'Amid Tremendous History, New Pity'

Oscar Williams (1900-4) was a middling poet with a gift for compiling excellent anthologies, thirty of which he published during his lifetime. Early on, several of them were my primers, an inviting way to learning the poetic tradition in English on the cheap. One of them, the paperback edition from Washington Square Press that I bought more than half a century ago, Immortal Poems of the English Language, cost seventy-five cents. I only recently encountered his War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the 20^th Century (John Day Co., 1945). 

The collection is divided into three sections: World War I poems, poems by American and English poets in the armed services during World War II, and those written during that war by civilians. The second section is largest, with fifty-eight poets represented. I recognized only 15 of the names, including Howard Nemerov, Karl Shapiro and William Jay Smith. Auden’s influence is everywhere. In the introduction, Williams explains his criteria for inclusion:

 

“I have included in this collection only such poems as seem to me written with an emotional comprehension of all that war implies. There are no sham patriotics; there are poems of sensitive patriotism, such as that of Gervase Stewart who offered his life willingly for an England which he wished to be better than the old.  While he yet honestly expressed his fear that the desired social changes might not come to pass.”

 

Not all of the poems in the second and third sections are about war. Roy Fuller (1912-91) was an English poet who served for five years in the Royal Navy beginning in 1941. His six poem are taken from his second and third collections, The Middle of a War (1942) and A Lost Season (1944). Here’s an interesting one, "January 1940," that has nothing to do with military service:

 

“Swift had pains in his head.

Johnson dying in bed

Tapped the dropsy himself.

Blake saw a flea and an elf.

Tennyson could hear the shriek

Of a bat. Pope was a freak.

Emily Dickinson stayed

Indoors for a decade.

Water inflated the belly

Of Hart Crane, and of Shelley.

Coleridge was a dope.

Southwell died on a rope.

Byron had a round white foot.

Smart and Cowper were put

Away. Lawrence was a fidget.

Keats was a midget.

Donne, alive in his shroud,

Shakespeare in the coil of a cloud,

Saw death as he

Came crab-wise, dark and massy.

I envy not only their talents

And fertile lack of balance

But the appearance of choice

In their sad and fatal voice.”

 

And here is a name new to me, Keidrych Rhys (1915-87), a Welsh poet and journalist whose surname is not Thomas. He served as a gunner in the British Army. The poem is "Tragic Guilt":

 

“N0. I’m not an Englishman with a partisan religion.

My roots lie in another region,

Though ranged alongside yours.

 

“Here I sense your stubbornness and your cohesion

And can even feel pride in your recent decision

That anger reassures.

 

“I know no love for disembodied principles, improbable tales.

The strength of the common man was always the strength of Wales,

Unashamed of her race.

 

“May this be also England's role to bring to birth.

May she draw opposite new powers from the earth.

Huge Shakespeare has his place.

 

“I have felt in my bones comradeship and pity,

I have seen wonders in an open door blitz city.

 

“Amid tremendous history, new pity.”