The Oxford Handbook of British and Irish War Poetry

by Kendall, Tim

• ISBN13: 9780199282661
• ISBN10: 0199282668
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2007-05-03
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

Thirty-seven chapters, written by leading literary critics from across the world, describe the latest thinking about twentieth-century war poetry. The book maps both the uniqueness of each war and the continuities between poets of different wars, while the interconnections between theliteratures of war and peacetime, and between combatant and civilian poets, are fully considered. The focus is on Britain and Ireland, but links are drawn with the poetry of the United States and continental Europe.The Oxford Handbook feeds a growing interest in war poetry and offers, in toto, a definitive survey of the terrain. It is intended for a broad audience, made up of specialists and also graduates and undergraduates, and is an essential resource for both scholars of particular poets and for thoseinterested in wider debates about modern poetry. This scholarly and readable assessment of the field will provide an important point of reference for decades to come.

Author Biography

Tim Kendall is Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter. He has published a book of poems, Strange Land, with Carcanet, and full-length studies of Muldoon and Plath. From 1994 until 2003 he edited the international poetry magazine, Thumbscrew. His latest monograph is Modern English War Poetry (OUP, 2006).

Table of Contents

Introduction

Fighting Talk: Victorian War Poetry

Graver Things, Braver Things: Hardy's Martial Zest

From Dark Defile to Gethsemane: Rudyard Kipling's War PoetryThe Great War

First World War Poetry and the Realm of the Senses

Many Sisters to Many Brothers: Woman Poets of the Great War

Wilfred Owen

Shakespeare and the Great War

Was there a Scottish War Literature? Scotland, Poetry, and the First World War

War Poetry, or the Poetry of War?

The Great War and Modernist Poetry in England

A War of Friendship: Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon

'Easter, 1916': Yeats's World War I PoemEntre Deux Guerres

'What the dawn will bring to light': Credulity and Commitment in the Ideological Construction of 'Spain'

Unwriting the Good Fight: Auden's 'Spain' and its Contexts

War, Politics and Disappearing Poetry: Auden, Yeats, EmpsonThe Second World War

'Others have come before you': the Influence of the Great War on Second World War Poets

Death's Proletariat: Scottish Poets of the Second World War

New Territory: Alun Llywelyn-Williams and Welsh Poetry of the Second World War

The Muse that Failed: Poetry and Patriotism during the Second World War

'Since Munich, What?': Louis MacNeice's Poetry of the Second World War

Sidney Keyes in Historical PerspectiveContinuities in Modern War Poetry

Anthologizing War

Mina Loy and E. J. Scovell: Defining Women's War Poetry

War Pastorals, 1914-2004

The Poetry of Pain

'Down in the terraces between the targets': Civilians

Complicate Me When I'm Dead: The War Remains of Keith Douglas and Ted Hughes

'For Isaac Rosenberg': Geoffrey Hill, Michael Longley, Cathal O'Searcaigh

The Fury and the Mire'Post-war' poetry

'This is plenty. This is more than enough': Poetry and the Memory of the Second World War

British Holocaust Poetry: Songs of Experience

Quiet Americans: Responses to War in some British and American Poets of the 1960s

Pointing to East and West: British Cold War Poetry

iDichtung und Wahrheit/i: Contemporary War and the Non-Combatant PoetNorthern Ireland

Constructing and Deconstructing the Epic - Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry

'Stalled in the Pre-Articulate': Heaney, Poetry, and War

Unavowed Engagement: Paul Muldoon as War Poet

Notes on Contributors

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.