reading of the Anne Sexton collection, for example.)
3/18/11: Ever since my first English Comp class, I've noticed this deep affinity for the literature, especially the poetry, and history (and later the art) of the First World War era. It affects me so profoundly (and in such a personal way, with such an odd intensity), that I always say that if I believed in reincarnation (I don't.), I would swear that I was a soldier in the Great War in a previous life. I've only just started the introduction to this volume and I'm already entranced.
3/18/11: Ever since my first English Comp class, I've noticed this deep affinity for the literature, especially the poetry, and history (and later the art) of the First World War era. It affects me so profoundly (and in such a personal way, with such an odd intensity), that I always say that if I believed in reincarnation (I don't.), I would swear that I was a soldier in the Great War in a previous life. I've only just started the introduction to this volume and I'm already entranced.
December 5, 2014
Note: I read the second edition, published in 1981. From what I understand, Penguin now sells George Walter’s In Flanders Fields repackaged as the new Penguin Book of First World War Poetry. Check which edition you’re getting if you decide to buy a copy!
Now, before you all grab your pitchforks and come after me for giving anything less than five stars to a book that has work by Wilfred Owen in it, let me explain: I did not deduct points for the poetry itself. Where this collection fails, quite spectacularly, is editing. Jon Silkin was undoubtedly a very intelligent man who knew a lot this particular period, but I have issues with many of his decisions.
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Now, before you all grab your pitchforks and come after me for giving anything less than five stars to a book that has work by Wilfred Owen in it, let me explain: I did not deduct points for the poetry itself. Where this collection fails, quite spectacularly, is editing. Jon Silkin was undoubtedly a very intelligent man who knew a lot this particular period, but I have issues with many of his decisions.
Read More
November 9, 2012
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (Second edition) edited by Jon Silkin and David McDuff is a collection of poetry from and about the WWI. Silkin and McDuff increased the number of poems in translation included in the collection. There are poems translated from German, French, Italian, Russian, and Hebrew, and Silkin was a poet himself. As expressed in the not at the beginning, “For some, war was moral athletics; others looked forward to the experience of war as a ‘vacation from life’ — a vacation from a society disjoined by class and constrained by the rigid structures of labour.” (page 12)
Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2012/11/t...
Read the full review: http://savvyverseandwit.com/2012/11/t...
February 14, 2008
This book is pretty awful. The organization is impossible to figure out. The editing is lousy, and the driving force of the introduction seems to be to track how anthologies over the years have defined the poetry of the first world war. There isn't a table of contents that lists the poems! There is no way of finding poems by author, only a title/first line index. And they aren't dated. So... thanks a lot for thematically organizing the poems into "Before the War" or "Behind the Lines" or "In the Trenches" but seriously, difficult to use. Crap volume.
March 8, 2017
There are some good poems, some poor poems, some rough poems and some I loved in this book. Poetry was much more part of life in 1914 and was a much more natural way for people to express their thoughts and feelings than it is now.
The poems are arranged thematically, not chronologically or by author, but you can read them in any order you feel like. I dipped into the book over a period of about three months.
The poems are arranged thematically, not chronologically or by author, but you can read them in any order you feel like. I dipped into the book over a period of about three months.
October 12, 2009
I always like to dip into this in the run up to Rememberance Sunday. It's a good way of reminding me of what those men went through, physically and emotionally, almost 100 years ago. This collection has both the classics and some lesser known poems and includes poets from both sides of the conflict.
August 13, 2013
There were a huge number of lives sacrificed in vain in the first world war. Some of them were poets of the highest caliber. Other great poets survived the battles and returned home. Whether you are reading the poetry of someone who died in the war, or survived, this collection is one of the most moving you will ever read. Highly recommended.
April 12, 2019
Introduction
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Text
Prelude
--On the idle hill of summer, A. E. Housman
1. Your Country Needs You
'Let the foul Scene proceed'
--Channel Firing, Thomas Hardy
--The Eve of War, Geoffrey Faber
--On Receiving the First News of the War, Isaac Rosenberg
--The Marionettes, Walter de la Mare
--August, 1914, John Masefield
--1914: Peace, Rupert Brooke
--Happy is England Now, John Freeman
--'For All We Have and Are', Rudyard Kipling
--This is no case of petty Right or Wrong, Edward Thomas
--To Germany, Charles Hamilton Sorley
--The Poets are Waiting, Harold Monro
--The Dilemma, J. C. Squire
'Who's for the khaki suit'
--The Trumpet, Edward Thomas
--The Call, Jessie Pope
--Recruiting, E. A. Mackintosh
--Soldier: Twentieth Century, Isaac Rosenberg
--Youth in Arms I, Harold Monro
--'I don't want to be a soldier', Soldiers' song
--The Conscript, Wilfrid Gibson
--Rondeau of a Conscientious Objector, D. H. Lawrence
--1914: Safety, Rupert Brooke
--'Now that you too must shortly go the way', Eleanor Farjeon
In Training
--The Kiss, Siegfried Sassoon
--Arms and the Boy, Wilfred Owen
--'All the hills and vales along', Charles Hamilton Sorley
--'We are Fred Karno's army', Soldiers' song
--Song of the Dark Ages, Francis Brett Young
--Sonnets 1917: Servitude, Ivor Gurney
--In Barracks, Siegfried Sassoon
--The Last Post, Robert Graves
--In Training, Edward Shanks
--Youth in Arms II: Soldier, Harold Monro
--'Men Who March Away' (Song of the Soldiers), Thomas Hardy
--Marching Men, Marjorie Pickthall
--The Send-off, Wilfred Owen
--Fragment, Rupert Brooke
2. Somewhere in France
In Trenches
--First Time In, Ivor Gurney
--Break of Day in the Trenches, Isaac Rosenberg
--'Bombed last night', Soldiers' song
--Breakfast, Wilfrid Gibson
--In the Trenches, Richard Aldington
--Winter Warfare, Edgell Rickword
--Futility, Wilfred Owen
--Exposure, Wilfred Owen
--'We're here because we're here', Soldiers' song
--Poem. Abbreviated from the Conversation of Mr. T. E. H., Ezra Pound
--Illusions, Edmund Blunden
--The Silent One, Ivor Gurney
--Moonrise over Battlefield, Edgell Rickword
