Merryn Williams on Oxford professor Jon Stallworthy’s war poetry anthology

This New Oxford Book is a revised and enlarged edition, comprising poetry about war from Homer and the Old Testament to Peter Wyton (born 1944).

Most is English-language, almost all the poets are male. Some are pro-war, many more are anti.

Before the 20th-century, few of the authors had actually fought. But the American Civil War inspired many fine poems; so, famously, did the First World War, and the Second, whose poetry, as Stallworthy says, is less well known than it should be.

Keith Douglas, Randall Jarrell and Charles Causley are among the several 20th-century poets he includes.

The wars keep going on, and he suggests that the definitive poems are “as likely to come from the hand of a front-line medic or war correspondent as from a professional soldier”. Indeed, some already have; Joel Barlow described Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in ‘Advice to a Raven in Russia’, written just before he himself died of exposure; Walt Whitman wrote about nursing the wounded; E.E. Cummings has a stunning poem about the treatment of conscientious objectors. The troubles in Northern Ireland inspired great poems by civilians Michael Longley and Seamus Heaney.

Personal experience seems to be the key, as all these writers had witnessed the atrocities they were describing.

Poems about Vietnam by Americans are less good.

There are many more great poems by authors too numerous to list, including Hardy, Housman, Owen, Larkin and, unexpectedly, Chaucer. Not to mention Robert Southey’s ‘Battle of Blenheim’. This is a superlative collection.

At the same time, Paul O’Prey has edited First World War Poems from the Front (£9.99) for the Imperial War Museum.

His 15 poets had all actually witnessed the First World War, but only ten were soldiers; there were also three nurses, one civilian and one chaplain.

Some of the greatest poems of the century (for the obvious names are all here) share space with others which make no special claim, except that they knew what they were talking about.

“Sentimentalism, fine words, false attitudes, have not stood the test of time,” O’Prey says, but the “rawness, energy and urgent truthfulness” of these poems “demands our attention”.

I particularly liked the modernist ‘Song of the Mud’, by Mary Borden. Another name, like the remarkable Joel Barlow and Ephim Fogel, which was quite new to me.

The New Oxford Book of War Poetry
ed Jon Stallworthy
Oxford University Press, £16.99
A superlative collection spanning centuries of history