The Oxford Book of War Poetry

by Jon Stallworthy

There can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war. The 250 poems included in this acclaimed anthology span centuries of human conflict - from David's lament for Saul and Jonathan, and Homer's Iliad, to the finest poems of the Second World War, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, and El Salvador, as well as the chilling visions of the 'Next War'. Reflecting the feelings of authors as diverse as Virgil, Daniel Defoe, Emily Dickinson, and Adrian Mitchell, they reveal a great shift in social awareness from man's early celebratory war-songs to the more recent anti-war attitudes of poets responding to 'man's inhumanity to man', and to women and children.