--The Redeemer, Siegfried Sassoon
--Serenade, Ivor Gurney
Behind the Lines
--Returning, We Hear The Larks, Isaac Rosenberg
--After War, Ivor Gurney
--Grotesque, Frederic Manning
--Louse Hunting, Isaac Rosenberg
--At Senlis Once, Edmund Blunden
--Crucifix Corner, Ivor Gurney
--Vlamertinghe: Passing the Chateau, July, 1917, Edmund Blunden
--Dead Cow Farm, Robert Graves
--The Sower (Eastern France), Laurence Binyon
--August, 1918 (In a French Village), Maurice Baring
--'Therefore is the name of it called Babel', Osbert Sitwell
--War, Lesley Coulson
Comrades of War
--Canadians, Ivor Gurney
--Banishment, Siegfried Sassoon
--Woodbine Willie, G. A. Studdert Kennedy
--Apologia pro Poemate Meo, Wilfred Owen
--My Company, Herbert Read
--Before the Battle, Martin Armstrong
--Nameless Men, Edward Shillito
--Greater Love, Wilfred Owen
--In Memoriam Private D. Sutherland killed in Action in the German Trench, May 16, 1916, and the Others who Died, E. A. Mackintosh
--To his Love, Ivor Gurney
--Trench Poets, Edgell Rickword
3. Action
Rendezvous with Death
--Before Action, W. N. Hodgson
--Into Battle, Julian Grenfell
--Lights Out, Edward Thomas
--'I have a rendezvous with Death', Alan Seeger
--Two Sonnets, Charles Hamilton Sorley
--1914: The Soldier, Rupert Brooke
--The Mother, May Herschel-Clark
--'I tracked a dead man down a trench', W. S. S. Lyon
--Ballad of the Three Spectres, Ivor Gurney
--The Question, Wilfrid Gibson
--The Soldier Addresses His Body, Edgell Rickword
--The Day's March, Robert Nichols
Battle
--Eve of Assault: Infantry Going Down to Trenches, Robert Nichols
--Headquarters, Gilbert Frankau
--Bombardment, D. H. Lawrence
--The Shell, H. Smalley Sarson
--Bombardment, Richard Aldington
--On Somme, Ivor Gurney
--Before the Charge, Patrick MacGill
--It's a Queer Time, Robert Graves
--The Face, Frederic Manning
--Gethsemane, Rudyard Kipling
--Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen
--The Navigators, W. J. Turner
--Spring Offensive, Wilfred Owen
--Counter-Attack, Siegfried Sassoon
--Youth in Arms III: Retreat, Harold Monro
Aftermath
--Back to Rest, W. N. Hodgson
--Dulce et Decorum est, Wilfred Owen
--Field Ambulance in Retreat, May Sinclair
--A Memory, Margaret Sackville
--Dead Man's Dump, Isaac Rosenberg
--Youth in Arms IV: Carrion, Harold Monro
--A Dead Boche, Robert Graves
--Soliloquy II, Richard Aldington
--Butchers and Tombs, Ivor Gurney
--A Private, Edward Thomas
--The Volunteer, Herbert Asquith
--In Flanders Fields, John McCrae
--1914: The Dead, Rupert Brooke
--1914: The Dead, Rupert Brooke
--'When you see millions of the mouthless dead', Charles Hamilton Sorley
--Strange Meeting, Wilfred Owen
--Prisoners, F. W. Harvey
--His Mate, Wilfrid Gibson
--Epitaphs: The Coward, Rudyard Kipling
--The Deserter, Gilbert Frankau
--My Boy Jack, Rudyard Kipling
--Easter Monday, Eleanor Farjeon
4. Blighty
Going Back
--'I Want to go home', Soldiers' song
--If We Return (Rondeau), F. W. Harvey
--Blighty, Ivor Gurney
--War Girls, Jessie Pope
--Home Service, Geoffrey Faber
--The Survivor Comes Home, Robert Graves
--Sick Leave, Siegfried Sassoon
--Reserve, Richard Aldington
--Wife and Country, Gilbert Frankau
--Girl to Soldier on Leave, Isaac Rosenberg
--The Pavement, Francis Brett Young
--Not to Keep, Robert Frost
--Going Back, D. H. Lawrence
The Other War
--'I wore a tunic', Soldiers' song
--'Blighters', Siegfried Sassoon
--Ragtime, Wilfrid Gibson
--Ragtime, Osbert Sitwell
--The Admonition: To Betsey, Helen Parry Eden
--Air-Raid, Wilfrid Gibson
--Zeppelins, Nancy Cunard
--'Education', Pauline Barrington
--Socks, Jessie Pope
--A War Film, Theresa Hooley
--The War Films, Sir Henry Newbolt
--The Dancers (During a Great Battle, 1916), Edith Sitwell
--Epitaphs: A Son, Rudyard Kipling
--'I looked up from my writing', Thomas Hardy
--Picnic July 1917, Rose Macaulay
--As the Team's Head-Brass, Edward Thomas
--The Farmer, 1917, Fredegond Shove
--May, 1915, Charlotte Mew
Lucky Blighters
--'They', Siegfried Sassoon
--Portrait of a Coward, Ivor Gurney
--In A Soldiers' Hospital I: Pluck, Eva Dobell
--In A Soldiers' Hospital II: Gramophone Tunes, Eva Dobell
--Hospital Sanctuary, Vera Brittain
--Convalescence, Amy Lowell
--Smile, Smile, Smile, Wilfred Owen
--The Beau Ideal, Jessie Pope
--The Veteran, Margaret Postgate Cole
--Repression of War Experience, Siegfried Sassoon
--A Child's Nightmare, Robert Graves
--Mental Cases, Wilfred Owen
--The Death-Bed, Siegfried Sassoon
5. Peace
Everyone Sang
--'When this bloody war is over', Soldiers' song
--Preparations for Victory, Edmund Blunden
--'Après la guerre finie', Soldiers' song
--Everyone Sang, Siegfried Sassoon
--Peace Celebration, Osbert Sitwell
--Paris, November 11, 1918, May Wedderburn Cannan
--It Is Near Toussaints, Ivor Gurney
--Two Fusiliers, Robert Graves
--Report on Experience, Edmund Blunden
--Dead and Buried, G. A. Studdert Kennedy
The Dead and the Living
--For the Fallen, Laurence Binyon
--The Cenotaph, Charlotte Mew
--The Silence, Sir John Adcock
--Armistice Day, 1921, Edward Shanks
--'Out of the Mouths of Babes -', F. W. Harvey
--Memorial Tablet (Great War), Siegfried Sassoon
--Elegy in a Country Churchyard, G. K. Chesterton
--Epitaphs: Common Form, Rudyard Kipling
--Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries, A. E. Housman
--On Passing the New Menin Gate, Siegfried Sassoon
--Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: V, Ezra Pound
--War and Peace, Edgell Rickword
--A Generation (1917), J. C. Squire
--Disabled, Wilfred Owen
--Strange Hells, Ivor Gurney
--The Superfluous Woman, Vera Brittain
--Men Fade Like Rocks, J. W. Turner
'Have you forgotten yet?'
--High Wood, Philip Johnstone
--Picture-Show, Siegfried Sassoon
--Festubert, 1916, Edmund Blunden
--Lamplight, May Wedderburn Cannan
--Recalling War, Robert Graves
--War Books, Ivor Gurney
--Aftermath, Siegfried Sassoon
--If ye Forget, G. A. Studdert Kennedy
--The Midnight Skaters, Edmund Blunden
--Ancient History, Siegfried Sassoon
--The Next War, Osbert Sitwell
--The War Generation: Ave, Vera Brittain
--To a Conscript of 1940, Herbert Read
Coda
--Ancre Sunshine, Edmund Blunden
Notes
A Glossary of the Western Front
Biographies
Further Reading
Poem Acknowledgements
Index of Titles and First Lines
Acknowledgements
A Note on the Text
Prelude
--On the idle hill of summer, A. E. Housman
1. Your Country Needs You
'Let the foul Scene proceed'
--Channel Firing, Thomas Hardy
--The Eve of War, Geoffrey Faber
--On Receiving the First News of the War, Isaac Rosenberg
--The Marionettes, Walter de la Mare
--August, 1914, John Masefield
--1914: Peace, Rupert Brooke
--Happy is England Now, John Freeman
--'For All We Have and Are', Rudyard Kipling
--This is no case of petty Right or Wrong, Edward Thomas
--To Germany, Charles Hamilton Sorley
--The Poets are Waiting, Harold Monro
--The Dilemma, J. C. Squire
'Who's for the khaki suit'
--The Trumpet, Edward Thomas
--The Call, Jessie Pope
--Recruiting, E. A. Mackintosh
