A Treasury of War Poetry: British and American Poems of the World War
Compiled by . Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company. First and Second Series: 1917 and 1919. Two vols., 12mo, xxx + 280, and xxxvii + 387 pp. Each vol., $1.50 cloth, $2.25 flexible leather.
WHEN Apollo bends his bow, it is for the slaying of the Python. Bellowing Mars, whom Jupiter rebuked as ‘most hateful of all the gods,’ is no captain of poets. The wars of freedom, not the wars of conquest, have left music on the English air. To the poets, who in this world war have lifted an unexampled chorus, the glory of battle is spiritual — courage, sacrifice, devotion to high and generous ideals. Professor Clarke’s anthology, like others, lays stress on these heroic qualities rather than on feats of arms.
We are too near the war and the flood of verse it has evoked to distinguish with any certainty between the enduring and the transient. In 1917 Professor Clarke was aided in making his selection by the popular voice, which had already acclaimed Kipling’s ’For All We Have and Are,’ Helen Gray Cone’s ‘A Chant of Love for England,’ Winifred M. Letts’s ‘The Spires of Oxford,’ Hardy’s ‘ Men Who March Away,’ Seeger’s ’I Have a Rendezvous with Death,’ and more. Even so, he missed a few favorites, as Dr. McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields,’ Lord Crewe’s ‘A Harrow Grave in Flanders,’ and L. W.’s appealing ‘Christ in Flanders.’
These and other well-loved poems, overlooked in the first garnering, appear in the volume of 1919. This second collection, largely made up as it is from recent publications, stands in a greater degree than the earlier series for personal taste rather than for general recognition, and is thereby less convincing. Agnes Lee, whose poignant ‘A Blinded Poilu to his Nurse’ has made the rounds of our newspapers, is not represented here; nor is that passionate poet of bereaved parenthood, ‘X,’ whose thin volume thrilled the heart of England as nothing had done since the soldier sonnets of Rupert Brooke. But it is ungracious to complain of omissions where we have so much that is beautiful and brave.
Professor Clarke’s method is topical. He groups the poems in sections, an arrangement which has its values but runs the danger of immediate repetition in theme and effect. The twenty sections of the first volume are respectively entitled: America, England and America, England, France, Belgium, Russia and America, Italy, Australia, Canada, Liége, Verdun, Oxford, Reflections, Incidents and Aspects, Poets Militant, Auxiliaries, Keeping the Seas, The Wounded, The Fallen, Women and the War. The second volume drops four of these divisions Russia and America, Liége, Verdun, Auxiliaries, and adds six new ones, Serbia, Greece, and Roumania (grouped together), Scotland, Ireland, Ypres, The Airmen, Peace. Australia, too, broadens to Australasia, Of the new sections, The Airmen, with so many swift-pulsing sky songs to draw upon, is disappointing. There is nothing here with the spring and splendor of Karle Wilson Baker’s ’Eagle outh.’ Of the five oems given, only one is by an a da tor: The Peace section, on the other hand, is well done — all the better in that it rings no proud peal of victory. Grave with remembrance and with devout resolve, this group closes the book on the bugle note of Phillpotts’s ‘Reveillé.’ K. L. B.