Poets Of The 1939-1945 War

Writers & Their Work #127

by R.N. Currey

The two World Wars of this century, national wars fought by national armies, called into being a new type of civilian soldier and a new type of war poetry. In Poets of the 1914-18 War (Writers and Their Work Series, No.100) Edmund Blunden wrote of the attitudes to war of Wilfred Owen, Seigfried Sassoon and other. Mr Currey, in his companion study, shows how, in the war of 1939-45, a new generation of poets—Sidney Keyes, Alun Lewis, Keith Douglas, Drummond Allison among them—took on where Owen and Sassoon left off, exploring with anger, compassion and a new fatalism the different circumstances of a less static, more truly global war.
R. N. Currey, the author of this essay, has made his own varied contribution to the poetry of the 1939-45 War. In This Other Planet he wrote as an artillery officer of exile in a world of mechanistic killing, following this with Between Two Worlds, a Third Programme verse play on some of the moral implications of killing at a distance. Indian Landscape was a verse record of three years' service in India where he edited with R. V. Gibson the forces anthology, Poems from India. This essay first appeared in 1060. Since then there has been a revival of interest in the poetry of this warm, showing itself in a number of new anthologies and new editions of individual poets. In response to this, Mr. Currey has now revised his essay in a number of particulars and made additions to the select bibliography.

[Taken from the inner cover]

52 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1960