Review of "Poetry of the First World War", ed. Tim Kendall. pub. OUP

[sheenaghpugh]

This is a very scholarly, thorough anthology by a man who knows his subject unusually well, as any regular reader of his blog "War Poets" will be aware. The introductory notes to each poet, and the notes on poems at the back, are very full and informative; the chronology of the war years is helpful and though there's no index of poets, it can be argued that this is not really necessary; there aren't that many represented and the table of contents suffices.

This is because, as Kendall states in the introduction, he has concentrated on the "most important" poets who come within his remit of "poetry related to the War by poets from Britain and Ireland who lived through part or all of it". ("Most important", of course, is a judgement open to debate, but we'll come to that later.) This is almost the polar opposite of the approach taken by Vivien Noakes's "Voices of Silence" anthology, which concentrated on lesser-known voices to give a wider overview of the response to the war than might emerge from the well-known Sassoon-Owen-Rosenberg axis. Nonetheless the two have some principles in common. Noakes's anthology included several women; Kendall's prioritising of poetic quality does not, commendably, lead him to ignore, as some anthologists have done, the contribution of female poets who did after all live through the war as much as men did (indeed sometimes serving as nurses at the front) and whose take on it is both equally relevant and, in several cases, badly underrated by critics.

The real difference between the two seems to me that Noakes is primarily interested in what poetry of the time reveals about people's experience of, and response to, the war, while Kendall is more concerned with what effect the war had on English poetry. In this respect the context-setting in his introduction about how "Georgian" poetry is now viewed, and what it was actually like, is immensely interesting and informative. I had no idea, for instance, how commercially successful and popular the movement was; the first two of the five Georgian anthologies (pub. 1912 and 1915) sold, respectively, 15,000 and 19,000 copies (while The Waste Land was taking 18 months to shift a print run of 443). By the way, for all Ivor Gurney's throwaway remark, noted in the introduction, that the Germans had no poets of note, the soldiers he was fighting did, if he had but known it, share similar enthusiasms; the poetic hit of 1913 in Germany had been Stefan George's "Der Stern des Bundes" (Star of the Covenant) and many German soldiers went into battle with it in their breast pockets.

There aren't many actual surprises among the poets or poems chosen; the major one, perhaps, being Robert Service, who like A A Milne could switch from comic to serious mode when he had to. The omissions, of course, are more problematic, as always in an anthology, and where space is at a premium I would maybe quibble with the inclusion of Sassoon's "Glory of Women", which, apart from being, as the introduction rightly says, misogynistic in the extreme, just doesn't strike me as a very good poem. The other inclusion I'm not sure about is the short selection of anonymous wartime songs at the end. That sort of thing fitted in the Noakes anthology for obvious reasons; I'm not sure it does here, and without these songs, Kendall might have found space for some of his more regretted omissions, notably Gilbert Frankau. I don't want to play the game of "who should have been in it", because no anthology can satisfy all comers, but I do think that even by Kendall's criterion of poetic excellence, Frankau ought to be there. If not in the very front rank of talent, he is not far behind, and because his take on the war was not quite that of Owen & Co, he has been often overlooked. He gives a different slant, which is why Kendall finds it necessary to quote him in the introduction.

Nonetheless, this is a thoroughly well produced anthology of powerful and fascinating poems. It's far more useful than some earlier anthologies that managed to be completely blind to the presence of female poets, and it also finds space for some longer poems, where many anthologies, from this or any other period, would leave you with the impression that nothing but brief lyrics was ever written. It also happens to be a most handsome hardback volume, with endpapers and a sewn-in bookmark and at a very reasonable price, but that's secondary. To me it perfectly complements my Noakes anthology: the other side of the coin, so to speak, and the introduction in particular is hugely informative.

Comments

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

Thanks for this post, it was very interesting to read.

[sheenaghpugh]

Oh of course, your novel is in this territory! Are things still going well?

[ideealisme.livejournal.com]

They are, thank you - edits should start in a few weeks once the publishers get back to me.

Though I've now read Pat Barker's The Ghost Road and really feel the standard I'm falling short of. I've decided I'm going to type out all the phrases in her novel that particularly impress me and try to work as meticulously and subtly as she does.

war poets and Georgians

[(Anonymous)]

Thanks, Sheenagh, just what a review should be - clear, informative, and appetising.