--Soldier: Twentieth Century, Isaac Rosenberg
--Youth in Arms I, Harold Monro
--'I don't want to be a soldier', Soldiers' song
--The Conscript, Wilfrid Gibson
--Rondeau of a Conscientious Objector, D. H. Lawrence
--1914: Safety, Rupert Brooke
--'Now that you too must shortly go the way', Eleanor Farjeon
In Training
--The Kiss, Siegfried Sassoon
--Arms and the Boy, Wilfred Owen
--'All the hills and vales along', Charles Hamilton Sorley
--'We are Fred Karno's army', Soldiers' song
--Song of the Dark Ages, Francis Brett Young
--Sonnets 1917: Servitude, Ivor Gurney
--In Barracks, Siegfried Sassoon
--The Last Post, Robert Graves
--In Training, Edward Shanks
--Youth in Arms II: Soldier, Harold Monro
--'Men Who March Away' (Song of the Soldiers), Thomas Hardy
--Marching Men, Marjorie Pickthall
--The Send-off, Wilfred Owen
--Fragment, Rupert Brooke
2. Somewhere in France
In Trenches
--First Time In, Ivor Gurney
--Break of Day in the Trenches, Isaac Rosenberg
--'Bombed last night', Soldiers' song
--Breakfast, Wilfrid Gibson
--In the Trenches, Richard Aldington
--Winter Warfare, Edgell Rickword
--Futility, Wilfred Owen
--Exposure, Wilfred Owen
--'We're here because we're here', Soldiers' song
--Poem. Abbreviated from the Conversation of Mr. T. E. H., Ezra Pound
--Illusions, Edmund Blunden
--The Silent One, Ivor Gurney
--Moonrise over Battlefield, Edgell Rickword
--The Redeemer, Siegfried Sassoon
--Serenade, Ivor Gurney
Behind the Lines
--Returning, We Hear The Larks, Isaac Rosenberg
--After War, Ivor Gurney
--Grotesque, Frederic Manning
--Louse Hunting, Isaac Rosenberg
--At Senlis Once, Edmund Blunden
--Crucifix Corner, Ivor Gurney
--Vlamertinghe: Passing the Chateau, July, 1917, Edmund Blunden
--Dead Cow Farm, Robert Graves
--The Sower (Eastern France), Laurence Binyon
--August, 1918 (In a French Village), Maurice Baring
--'Therefore is the name of it called Babel', Osbert Sitwell
--War, Lesley Coulson
Comrades of War
--Canadians, Ivor Gurney
--Banishment, Siegfried Sassoon
--Woodbine Willie, G. A. Studdert Kennedy
--Apologia pro Poemate Meo, Wilfred Owen
--My Company, Herbert Read
--Before the Battle, Martin Armstrong
--Nameless Men, Edward Shillito
--Greater Love, Wilfred Owen
--In Memoriam Private D. Sutherland killed in Action in the German Trench, May 16, 1916, and the Others who Died, E. A. Mackintosh
--To his Love, Ivor Gurney
--Trench Poets, Edgell Rickword
3. Action
Rendezvous with Death
--Before Action, W. N. Hodgson
--Into Battle, Julian Grenfell
--Lights Out, Edward Thomas
--'I have a rendezvous with Death', Alan Seeger
--Two Sonnets, Charles Hamilton Sorley
--1914: The Soldier, Rupert Brooke
--The Mother, May Herschel-Clark
--'I tracked a dead man down a trench', W. S. S. Lyon
--Ballad of the Three Spectres, Ivor Gurney
--The Question, Wilfrid Gibson
--The Soldier Addresses His Body, Edgell Rickword
--The Day's March, Robert Nichols
Battle
--Eve of Assault: Infantry Going Down to Trenches, Robert Nichols
--Headquarters, Gilbert Frankau
--Bombardment, D. H. Lawrence
--The Shell, H. Smalley Sarson
--Bombardment, Richard Aldington
--On Somme, Ivor Gurney
--Before the Charge, Patrick MacGill
--It's a Queer Time, Robert Graves
--The Face, Frederic Manning
--Gethsemane, Rudyard Kipling
--Anthem for Doomed Youth, Wilfred Owen
--The Navigators, W. J. Turner
--Spring Offensive, Wilfred Owen
--Counter-Attack, Siegfried Sassoon
--Youth in Arms III: Retreat, Harold Monro
Aftermath
--Back to Rest, W. N. Hodgson
--Dulce et Decorum est, Wilfred Owen
--Field Ambulance in Retreat, May Sinclair
--A Memory, Margaret Sackville
--Dead Man's Dump, Isaac Rosenberg
--Youth in Arms IV: Carrion, Harold Monro
--A Dead Boche, Robert Graves
--Soliloquy II, Richard Aldington
--Butchers and Tombs, Ivor Gurney
--A Private, Edward Thomas
--The Volunteer, Herbert Asquith
--In Flanders Fields, John McCrae
--1914: The Dead, Rupert Brooke
--1914: The Dead, Rupert Brooke
--'When you see millions of the mouthless dead', Charles Hamilton Sorley
--Strange Meeting, Wilfred Owen
--Prisoners, F. W. Harvey
--His Mate, Wilfrid Gibson
--Epitaphs: The Coward, Rudyard Kipling
--The Deserter, Gilbert Frankau
--My Boy Jack, Rudyard Kipling
--Easter Monday, Eleanor Farjeon
4. Blighty
Going Back
--'I Want to go home', Soldiers' song
--If We Return (Rondeau), F. W. Harvey
--Blighty, Ivor Gurney
--War Girls, Jessie Pope
--Home Service, Geoffrey Faber
--The Survivor Comes Home, Robert Graves
--Sick Leave, Siegfried Sassoon
--Reserve, Richard Aldington
--Wife and Country, Gilbert Frankau
--Girl to Soldier on Leave, Isaac Rosenberg
--The Pavement, Francis Brett Young
--Not to Keep, Robert Frost
--Going Back, D. H. Lawrence
The Other War
--'I wore a tunic', Soldiers' song
--'Blighters', Siegfried Sassoon
--Ragtime, Wilfrid Gibson
--Ragtime, Osbert Sitwell
--The Admonition: To Betsey, Helen Parry Eden
--Air-Raid, Wilfrid Gibson
--Zeppelins, Nancy Cunard
--'Education', Pauline Barrington
--Socks, Jessie Pope
--A War Film, Theresa Hooley
--The War Films, Sir Henry Newbolt
--The Dancers (During a Great Battle, 1916), Edith Sitwell
--Epitaphs: A Son, Rudyard Kipling
--'I looked up from my writing', Thomas Hardy
--Picnic July 1917, Rose Macaulay
--As the Team's Head-Brass, Edward Thomas
--The Farmer, 1917, Fredegond Shove
--May, 1915, Charlotte Mew
Lucky Blighters
--'They', Siegfried Sassoon
--Portrait of a Coward, Ivor Gurney
--In A Soldiers' Hospital I: Pluck, Eva Dobell
--In A Soldiers' Hospital II: Gramophone Tunes, Eva Dobell
--Hospital Sanctuary, Vera Brittain
--Convalescence, Amy Lowell
--Smile, Smile, Smile, Wilfred Owen
--The Beau Ideal, Jessie Pope
--The Veteran, Margaret Postgate Cole
--Repression of War Experience, Siegfried Sassoon
--A Child's Nightmare, Robert Graves
--Mental Cases, Wilfred Owen
--The Death-Bed, Siegfried Sassoon
5. Peace
Everyone Sang
--'When this bloody war is over', Soldiers' song
--Preparations for Victory, Edmund Blunden
--'Après la guerre finie', Soldiers' song
--Everyone Sang, Siegfried Sassoon
--Peace Celebration, Osbert Sitwell
--Paris, November 11, 1918, May Wedderburn Cannan
--It Is Near Toussaints, Ivor Gurney
--Two Fusiliers, Robert Graves
--Report on Experience, Edmund Blunden
--Dead and Buried, G. A. Studdert Kennedy
The Dead and the Living
--For the Fallen, Laurence Binyon
--The Cenotaph, Charlotte Mew
--The Silence, Sir John Adcock
--Armistice Day, 1921, Edward Shanks
--'Out of the Mouths of Babes -', F. W. Harvey
--Memorial Tablet (Great War), Siegfried Sassoon
--Elegy in a Country Churchyard, G. K. Chesterton
--Epitaphs: Common Form, Rudyard Kipling
--Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries, A. E. Housman
--On Passing the New Menin Gate, Siegfried Sassoon
--Hugh Selwyn Mauberley: V, Ezra Pound
--War and Peace, Edgell Rickword
--A Generation (1917), J. C. Squire
--Disabled, Wilfred Owen
--Strange Hells, Ivor Gurney
--The Superfluous Woman, Vera Brittain
--Men Fade Like Rocks, J. W. Turner
'Have you forgotten yet?'
