WAR AND THE POET

by Richard Eberhart '26 and Selden Rodman. Devin-Adair Company, 1945. 240 pp. 15.00.

There are many anthologies of war verse. There is not, so far as I know, another anthology like War and the Poet. Its editors, themselves considerable poets, have admitted nothing which could not pass severe critical judgment. The result is a highly selective record of poetic statement, some two hundred uncrowded pages from almost 4,000 years of world culture. The material is war, but onlv the consciousness and idiom of poetry are accepted as shapers of that material. Hence familiar warrior-poets, such as Brooke and Graves, are omitted, and poets, such as Blake Hopkins, Emily Dickinson or Marianne Moore, who bring the war home from battlefield to spirit are present.

A preface by Lt. Comdr. Eberhart and an introduction by Master Sergeant Rodman serve chiefly as comment on the poets included, but make so many suggestive remarks one wishes them less modestly limited.

The uniform excellence of translation strikes the reader particularly in the poems early in time in which the translator, often a poet himself, has dropped the vague latinized vocabulary of the "trot" for the vigorous speech of modern poetry. Incidentally, many of the translations from the Greek were made by Richmond Lattimore '26.

Wilfred Owen wrote shortly before he died in 1918:

Above all I am not concerned with Poetry. My subject is War, and the pity of War.

The Poetry is in the pity. He was, at the time, caught in physical suffering and in poetic transition. Art at its best knows no such division. This War and thePoet proves.