has not provided sufficient quality to sustain interest (Shires 1985). Another view is that this tendency to seek a small canon of Second World War poets itself ‘quality’ rests on problematic assumptions about war poetry being a genre shaped by the First World War and its literary output (Walter 1997; Lyon 2005 a & b). As the next section will explore, a fuller literary-historical contextual account shows that not only was a great deal of Second World War poetry written and published but that it played a significant role in wartime culture. In literary and cultural historical terms, this body of work represents a substantive and meaningful dimension of the British artistic response to the events of 1939-45. The anthology form and war poetry in Britain during 1939-45 The anthology, as a conglomeration of selected and mediated by a supervisory or editorial figure, offered extensive opportunities for meaning-making in wartime. A very large corpus of war poems emerged during the Second World War. This can be defined in historical terms as written in the period 1939-1945, although much of this poetry was published after 1945 and much was re-selected, reorganised and republished in post-war anthologies up to the present. This corpus is also defined thematically: the poetry included within it alludes to, describes or metaphorically explores war conditions, experiences and ideology. Many were put together with overt editorial agendas in mind, exposing some of the values and aims underlying the business of poetry publishing and poetry selling during the war. Extensive scholarly work recording and categorising the poetry of both world wars has been published and provides rich bibliographical data for any researcher in the field (Reilly 1978; Reilly 1986), including lists of edited war poetry anthologies. For the purposes of this research, the focus is a subset of approximately 90 anthologies, based on Reilly’s
has not provided sufficient quality to sustain interest (Shires 1985). Another view is that this tendency to seek a small canon of ‘quality’ Second World War poets itself rests on problematic assumptions about war poetry being a genre shaped by the First World War and its literary output (Walter 1997; Lyon 2005 a & b). As the next section will explore, a fuller literary-historical contextual account shows that not only was a great deal of Second World War poetry written and published but that it played a significant role in wartime culture. In literary and cultural historical terms, this body of work represents a substantive and meaningful dimension of the British artistic response to the events of 1939-45. The anthology form and war poetry in Britain during 1939-45 The anthology, as a conglomeration of selected and mediated by a supervisory or editorial figure, offered extensive opportunities for meaning-making in wartime. A very large corpus of war poems emerged during the Second World War. This can be defined in historical terms as written in the period 1939-1945, although much of this poetry was published after 1945 and much was re-selected, reorganised and republished in post-war anthologies up to the present. This corpus is also defined thematically: the poetry included within it alludes to, describes or metaphorically explores war conditions, experiences and ideology. Many were put together with overt editorial agendas in mind, exposing some of the values and aims underlying the business of poetry publishing and poetry selling during the war. Extensive scholarly work recording and categorising the poetry of both world wars has been published and provides rich bibliographical data for any researcher in the field (Reilly 1978; Reilly 1986), including lists of edited war poetry anthologies. For the purposes of this research, the focus is a subset of approximately 90 anthologies, based on Reilly’s