Jon Stallworthy, ed. - The Oxford Book of War Poetry

The Oxford Book of War Poetry (Oxford UP, 1984). Chosen and edited by Jon Stallworthy.

ISBN: 0192141252 | 390 pages | PDF


No area of human experience has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war. The 260 poems in Jon Stallworthy's classic and celebrated anthology span centuries of human experience of war, 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 chart a great shift in human awareness -- from man's early celebratory "war-songs" to the twentieth century's darker poetic responses to "man's inhumanity to man."


Reviews

"Quite simply the most rewardingly catholic anthology of battle verse I know. Homer, Byron, Macauley, Hardy -- and more recently, Keyes, Reed, Lewis, Douglas and Prince -- they're all here, plus an excellent brief essay of introduction." -- Times Educational Supplement

"This collection is of exceptionally high quality." -- Washington Post

"This is an anthology that works in a way that the work of no single poet could." -- The Observer