The Great War Poets

30:2, Reviews church in Skoplje, and the great set-piece of the sacrifice of the black lamb on Sheep's Field, with all its implications for the suicidal death-worship of European civilization. In doing this he efficiently accomplishes one of the aims of his book, which he announces with admirable directness: to earn for Rebecca West a wider audience. Jefferson Hunter _______________________________________Smith College__________________ THE GREAT WAR POETS Dominic Hibberd and John Onions, eds. Poetry of the Great War: An Anthology. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1986. $29.95 Most literary anthologists are bound by one or more of three principles of selection: quality, representativeness, and availability. The first tries their critical powers (or minimally their sense of an established canon), the second demands a responsibility to history, and the third is circumscribed by their respect for both justice and the market. That third concem is often and quite properly the initial motive of a collection—certain entries have not been easily available elsewhere. One would have thought that the range of possibilities had been covered in the many recent (and still in print) anthologies of First World War poetry. Brian Gardner, who heralded that second revival of interest in that war's literature in the 1960s (the first was in the late 1920s), was guided primarily by the second and third principles: "concerned more with the First World War than with poetry" and with "poets almost entirely forgotten now" (Up the Line to Death, 1964). A year later I. M. Parsons was guided by the first two principles—a concem for representativeness was tempered by his belief "that more good poetry came out of World War I than is generally recognized," so he included only poems that he considered "valuable contributions" to the literature of the period (Men Who March Away, 1965). Maurice Hussey's Poetry of the First World War (1967) follows the emphasis of Gardner, and E. L. Black's 1914-18 in Poetry (1970) that of Parsons. In what is perhaps the most popular collection today, TAe Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (1st edition, 1979), Jon Silkin shuns "historical principles" altogether and tries for what no anthology had yet done, "to limit itself to excellence." Hibberd and Onions justify yet another anthology by assuming a superior objectivity. "Most Great War anthologies have been designed," they claim in the thirty-six page Introduction, "to reinforce one view or another of the war" (3). Those from the 1960s were the products of a vague liberalism that could not see beyond the myth of "an assumed progression from idealism to bitterness" between 1914 and 1918, which resulted in "much misrepresentation," and behind Silkin's dedication to so-called excellence, they assert, is a personal appeal to a "radical political commitment" (3-4). The result in this new anthology is 232 30:2, Reviews a selection process that has moved even further away than that of Gardner and Hussey from an attention to quality. Their defense turns on an unquestioned assumption that poets, being "individualists," are not very good "witnesses to history. . . . The best poetry of the Great War is necessarily not typical; the most useful historical evidence is often to be found in mere 'verse'" (2). So to avoid a political or other nonliterary bias and at the same time subjectivism or aestheticism, they take a decidedly historical and pluralistic approach: paying more careful attention to chronology than any anthologists before, unrepentantly offering biographical information "to clarify the meaning" of a poem, and (most tellingly) representing "the volume and diversity" of war poetry and verse. The dust jacket proudly proclaims this collection to give "a wider, more accurate and thought-provoking view." The thought that is provoked, however, cannot constructively be critical. There is, for example, that very questionable assumption about the very nature of poetry I have already mentioned: that a true poet being an individualist cannot in any significant sense speak for or serve the public. Referring to early patriotic verse by established authors, the editors maintain that "these public verses were expressions of the popular spirit rather than of inner feelings; Hardy and Begbie, for instance, were privately well aware of war...