War and the Poet

AS PART of the interest in war poetry, Richard Eberhart and Selden Rodman have compiled a conscientious little anthology (200 pages) to represent “the continuity of the various reactions to war” of poets of all times and literatures from 1800 B.C. to the present. The scope of the ground plan has obviously required exploration into seldom-tapped sources, the reward for which is some really exciting discoveries. I find most memorable the selections from the Russian poets, Li Po’s “The Moon at the Fortified Pass,” and Wolker’s “Epitaph,” all of them superbly translated.

The tracing of the various themes that have emerged with time is, in general, excellent. The evaluation of Cummings and Rosenberg as two of the best voices of World War I has been delayed long enough, and it is proper and good to find it made here. But it is difficult to escape the feeling that the editors fumble on the one-yard line after a fine long run. There are some surprising omissions in the section of World War II poets, among them John Pudney. And Randall Jarrell, who has written some of the best poetry of the last few years, is inadequately represented by one short poem.

There can be little doubt that the real theme of the best poets of World War II is social: that the fighting and the stupidity and the suffering were for one reason only — for the right to fight again in peace for the meaningful world that reactionary ignorance is capable of taking from us; for Shapiro’s “peace kept by a human creed”; and for the thing Jarrell sees: “From these moments repeated forever, our own new world will be made.”

Selden Rodman, at the end of his preface, does make an attempt to state this emergent theme, but with a vagueness and timidity reminiscent of the last chapter of a Ph.D. thesis, where the author feels the need to state conclusions but isn’t sure he has any. The total result is a good anthology that might have gone one perception further and been the better for it.

JOHN CIARDI