--High Wood, Philip Johnstone
--Picture-Show, Siegfried Sassoon
--Festubert, 1916, Edmund Blunden
--Lamplight, May Wedderburn Cannan
--Recalling War, Robert Graves
--War Books, Ivor Gurney
--Aftermath, Siegfried Sassoon
--If ye Forget, G. A. Studdert Kennedy
--The Midnight Skaters, Edmund Blunden
--Ancient History, Siegfried Sassoon
--The Next War, Osbert Sitwell
--The War Generation: Ave, Vera Brittain
--To a Conscript of 1940, Herbert Read
Coda
--Ancre Sunshine, Edmund Blunden
Notes
A Glossary of the Western Front
Biographies
Further Reading
Poem Acknowledgements
Index of Titles and First Lines
January 19, 2022
I read this in 1988 a year after I left the British Army after realising the military life and it’s moral obligation to the state was not for me. This collection is the best I’ve read on the theme of WW1 and saw me seek out a full collection of Ungaretti, and presented my first reading of Walt Whitman (in the introduction) and E. E. Cummings all of whom are now favourites thanks to this book.
Of course it has Owen and Sassoon but also many new to me. Each and every one is more than readable and many are harrowing.
The inclusion of other voices is brave though a minor note to overwhelming numbers from the British view, but this isn’t about sides but the experience of the soldier himself.
I applaud Silkin and thank Penguin for presenting what may be a definitive introduction to the poetry of WW1. Highly recommended.
(From a reviewer who mainly reads Beat poetry and haiku).
Of course it has Owen and Sassoon but also many new to me. Each and every one is more than readable and many are harrowing.
The inclusion of other voices is brave though a minor note to overwhelming numbers from the British view, but this isn’t about sides but the experience of the soldier himself.
I applaud Silkin and thank Penguin for presenting what may be a definitive introduction to the poetry of WW1. Highly recommended.
(From a reviewer who mainly reads Beat poetry and haiku).
March 31, 2020
“In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie,
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.”
May 1, 2022
One of the finest poetry anthologies I've ever read.
November 7, 2022
A good range mostly within the limits of white English men and women writing about the western front. Not the breadth of British citizens involved in the First World War let alone wider First World War poets involved not connected to British ex-colonies.
June 28, 2023
Jingoism rattles in the skull, in the loose pocket change of the Jungle Book, in short, cutesy rhymes. Suspicion mingles with supposed sincerity, and “freedom,” that dread club, is wielded with real power for the last time. Like the personhood we now give to corporation, personhood then resided within the nation-state, that vulnerable female under constant threat of rapine from the "enemy."
But two cracks betray the flimsy foundation: the smell of God’s rotting corpse, and a brief breath of true, Christian, brotherly love. Steven Crane’s echoes reverberate in Rosenberg’s verse: “Red fangs have torn His face, / God’s blood is shed: / He mourns from His lone place / His children dead.” The world moves toward war at an inevitable yet an impossible pace. Technology, having outstripped tactics and politics, marches mechanically, stiffly, sharply. Many wonder to themselves “to which God do we appeal when we all appeal to the same God?” Gone are the pagan tribal gods, instead the Nation-State has repealed God; the deicide has proved a regicide. But atheists abound. “This is no case of petty right or wrong / That politicians or philosophers / Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot / With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers” and again “You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed / … / And the blind fight the blind.” The assembly line has taken the need for hatred out of war. War can be waged at a lukewarm, distant, trigger-snap distance.
To this day, the reasoning for the war feels self-evidently false. One man dying at the hands of another is so obviously no reason to kill untold millions, and they don’t even try: “Well, you’re going to the wars-- / That is all you need to know.” A pale, mutated, malnourished, quasi-premodernism served as the excuse, that sense of duty twisted into an irrational conveyor belt to hell.
Greybeards plotted. They were sad.
Death was in their wrinkled eyes.
At their tables, with their maps
Plans and calculations, wise
They all seemed; for well they knew
How ungrudgingly Youth dies.
This stanza makes an interesting argument. Old age bitterly drags youth down to death with them. Little do they know, this youth will be the first to completely lose their youth, and this youth, this sincerity, this innocence cannot be recovered, perhaps never will be again. “Everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The sarcophagus was hermetically sealed after the next war, but the fatal wound was made in the Great War. Never before had so many young men been betrayed. An entire generation destroyed. And the women, they saw the emptiness of the returning men, they felt it, a gestalt shift, an irreversible loss of that which is childlike. Woolf was wrong, human nature didn’t change in 1910, it changed in the trenches. Every soldier was infected, and brought the infection back home with him. Despite all the planning, the “wisdom” of the aged, the calculations, the rhetoric, those four deadly years proved that everything merely “seemed.” Nothing was, in reality. Trust between generations was at this point severed. Old age ceased to denote wisdom, but instead stubborn egotism, fatally dusty philosophy, and a giddy willingness to sacrifice the lives of the young.
In response, the first seeds of reactive meme culture sprout, with lines such as:
I don’t want to be a soldier,
I don’t want to go to war.
I’d rather say at home,
Around the streets to roam,
And live on the earnings of a well-paid whore.
I don’t want a bayonet up my arsehole,
I don’t want my bollocks shot away.
I’d rather stay in England,
In merry, merry England,
And fuck my bleeding life away.
This proto-meme contains in itself the flippancy and irreverence of the internet age, mixed with the sincerity of the pre-war years. Men are simple creatures, after all. Much more savage and ironic songs likely are sung in today’s armies.
Another place where sincerity remained was that of seeing Christ in their comrades’ deaths. The death of Christ soon becomes the only remaining religious image. Even the resurrection gets jettisoned. Only Christ’s death feels real to soldiers, and this plays into the death of God even more deeply. But thinking too long about death soon becomes a burden, a pit, something desperately to be avoided. Reality itself becomes too much, too loud, too bright, too sharp. The senses literally cannot handle what is happening anymore. “But every syllable said / Brings you nearer the time you’ll be found lying dead // (Thought! Thought go back into your kennel again: / Hound, back!)” Repression begins in earnest, which weakens the walls of the psyche. Bracing for the impact only breaks more bones, after all.
“My mind is a corridor. The minds about me are corridors. / Nothing suggests itself. There is nothing to do but keep on.” Finding one’s self in a trench must feel unreal; the alien landscape, scarred, treeless, pockmarked and littered with limbs. It smolders, it smells, and it is all that is before you, literally and figuratively. It is your destiny, our destiny. Behind, the politicians sleep soundly at home, the quiet of domestic life purrs on, the slow chewing of cows ruminates; this all now feels equally unreal, something farcical in the ghoulish face of war. Contradictions collapse all around the soldier, who knows only rattling rhymes that echo hollowly. The soldier as yet has no language with which to word his experience. Everything which prepared him made him somehow less prepared than if he was feral, uneducated, untrained. At least then he wouldn't have been so disenchanted. Here, the poetry gets echoey, confused, caught between the disbelief of fighting a pointless war and finding one’s self in said war. The poems skirt around combat, fearing a frontal assault. Instead of depicting death, they shy away from it, confused, still in the Denial stage of grief.
Herbert Read’s poem “My Company” stands out. Abandoning rhyming allows him the freedom to be honest. Most all of the poems up to this point were choked by decorum. Too-blunt honesty was a faux-pas, a slip of the tongue chalked up to insanity. But Read brews a witches cauldron, throwing in the contradictory experiences, feelings, tastes, smells, burnt bits, tree bark, everything. “I cannot tell / What time your life became mine” he thinks to himself. He has subsumed everything around him into himself, and simultaneously he has been dissipated into the world: “In many acts and quiet observances / You absorbed me.” The push and pull of this tension, of being and nonbeing, burns infernally: “This is a hell / Immortal while I live.” Read finds in the embittered blasphemies of his soldiers the truth of the war, of the “modern:”
Then on again,
Sweating and blaspheming—
‘Oh, bloody Christ!’
My men, my modern Christs,
Your bloody agony confronts the world.
Wisdom is again found in the unlikeliest of places. But is this not precisely what Christ did? Finding wisdom among the prostitutes and usurers and soldiers? But back then, the demon-possessed had the decency to hide away in tombs, while here they wander among the ranks, they lie splayed out in no-man’s-land: “A man of mine / lies on the wire. / It is death to fetch his soulless corpse.” These Christs inspire no Pieta, they receive no burial, and thus resurrection remains impossible, a formality of former times no longer respected or observed. What Read and his men have seen prevents them from enjoying the peace they supposedly have achieved. But peace, like childhood, has been irrevocably mutated, marred even, becoming a consumerist product: “Our souls will never settle in suburban hearths.” It is here that he assumes the hugeness and revolutionary potential of a Mayakovsky: “From my giant attitude, / In godlike mood, / I laugh till space is filled / with hellish merriment.”
