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Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 even after he saw action, or that Brooke wrote the "1914" sonnet sequence after taking part in the failed defense of Antwerp, clearly puzzles and outrages Crawford. McCrae's poem becomes "less commendable " as a consequence, and Brooke is condemned to perpetual Georgianism. Such an attitude may be "commendable" and even agreeable to a post-Vietnam public likely to share such views, but it damages the whole concept of trying to see the poetry of the Great War "in context." The context should be their context, not ours. It is only when we are aware of that context, and of the tradition behind it, that we realize what we glibly call "war poetry" today is really a relatively recent "antiwar poetry." The very long, and usually honored, tradition of war poetry in the West is a tradition of heroism and chivalry in war, beginning with Homer. It is, in short, pro-war poetry. Crawford may be right in condemning that tradition and in maintaining that, given the conditions of modern warfare, heroism and chivalry are impossible, but it is a case that needs to be argued and not simply assumed. Clearly, some at least of the poets Crawford approves of were not as convinced of the "truth" of this moral position as Crawford is: Graves, for example, continued to admire Brooke after the war; and despite confining his poetry to the pity, rather than the heroism of war, Owen supported the righteousness of the Allied cause to the end, and comported himself with exemplary heroism and chivalry on the field. David Jones, too, felt strongly the intensity of emotion and friendship occasioned by his participation in the war, and saw clearly the links between his experience and that of the great epic, pro-war poems of the past. It therefore seems rather perverse of Crawford to pronounce In Parenthesis a failure because "the Great War was not a subject for epic celebration." Not that Crawford is by any means alone in his views. The immensely influential Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry omits Brooke, McCrae and other pro-war poets of the Great War altogether. The new orthodoxy, it seems, exercises its censoring/ censuring power as ruthlessly as did the old. Peter E. Firchow _______________________________University of Minnesota_____________ EDWARD THOMAS Helen Thomas, with Myfanwy Thomas. Under Storm's Wing. Manchester : Carcanet, 1988. $24.95 Edward Thomas was the finest English poet killed in the 1914-18 war. While not a modernist, the 140-odd poems he wrote in the two80 Book Reviews, Volume 32:1, 1988 and-a-half years preceding his death in 1917 are all unmistakably modern. These poems are for the most part quietly modest, apparently straightforward "nature poems." And yet, despite the widespread assumption that radical poetry must be striking and showy in its surfaces, uncompromising in its certainties, Thomas's poems are radical: they go to the roots, where Thomas wrestles uneasily with the uncertainties and ambiguities that characterize modern consciousness. Although Thomas's reputation as a poet has slowly increased since his death, given the taut but unspectacular kind of poems he wrote, it is unlikely that he will ever figure prominently on English course reading lists. Whether that means he will not receive due recognition as a poet, however, is doubtful. For if the poems do not have the kind of wide appeal that engages a desire for assertive postures in poetry, they are nonetheless poems that, if one likes them at all, one takes to heart. Under Storm's Wing is a collection of memoirs, letters and photographs , virtually all of which have been previously published. There is an appendix of six letters written to Edward Thomas by Robert Frost between June 1915 and December 1916, published first in Poetry Wales (22:4, 1987). These are only marginally interesting. The last chapter of the book proper is an extract from a longer memoir, One of These Fine Days (1982), by Thomas's youngest child, Myfanwy. While this extract does shed circumstantial light on a few poems, since Myfanwy was only six when her father was killed, that light is limited. It is, then, the first four chapters that...

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