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 20th 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.”
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