Alan Seeger had a “rendezvous with Death,” like Dickinson before him, who “could not stop for Death.” Say what you will about the Lost Generation, but they were certainly punctual. They were too honest to be anything else. Unfortunately, honesty counts for nothing in a capitalistic world. Virtue means nothing to a bullet, and oratory counts for nothing when “blood / Come[s] gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.” Enter Wilfred Owens, the main reason why we even know about WWI poetry. Strategically planted at the exact halfway point of the book, his classic “Dulce et Decorum est” lands like a precursor to the atomic bomb. Though Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly V” captures a pungent bottle full of wrath, Owens unleashed an ocean. Pound’s anger betrays him, calling our “botched civilization” an “old bitch gone in the teeth;” by contrast, Owens shows that characteristic restraint of the Lost Generation, that pre-war dignity which he refused to lose. At no point does he lose control, but he does loose Cerberus’ leash for a horrifying moment, and he does hint darkly at the green sea’s roiling wrath.
To be fully experienced, “Dulce” must be read aloud; this act highlights not only a hidden rhyme scheme, but also careful, calculated repetition and mutation. Almost disorienting initially, the poem blooms into a well-structured story the more you re-read it. Like a climber looking at a sheer wall, suddenly handholds emerge. And, in parallel to another wall, Owens’ righteous anger channels Daniel’s interpretation of “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,��� in other words, “you have been weighed and found wanting.” Not only has war been dealt a mortal wound, but all myths (in the widest sense of the word) have been challenged by Owen and his generation. The indisputable facts of the war loudly demand valid answers: the gore of cold machines, the killing without enemies, the irrationality of going “over the top” just to feed a gray-bearded man’s ego. Of course, none of them receive any answers. The neo-god of nationalism proves just as silent as the God of yore, but even more contemptable. At least God offered salvation (through literally His self-sacrifice, not yours); nationalism, by contrast, demands abject slavery to achieve some pyrrhic “freedom.” Freedom from whom? Freedom to do what? All the states fighting this war had roughly the same level of individual freedom, and none of them gained materially. So what happened? And more importantly, “Who shall deliver us from the memory of these dead?”
It is notable that the women included in this collection consistently prove themselves ahead of the curve, dispensing with rhyming and nationalism much faster than the men. Their distance from the front translates to a helpful distance, one wherein the hot breath of death relents for long enough to observe the devastation in a wider way. Rather than describing the anticipation and fear, women like Margaret Sackville describe the aftermath:
Only behind a wall the slow sobbing of women,
The creaking of a door, a lost dog—nothing else.
Silence which might be felt, no pity in the silence,
Horrible, soft like blood, down all the blood-stained ways;
In the middle of the street two corpses lie unburied
And a bayoneted woman stares in the market-place.
Where the men go, constant danger trails close behind, like a dog on the hunt, a starving hellhound lusting for blood. But what happens when neither army is around? What happens in the liminal space of war, the uncontested zone, the scarred-over, scorched stain of what once was a town? Similarly, what happens to a corpse when not even the insects are interested, when it has been so thoroughly picked clean that the bones shine with a bleached luster? Other than land, people can also be treated this way; social classes, artistic movements, lifestyles, lots of things suffer from the same overuse. Think of the warehouses of fidget spinners no one wants because the trend died so fast. Think of the mountains of food thrown away because they made too much, because we demand too fast of service.
Returning to the front, however, the war drags on. As it does, paradoxes start breaking down old categories, old understandings. Death and gore becomes beautiful “More beautiful than one can tell, / More subtly colored than a perfect Goya;” men-turned-killers, the same who were so hesitant back home, now identify with their comrades, with their enemies: "We are the dead.” And the dead have loud voices. The number of wandering ghosts crowds Charon, his boat sinking under the weight of so many million shades. The dead lose not their wrath concerning injustice, but instead magnify it:
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The dead want not pity, but revenge. Deserters get shot, even though they’re sorry. Letters are never delivered to men just recently dead. Normal cycles get interrupted, and such interruption becomes the rule. This has been bitterly true ever since the Great War, only magnifying day by day, in every part of life.
But even returning home means nothing. Where is home? What is home? As a schizophrenic asked during one of his episodes, “when do I go home?” to which his girlfriend piteously replied “you are home, sweetie.” (Poignantly enough, the young man continued “No…the wars are over, and I want to go home.”) Not to minimize legitimate schizophrenia, but this feels heartbreakingly relatable to probably everyone in the post-war world, whether we went to war or just lived in the wake of these several simultaneous and irreversible tragedies. To many schizophrenics, the voices they hear are accusatory, inquisitive. At one point halfway through the above video, the young man stops answering his girlfriend’s questions, repeating only “I don’t know.” This is the mantra of the post-war world, the post-modern world, an uncertainty, a radical crowding of the mind, a multiplication of voices but a famine of meaning.
For perhaps the first time, war’s shattering affect destroyed more than just bodies, but minds, spirits, perhaps an entire civilization. Eva Dobell’s observations of watching badly wounded men attempting to enjoy a record tainted forever that music, so it lost its original cheeriness. Instead, it has been replaced with a ghastly irony, a hollowness like the “puzzled patient smile” of a man with “Shell-shock—he cannot hear a sound.” The quantifiable losses of the war were staggering enough, but the qualitative loss is even worse. Even the jingoist Rudyard Kipling has lost his faith: “If any question why he died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied.” Not only have we lost faith in authority, tradition, and the elders, but even thought itself, rationality, the ability to “think” has betrayed us. Yes, it built the machines of death, but the mind also serves as a cold cage, a video player ever-replaying unwanted memories. The only option left is obliteration, oblivion: “Draw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen.” Distraction (in Sassoon’s case, books) reigns omnipotent until old age, or the next war, whichever kills you first. Perhaps the only thing scarier than the need to forget is the need to remember, lest this happen again. Yet again, we are trapped in a spiderweb spun between the branches of Paradox and Contradiction:
Let me forget – Let me forget,
I am weary of remembrance,
And my brow is ever wet,
With the tears of my remembrance,
With the tears and bloody sweat,
Let me forget.
If ye forget – If ye forget,
Then your children must remember,
And their brow be ever wet,
With the tears of their remembrance,
With the tears and bloody sweat,
If ye forget.
But two cracks betray the flimsy foundation: the smell of God’s rotting corpse, and a brief breath of true, Christian, brotherly love. Steven Crane’s echoes reverberate in Rosenberg’s verse: “Red fangs have torn His face, / God’s blood is shed: / He mourns from His lone place / His children dead.” The world moves toward war at an inevitable yet an impossible pace. Technology, having outstripped tactics and politics, marches mechanically, stiffly, sharply. Many wonder to themselves “to which God do we appeal when we all appeal to the same God?” Gone are the pagan tribal gods, instead the Nation-State has repealed God; the deicide has proved a regicide. But atheists abound. “This is no case of petty right or wrong / That politicians or philosophers / Can judge. I hate not Germans, nor grow hot / With love of Englishmen, to please newspapers” and again “You are blind like us. Your hurt no man designed / … / And the blind fight the blind.” The assembly line has taken the need for hatred out of war. War can be waged at a lukewarm, distant, trigger-snap distance.
To this day, the reasoning for the war feels self-evidently false. One man dying at the hands of another is so obviously no reason to kill untold millions, and they don’t even try: “Well, you’re going to the wars-- / That is all you need to know.” A pale, mutated, malnourished, quasi-premodernism served as the excuse, that sense of duty twisted into an irrational conveyor belt to hell.
Greybeards plotted. They were sad.
Death was in their wrinkled eyes.
At their tables, with their maps
Plans and calculations, wise
They all seemed; for well they knew
How ungrudgingly Youth dies.
