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There can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war. The 250 poems included in this acclaimed anthology span centuries of human conflict from David's lament for Saul and Jonathan, and Homer's Iliad, to the finest poems of the First and Second World Wars, and beyond. Reflecting the feelings of poets as diverse as Byron, Hardy, Owen, Sassoon, and Heaney, they reveal a great shift in social awareness fromman's early celebratory `war-songs' to the more recent `anti-war' attitudes of poets responding to `man's inhumanity to man' - and to women and children.
There can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war. The 250 poems included in this acclaimed anthology span centuries of human conflict - from David's lament for Saul and Jonathan, and Homer's Iliad, to the finest poems of the Second World War, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, and El Salvador, as well as the chilling visions of the 'Next War'. Reflecting the feelings of authors as diverse as Virgil, Daniel Defoe, Emily Dickinson, and Adrian Mitchell, they reveal a great shift in social awareness from man's early celebratory war-songs to the more recent anti-war attitudes of poets responding to 'man's inhumanity to man', and to women and children. Book jacket.
Thirty-seven chapters, written by leading literary critics from across the world, describe the latest thinking about twentieth-century war poetry. The book maps both the uniqueness of each war and the continuities between poets of different wars, while the interconnections between the literatures of war and peacetime, and between combatant and civilian poets, are fully considered. The focus is on Britain and Ireland, but links are drawn with the poetry of the United States and continental Europe. The Oxford Handbook feeds a growing interest in war poetry and offers, in toto, a definitive survey of the terrain. It is intended for a broad audience, made up of specialists and also graduates and undergraduates, and is an essential resource for both scholars of particular poets and for those interested in wider debates about modern poetry. This scholarly and readable assessment of the field will provide an important point of reference for decades to come.
Modern English War Poetry ranges widely across the twentieth century, incorporating detailed discussions of some of the most important poets of the period. It emphasizes the influence of war and war poetry even on those poets usually considered in other contexts, such as Ted Hughes and Geoffrey Hill.
The First World War produced an extraordinary flowering of poetic talent, poets whose words commemorate the conflict more personally and as enduringly as monuments in stone. Lines such as 'What passing-bells for these who die as cattle?' and 'They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old' have come to express the feelings of a nation about the horrors and aftermath of war. This new anthology provides a definitive record of the achievements of the Great War poets. As well as offering generous selections from the celebrated soldier-poets, including Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Rupert Brooke, and Ivor Gurney, it also incorporates less well-known writing by civilian and women poets. Music hall and trench songs provide a further lyrical perspective on the War. A general introduction charts the history of the war poets' reception and challenges prevailing myths about the war poets' progress from idealism to bitterness. The work of each poet is prefaced with a biographical account that sets the poems in their historical context. Although the War has now passed out of living memory, its haunting of our language and culture has not been exorcised. Its poetry survives because it continues to speak to and about us.
