Poetry of the Second World War: An Anthology (Ed Tim Kendall). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025.
There are twenty-eight poets in this collection, all British or Irish, eight of them women, five of them died in the war. There is an excellent introduction, notes on publication dates and other matters, and a few pages of information about each author.
The introduction argues that we have all been wrong to think that World War Two poetry is less good than World War One poetry, indeed, ‘some of the finest poems of the twentieth century can be found in this anthology’ (Auden, MacNeice, Douglas, Causley). But it was poetry of a very different kind, not written from the trenches but from the desert, Italy, the sea, the home front where women experienced the Blitz and agonised about husbands and children. Civilians were very much involved in this war, were in danger, and did not have romantic illusions.
Some very famous poets and poems are here – those I have mentioned, and also Dylan Thomas with ‘A Refusal to Mourn’, Henry Reed’s ‘Naming of Parts’, light verse from Noel Coward and Hamish Henderson (‘D-Day Dodgers’). Margery Lea, of whom almost nothing is known, is here with ‘Bomb Story’. Alun Lewis is here from Wales and the Scots Edwin Morgan, Sorley Maclean, and the brilliant Robert Garioch, who learned Italian and wrote poetry while a prisoner of war.
But there is one extraordinary omission. Where on earth is Vernon Scannell, who survived and wrote about many other things, but who suffered from PTSD all his life and whose ‘Walking Wounded’ is one of the supreme poems of the war? It was written long afterwards, in 1962, but this needn’t have excluded him. Causley’s ‘At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux’ (written 1954, and I think a better poem than Binyon’s ‘For the Fallen’) is here. Most entries, though, were written while the conflict was happening or just about to happen.
There are two poems which I hadn’t seen, and which raise important moral questions. Sorley Maclean’s ‘Heroes’ (translated from Gaelic by himself) contemplates a young dead German soldier and wonders whether he was a Nazi or a victim. And John Jarmain, who was killed in Normandy, argues passionately, in ‘The Innocent shall Suffer’, that soldiers may kill only one another, not civilians. It is good to have him and other less celebrated writers in what is a very welcome anthology.