This stanza makes an interesting argument. Old age bitterly drags youth down to death with them. Little do they know, this youth will be the first to completely lose their youth, and this youth, this sincerity, this innocence cannot be recovered, perhaps never will be again. “Everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned.” The sarcophagus was hermetically sealed after the next war, but the fatal wound was made in the Great War. Never before had so many young men been betrayed. An entire generation destroyed. And the women, they saw the emptiness of the returning men, they felt it, a gestalt shift, an irreversible loss of that which is childlike. Woolf was wrong, human nature didn’t change in 1910, it changed in the trenches. Every soldier was infected, and brought the infection back home with him. Despite all the planning, the “wisdom” of the aged, the calculations, the rhetoric, those four deadly years proved that everything merely “seemed.” Nothing was, in reality. Trust between generations was at this point severed. Old age ceased to denote wisdom, but instead stubborn egotism, fatally dusty philosophy, and a giddy willingness to sacrifice the lives of the young.
In response, the first seeds of reactive meme culture sprout, with lines such as:
I don’t want to be a soldier,
I don’t want to go to war.
I’d rather say at home,
Around the streets to roam,
And live on the earnings of a well-paid whore.
I don’t want a bayonet up my arsehole,
I don’t want my bollocks shot away.
I’d rather stay in England,
In merry, merry England,
And fuck my bleeding life away.
This proto-meme contains in itself the flippancy and irreverence of the internet age, mixed with the sincerity of the pre-war years. Men are simple creatures, after all. Much more savage and ironic songs likely are sung in today’s armies.
Another place where sincerity remained was that of seeing Christ in their comrades’ deaths. The death of Christ soon becomes the only remaining religious image. Even the resurrection gets jettisoned. Only Christ’s death feels real to soldiers, and this plays into the death of God even more deeply. But thinking too long about death soon becomes a burden, a pit, something desperately to be avoided. Reality itself becomes too much, too loud, too bright, too sharp. The senses literally cannot handle what is happening anymore. “But every syllable said / Brings you nearer the time you’ll be found lying dead // (Thought! Thought go back into your kennel again: / Hound, back!)” Repression begins in earnest, which weakens the walls of the psyche. Bracing for the impact only breaks more bones, after all.
“My mind is a corridor. The minds about me are corridors. / Nothing suggests itself. There is nothing to do but keep on.” Finding one’s self in a trench must feel unreal; the alien landscape, scarred, treeless, pockmarked and littered with limbs. It smolders, it smells, and it is all that is before you, literally and figuratively. It is your destiny, our destiny. Behind, the politicians sleep soundly at home, the quiet of domestic life purrs on, the slow chewing of cows ruminates; this all now feels equally unreal, something farcical in the ghoulish face of war. Contradictions collapse all around the soldier, who knows only rattling rhymes that echo hollowly. The soldier as yet has no language with which to word his experience. Everything which prepared him made him somehow less prepared than if he was feral, uneducated, untrained. At least then he wouldn't have been so disenchanted. Here, the poetry gets echoey, confused, caught between the disbelief of fighting a pointless war and finding one’s self in said war. The poems skirt around combat, fearing a frontal assault. Instead of depicting death, they shy away from it, confused, still in the Denial stage of grief.
Herbert Read’s poem “My Company” stands out. Abandoning rhyming allows him the freedom to be honest. Most all of the poems up to this point were choked by decorum. Too-blunt honesty was a faux-pas, a slip of the tongue chalked up to insanity. But Read brews a witches cauldron, throwing in the contradictory experiences, feelings, tastes, smells, burnt bits, tree bark, everything. “I cannot tell / What time your life became mine” he thinks to himself. He has subsumed everything around him into himself, and simultaneously he has been dissipated into the world: “In many acts and quiet observances / You absorbed me.” The push and pull of this tension, of being and nonbeing, burns infernally: “This is a hell / Immortal while I live.” Read finds in the embittered blasphemies of his soldiers the truth of the war, of the “modern:”
Then on again,
Sweating and blaspheming—
‘Oh, bloody Christ!’
My men, my modern Christs,
Your bloody agony confronts the world.
Wisdom is again found in the unlikeliest of places. But is this not precisely what Christ did? Finding wisdom among the prostitutes and usurers and soldiers? But back then, the demon-possessed had the decency to hide away in tombs, while here they wander among the ranks, they lie splayed out in no-man’s-land: “A man of mine / lies on the wire. / It is death to fetch his soulless corpse.” These Christs inspire no Pieta, they receive no burial, and thus resurrection remains impossible, a formality of former times no longer respected or observed. What Read and his men have seen prevents them from enjoying the peace they supposedly have achieved. But peace, like childhood, has been irrevocably mutated, marred even, becoming a consumerist product: “Our souls will never settle in suburban hearths.” It is here that he assumes the hugeness and revolutionary potential of a Mayakovsky: “From my giant attitude, / In godlike mood, / I laugh till space is filled / with hellish merriment.”
Alan Seeger had a “rendezvous with Death,” like Dickinson before him, who “could not stop for Death.” Say what you will about the Lost Generation, but they were certainly punctual. They were too honest to be anything else. Unfortunately, honesty counts for nothing in a capitalistic world. Virtue means nothing to a bullet, and oratory counts for nothing when “blood / Come[s] gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs.” Enter Wilfred Owens, the main reason why we even know about WWI poetry. Strategically planted at the exact halfway point of the book, his classic “Dulce et Decorum est” lands like a precursor to the atomic bomb. Though Pound’s “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly V” captures a pungent bottle full of wrath, Owens unleashed an ocean. Pound’s anger betrays him, calling our “botched civilization” an “old bitch gone in the teeth;” by contrast, Owens shows that characteristic restraint of the Lost Generation, that pre-war dignity which he refused to lose. At no point does he lose control, but he does loose Cerberus’ leash for a horrifying moment, and he does hint darkly at the green sea’s roiling wrath.
To be fully experienced, “Dulce” must be read aloud; this act highlights not only a hidden rhyme scheme, but also careful, calculated repetition and mutation. Almost disorienting initially, the poem blooms into a well-structured story the more you re-read it. Like a climber looking at a sheer wall, suddenly handholds emerge. And, in parallel to another wall, Owens’ righteous anger channels Daniel’s interpretation of “Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin,��� in other words, “you have been weighed and found wanting.” Not only has war been dealt a mortal wound, but all myths (in the widest sense of the word) have been challenged by Owen and his generation. The indisputable facts of the war loudly demand valid answers: the gore of cold machines, the killing without enemies, the irrationality of going “over the top” just to feed a gray-bearded man’s ego. Of course, none of them receive any answers. The neo-god of nationalism proves just as silent as the God of yore, but even more contemptable. At least God offered salvation (through literally His self-sacrifice, not yours); nationalism, by contrast, demands abject slavery to achieve some pyrrhic “freedom.” Freedom from whom? Freedom to do what? All the states fighting this war had roughly the same level of individual freedom, and none of them gained materially. So what happened? And more importantly, “Who shall deliver us from the memory of these dead?”
It is notable that the women included in this collection consistently prove themselves ahead of the curve, dispensing with rhyming and nationalism much faster than the men. Their distance from the front translates to a helpful distance, one wherein the hot breath of death relents for long enough to observe the devastation in a wider way. Rather than describing the anticipation and fear, women like Margaret Sackville describe the aftermath:
Only behind a wall the slow sobbing of women,
The creaking of a door, a lost dog—nothing else.
Silence which might be felt, no pity in the silence,
Horrible, soft like blood, down all the blood-stained ways;
In the middle of the street two corpses lie unburied
And a bayoneted woman stares in the market-place.
Where the men go, constant danger trails close behind, like a dog on the hunt, a starving hellhound lusting for blood. But what happens when neither army is around? What happens in the liminal space of war, the uncontested zone, the scarred-over, scorched stain of what once was a town? Similarly, what happens to a corpse when not even the insects are interested, when it has been so thoroughly picked clean that the bones shine with a bleached luster? Other than land, people can also be treated this way; social classes, artistic movements, lifestyles, lots of things suffer from the same overuse. Think of the warehouses of fidget spinners no one wants because the trend died so fast. Think of the mountains of food thrown away because they made too much, because we demand too fast of service.
