Singing in the mud

This is a courageous and original book. Its editor, Vivien Noakes, is resisting, though not alone (Martin Stephen, Anne Powell, Dominic Hibberd and John Onions could also be cited), a trend of opinion which has shown no sign of receding over the past 50 years: this has effectively labelled Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and, at a pinch, half a dozen others as the only true voices of the Great War. The canon, mainly anti-war in outlook and confined almost entirely to the Western Front, has dominated the British anthologies, which in turn have profoundly influenced national perceptions of that war.

In fact, for 1914-18, the proportion of optimistic and patriotic war poetry to anti-war poetry was very high. This was reflected in early anthologies but increasingly less so from the 1930s onward. Noakes, drawing on the works of around two and a half thousand writers, some unpublished, asks readers to look at the great number of forgotten versifiers who represented the wide range of feelings, positive and disenchanted alike, shared by soldiers, sailors and airmen at the front. She has assembled, too, a mass of civilian poetry, both facetious and poignant, by private individuals, some of them conscientious objectors, and by well-known public figures such as Owen Seaman, the editor of Punch. Much has been drawn from local papers.

From the armed services there are vigorously satirical verses in trench journals such as The Wipers Times and Aussie and, higher up the scale, works by competent poets who have featured in anthologies of the war years and the 1920s, but seldom recently: Leslie Coulson, J. B. Priestley, Geoffrey Dearmer, Robert Nichols and A. P. Herbert. Particular favourites of Vivien Noakes seem to be Louis Golding, F.