Continuities and Disjunctions: Investigating British Poetry Anthologies of the Second World War

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British Second World War poetry provides a rich and complex set of voices offering multiple perspectives on notions of heroism, selfhood, youth, combat, civilization, and the relationship between art, politics, and wartime society. While First World War poetry has had a dominant role in shaping the war poetry genre, becoming embedded in a range of cultural practices, Second World War poetry has also been of increasing interest to anthologists and literary critics during the post-war period and has been mapped, reappraised and reconceptualized as significant in its own right. Beginning with this critical and contextual perspective, the article focuses on the anthology form and the set of poetry anthologies published during Second World War. It explores the value of these anthologies as literary and cultural historical sources, using taxonomical and textual inquiry into the tropes, techniques, themes, and agendas of the poems and the anthologists’ editorial approaches.