Returning to the front, however, the war drags on. As it does, paradoxes start breaking down old categories, old understandings. Death and gore becomes beautiful “More beautiful than one can tell, / More subtly colored than a perfect Goya;” men-turned-killers, the same who were so hesitant back home, now identify with their comrades, with their enemies: "We are the dead.” And the dead have loud voices. The number of wandering ghosts crowds Charon, his boat sinking under the weight of so many million shades. The dead lose not their wrath concerning injustice, but instead magnify it:
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
The dead want not pity, but revenge. Deserters get shot, even though they’re sorry. Letters are never delivered to men just recently dead. Normal cycles get interrupted, and such interruption becomes the rule. This has been bitterly true ever since the Great War, only magnifying day by day, in every part of life.
But even returning home means nothing. Where is home? What is home? As a schizophrenic asked during one of his episodes, “when do I go home?” to which his girlfriend piteously replied “you are home, sweetie.” (Poignantly enough, the young man continued “No…the wars are over, and I want to go home.”) Not to minimize legitimate schizophrenia, but this feels heartbreakingly relatable to probably everyone in the post-war world, whether we went to war or just lived in the wake of these several simultaneous and irreversible tragedies. To many schizophrenics, the voices they hear are accusatory, inquisitive. At one point halfway through the above video, the young man stops answering his girlfriend’s questions, repeating only “I don’t know.” This is the mantra of the post-war world, the post-modern world, an uncertainty, a radical crowding of the mind, a multiplication of voices but a famine of meaning.
For perhaps the first time, war’s shattering affect destroyed more than just bodies, but minds, spirits, perhaps an entire civilization. Eva Dobell’s observations of watching badly wounded men attempting to enjoy a record tainted forever that music, so it lost its original cheeriness. Instead, it has been replaced with a ghastly irony, a hollowness like the “puzzled patient smile” of a man with “Shell-shock—he cannot hear a sound.” The quantifiable losses of the war were staggering enough, but the qualitative loss is even worse. Even the jingoist Rudyard Kipling has lost his faith: “If any question why he died, / Tell them, because our fathers lied.” Not only have we lost faith in authority, tradition, and the elders, but even thought itself, rationality, the ability to “think” has betrayed us. Yes, it built the machines of death, but the mind also serves as a cold cage, a video player ever-replaying unwanted memories. The only option left is obliteration, oblivion: “Draw a deep breath; stop thinking; count fifteen.” Distraction (in Sassoon’s case, books) reigns omnipotent until old age, or the next war, whichever kills you first. Perhaps the only thing scarier than the need to forget is the need to remember, lest this happen again. Yet again, we are trapped in a spiderweb spun between the branches of Paradox and Contradiction:
Let me forget – Let me forget,
I am weary of remembrance,
And my brow is ever wet,
With the tears of my remembrance,
With the tears and bloody sweat,
Let me forget.
If ye forget – If ye forget,
Then your children must remember,
And their brow be ever wet,
With the tears of their remembrance,
With the tears and bloody sweat,
If ye forget.
October 3, 2016
Wars, good and bad, are ugly, de-humanizing, soul-destroying things. This is indisputably true, both history and literature gives proof to this. Yet the preponderance of bad or unnecessary wars to necessary ones in the world’s history is aided and abetted by a willful disregard of this truth. Homer and the Greek tragedians made it clear. So too have writers who write from witness ever since.
The testimony from the First World War, the so-called Great War (great because of its size not because of its purpose, which remains something between a mystery and an absence of purpose), is particularly and relentlessly compelling on the brutality and folly of war. It may have been one of the last wars where everyone turned out to fight without exemptions and deferments for the powerful, the wealthy, the academic, the artistic. The poor, of course, were there as they always are, but it is remarkable how many young men of privilege were not just in the service but on the front lines. (They don’t matter more; they just provided a testimony that reached audiences that were broad at the time and that continue to reach across time.)
Fiction and poetry both benefited from this testimony of experience. This superb anthology captures that and it includes many poems that should be required reading in school and college, particularly given that political leaders who send our young men and women off to war now are almost never veterans of the military. Not that being a veteran guarantees a sober, less impulsive and shallow approach but foppish callowness is less likely. Compare John McCain and Donald Trump on war and torture and note that Cruz, Rubio, Bush, Christie all sound more like Trump than McCain. Read memoirs by all means for a real taste of war. But also read Homer. And read Edmund Blunden, Igor Gurney, Robert Graves, Edward Rickwood, Richard Aldington, Herbert Read, Ford Madox Ford, Georg Trakl, Anton Schnack, Rene Arcos, and, of course, Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg. There are more in this not very long but nonetheless rich volume. A surprising number did not survive the war and there is credibility and immediacy that comes of that reality. But even those who survived wrote poems in the moment and the immediate aftermath, not years later. It is art and journalism wrapped beautifully and poignantly together.
The collection represents a range of voices and perspectives and countries of origin (England, Australia, Wales, America, Canada, Germany, Italy, France, Russia, and China). Women poets are included, almost reluctantly, alas. That and a few of the more modernist poem choices that are less about the war specifically but about life and art were the only weaknesses I found with the book. The anthology is filled with brilliant poems that capture the range of war from optimistic patriotism, parades and comradeship, to fear and boredom, violence and death, which despite changes in technology is as grim and brutal as Homer or the modern battlefield, the unendurable filth and cold, the many simple small joys in moments of calm and relief, the grim reality of medical stations and hospitals. Collectively it’s an immersive experience that gives the reader an opportunity to respectfully learn what we ask soldiers to endure and inflict, a learning that should give us pause when anyone sends others off thoughtlessly or giddily to war.
The testimony from the First World War, the so-called Great War (great because of its size not because of its purpose, which remains something between a mystery and an absence of purpose), is particularly and relentlessly compelling on the brutality and folly of war. It may have been one of the last wars where everyone turned out to fight without exemptions and deferments for the powerful, the wealthy, the academic, the artistic. The poor, of course, were there as they always are, but it is remarkable how many young men of privilege were not just in the service but on the front lines. (They don’t matter more; they just provided a testimony that reached audiences that were broad at the time and that continue to reach across time.)
Fiction and poetry both benefited from this testimony of experience. This superb anthology captures that and it includes many poems that should be required reading in school and college, particularly given that political leaders who send our young men and women off to war now are almost never veterans of the military. Not that being a veteran guarantees a sober, less impulsive and shallow approach but foppish callowness is less likely. Compare John McCain and Donald Trump on war and torture and note that Cruz, Rubio, Bush, Christie all sound more like Trump than McCain. Read memoirs by all means for a real taste of war. But also read Homer. And read Edmund Blunden, Igor Gurney, Robert Graves, Edward Rickwood, Richard Aldington, Herbert Read, Ford Madox Ford, Georg Trakl, Anton Schnack, Rene Arcos, and, of course, Owen, Sassoon and Rosenberg. There are more in this not very long but nonetheless rich volume. A surprising number did not survive the war and there is credibility and immediacy that comes of that reality. But even those who survived wrote poems in the moment and the immediate aftermath, not years later. It is art and journalism wrapped beautifully and poignantly together.
The collection represents a range of voices and perspectives and countries of origin (England, Australia, Wales, America, Canada, Germany, Italy, France, Russia, and China). Women poets are included, almost reluctantly, alas. That and a few of the more modernist poem choices that are less about the war specifically but about life and art were the only weaknesses I found with the book. The anthology is filled with brilliant poems that capture the range of war from optimistic patriotism, parades and comradeship, to fear and boredom, violence and death, which despite changes in technology is as grim and brutal as Homer or the modern battlefield, the unendurable filth and cold, the many simple small joys in moments of calm and relief, the grim reality of medical stations and hospitals. Collectively it’s an immersive experience that gives the reader an opportunity to respectfully learn what we ask soldiers to endure and inflict, a learning that should give us pause when anyone sends others off thoughtlessly or giddily to war.
