'The Document of Our Time'

Among my teachers when I was young was a man I never met. In fact, he had died several years before I enrolled in his school. Oscar Williams, born in Ukraine, died in New York City in 1964. He was a poet but I knew him strictly as an anthologist. Sorry to say, his poems are forgettable. Around 1966 I bought Immortal Poems of the English Language and, a little later, The Pocket Book of Modern Verse and A Little Treasury of Modern Poetry: English and American. That was how I learned the tradition of poetry in English. Anthologies get dismissed but thanks to Williams I read Wyatt and Jonson, Robinson and Auden. I started from zero, knowing nothing, and discovered the writers I loved. I remember falling for Karl Shapiro's war poems. Thanks to Williams, I learned the continuity of poetry in English. 

A Williams anthology I didn’t read was The War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the 20th Century (John Day Co., 1945). In his introduction, dated December 31, 1944, Williams writes: “The poet’s poem has always outlived the names of battles, generals and statesmen; our was poetry as a whole is perhaps the document of our time that will outlive all the rest.” That’s optimistic but World War II was months away from ending.

Williams divides his book into three sections: Great War poems, “Poems by the Men in the Armed Forces of England and America” and “War Poems by the Civilian Poets.” The poets in the second section are identified by their military rank. Sgt. William Abrahams (1909-98), a poet I had never heard of, is author of “Poem in Time of War,” which includes an unexpected Paul Valéry allusion. And there’s Lt. William Jay Smith’s “3 for 25,” which reminds me of the snapshots my father brought home from North Africa and France.

I’m still reading the book but I can recommend it for historical and literary reasons. Most of the good poems in the anthology I already knew. Some of the poets included by Williams had already been killed by the time of publication. Take Sub-lieutenant, Fleet Air Arm Gervase Stewart (1920-41). The blogger Richard Warren remembers him here.

Williams includes my favorite poem by Edwin Muir, “Reading in Time of War”:

“Boswell by my bed,

Tolstoy on my table;

Thought the world has bled

For four and a half years,

And wives' and mothers' tears

Collected would be able

To water a little field

Untouched by anger and blood,

A penitential yield

Somewhere in the world;

Though in each latitude

Armies like forest fall,

The iniquitous and the good

Head over heels hurled,

And confusion over all:

Boswell's turbulent friend

And his deafening verbal strife,

Ivan Ilych's death

Tell me more about life,

The meaning and the end

Of our familiar breath,

Both being personal,

Than all the carnage can,

Retrieve the shape of man,

Lost and anonymous,

Tell me wherever I look

That not one soul can die

Of this or any clan

Who is not one of us

And has a personal tie

Perhaps to someone now

Searching an ancient book,

Folk-tale or country song

In many and many a tongue,

To find the original face,

The individual soul,

The eye, the lip, the brow

For ever gone from their place,

And gather an image whole.”