November 18, 2021
The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry is an anthology of sixteen entries edited by George Walter. This collection reflects the diverse experiences of those who lived through the war, bringing together the words of poets, soldiers, and civilians affected by the conflict.
For the most part, this collection of poetry was written and constructed rather well. Editor Walter has assembled sixteen wonderful poems about the Great War – both during and after the war. Well-known poets and more obscure ones nicely balance this anthology with different viewpoints and talents.
Arranged thematically, the selections take the reader through the war's stages, from conscription to its aftermath, and offer a blend of voices that is both unique and profoundly moving. This anthology is divided into five sections with three poems each and a coda at the end: "Your Country Needs You", "Somewhere in France", "Action", "Blighty", and "Peace", which neatly divides each poem from conscription to peace.
Like most anthologies there are weaker contributions and The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry is not an exception. Granted that a couple poems are written better than other – comparatively speaking, but it is only a singular experience – a British one. Granted they were a major player in the Great War, but it would have been nice to have a more worldly view as it was the first war that the world participated in.
This particular edition contains an introduction by George Walter, which examines the genre of War poetry – in particular to the First World War and how these poems impacted the world at the time. Additionally, there are copious and valuable notes on the text, glossary, biographies, and a list of further reading.
All in all, The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry is a wonderful, albeit limited, collection of war poetry – in particular the First World War.
For the most part, this collection of poetry was written and constructed rather well. Editor Walter has assembled sixteen wonderful poems about the Great War – both during and after the war. Well-known poets and more obscure ones nicely balance this anthology with different viewpoints and talents.
Arranged thematically, the selections take the reader through the war's stages, from conscription to its aftermath, and offer a blend of voices that is both unique and profoundly moving. This anthology is divided into five sections with three poems each and a coda at the end: "Your Country Needs You", "Somewhere in France", "Action", "Blighty", and "Peace", which neatly divides each poem from conscription to peace.
Like most anthologies there are weaker contributions and The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry is not an exception. Granted that a couple poems are written better than other – comparatively speaking, but it is only a singular experience – a British one. Granted they were a major player in the Great War, but it would have been nice to have a more worldly view as it was the first war that the world participated in.
This particular edition contains an introduction by George Walter, which examines the genre of War poetry – in particular to the First World War and how these poems impacted the world at the time. Additionally, there are copious and valuable notes on the text, glossary, biographies, and a list of further reading.
All in all, The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry is a wonderful, albeit limited, collection of war poetry – in particular the First World War.
April 25, 2018
BTW the Introduction by Jon Silkin is excellent. It’s not just a couple of pages, it’s almost a third of the book (77 pages in a book of 282 pages, though that includes the indexes and the bibliography.) He talks about the issue of evaluating the war poets for their explicit ideas, even if we disagree (as to militarism, patriotism, pacifism and so on) and his schema consists of two parts:
•… an arrangement, or progression, of poets according to a developing consciousness, in relation to the war and the ‘good’ of society as a whole
•…an attempt to group poets in terms of sensibility and language.
He places the war poets in context with the preceding Romantic poets, and he identifies four stages of consciousness:
•… a passive reflection of, or conduit for, the prevailing patriot ideas, and the cant that’s contingent on most social abstract impulsions.
•…’the role of the angry prophet’, protesting against the war through the recreation of physical horror, through anger and satire, and through sardonic distancing.
•…’compassion’ – with strength of feeling
•…’an active desire for change, a change that will re-align the elements of human society in such a way as to make it more creative and fruitful.
This is a very good collection, thoughtfully arranged and inclusive of both sides of the conflict.
To see the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/04/25/t...
•… an arrangement, or progression, of poets according to a developing consciousness, in relation to the war and the ‘good’ of society as a whole
•…an attempt to group poets in terms of sensibility and language.
He places the war poets in context with the preceding Romantic poets, and he identifies four stages of consciousness:
•… a passive reflection of, or conduit for, the prevailing patriot ideas, and the cant that’s contingent on most social abstract impulsions.
•…’the role of the angry prophet’, protesting against the war through the recreation of physical horror, through anger and satire, and through sardonic distancing.
•…’compassion’ – with strength of feeling
•…’an active desire for change, a change that will re-align the elements of human society in such a way as to make it more creative and fruitful.
This is a very good collection, thoughtfully arranged and inclusive of both sides of the conflict.
To see the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2018/04/25/t...
July 22, 2023
My husband, upon getting a brief glance at the title: "Penguin war poetry? What?"
(I then explained that no, the penguins weren't writing war poems.)
My students and I spent just a week looking at First World War poetry--not nearly long enough, but better than nothing, which would have been the only other option. This anthology provides an excellent selection of WWI poetry--primarily from the big British names like Sassoon and Owen, but also lesser-known poets, poems in translation, and poems from pacifists.
In an ideal world, this volume would also include some biographical information on each of the poets represented, but it's not a tremendous mark against the book. Overall, a good addition to any poetry collection.
Update, 7/22/23:
A summer re-read to prepare both for this coming school year's Brit Lit class and for our Books and Bourbon meeting on War. I was struck this time around by how blatantly the editor admitted his bias--against war, patriotism, and all that rot (I would have liked to see him go toe-to-toe with CS Lewis on the subject).
Of course, another read-through only leads to additional poems I would like to assign to my students. (Whoops?) I'll have to decide if I'm adding or substituting. So much excellent poetry came out of England during this time period--it's hard to narrow it down.
(I then explained that no, the penguins weren't writing war poems.)
My students and I spent just a week looking at First World War poetry--not nearly long enough, but better than nothing, which would have been the only other option. This anthology provides an excellent selection of WWI poetry--primarily from the big British names like Sassoon and Owen, but also lesser-known poets, poems in translation, and poems from pacifists.
In an ideal world, this volume would also include some biographical information on each of the poets represented, but it's not a tremendous mark against the book. Overall, a good addition to any poetry collection.
Update, 7/22/23:
A summer re-read to prepare both for this coming school year's Brit Lit class and for our Books and Bourbon meeting on War. I was struck this time around by how blatantly the editor admitted his bias--against war, patriotism, and all that rot (I would have liked to see him go toe-to-toe with CS Lewis on the subject).
Of course, another read-through only leads to additional poems I would like to assign to my students. (Whoops?) I'll have to decide if I'm adding or substituting. So much excellent poetry came out of England during this time period--it's hard to narrow it down.
April 15, 2015
Having written an amazing essay on WW1 poetry for my GCSEs I thought I knew about this stuff. Turns out I should've paid more attention to the critics who harshly savaged my lengthy dissection of 'If I should die...' with a 3 out of 10 and a scraped 'C'.
However my groundwork in disappointment stood me in good stead because once I'd managed to wade my way through editor Jon Silkin's dense intro it now all makes perfect sense.
Obviously as he's choosing the selection, the poems neatly illustrate his theories, particularly the move from patriotism to numbed brutality and the underlying sense of doom that was equally present in the German and French trenches as the good old Tommy.
What was more interesting/moving wasn't the mud and blood, but the more modern, stream of conscious poems seemingly not about war but laden with portents, like the extracts of Jones' 'In Parenthesis', the brilliant Edward Thomas and Herbert Read.
Now all I've got to do is invent a time machine, go back to school and rewrite that essay. Obvs I wouldn't stop the war... what would I do with this newfound info if there wasn't a war?
However my groundwork in disappointment stood me in good stead because once I'd managed to wade my way through editor Jon Silkin's dense intro it now all makes perfect sense.
Obviously as he's choosing the selection, the poems neatly illustrate his theories, particularly the move from patriotism to numbed brutality and the underlying sense of doom that was equally present in the German and French trenches as the good old Tommy.
What was more interesting/moving wasn't the mud and blood, but the more modern, stream of conscious poems seemingly not about war but laden with portents, like the extracts of Jones' 'In Parenthesis', the brilliant Edward Thomas and Herbert Read.
Now all I've got to do is invent a time machine, go back to school and rewrite that essay. Obvs I wouldn't stop the war... what would I do with this newfound info if there wasn't a war?
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