Up the Line to Death: The War Poets 1914-1918

The poetry from the First World War is amongst the most profound ever produced in English, so with any anthology you are bound to get a strong showing. Up the Line to Death is strong, with the mix of mainstays in the genre (Owen, Sassoon, McCrae, etc.) and some lesser-known pieces. The collection is not comprehensive and, surprisingly, Gardner admits in his introduction that some well-known poems were deliberately omitted to make the collection a 'publishing proposition' at the time (pg. xxv). This might have swayed the publishers in 1964 but it does damage the collection in posterity.

Maybe I've been spoiled, because my first sustained exposure to war poetry was in Hibberd and Onions' The Winter of the World, a comprehensive collection show more of First World War poetry which also managed to arrange things with a readable flow and provide unobstructive biographical context. But Gardner's older collection holds, and the uncomfortable truth of war poetry will likely never wane. There are probably many reasons for our continued fascination; Gardner's introduction speculates on some of them, including the immediacy of the lines from poets who didn't know if they would live long enough to write revisions, its own incomprehensibility to us in a peaceful time and our futile attempts to understand such horror, and the admiration for gentle men who, though they despised the war, could find the nobility of man in their war (pg. xx).

Personally, I think it is because, as Gardner writes, "the journey from Laurence Binyon's 'The Fourth of August' to Philip Johnstone's 'High Wood' was a long a terrible one" (pg. xxv) – there was a profound and violent shift in such a condensed period of time, from the happy patriotism of the summer of 1914 to the grey and wearied disillusionment of 1918's armistice. Such a seismic shift is always likely to fascinate us, particularly as one might pinpoint 1914-18 as the years when the Western world's back was broken, its leaping ascendency arrested. Whatever the reason, or whatever the correct hierarchy of the multiple reasons, one cannot help but read poetry of such grief and pain and disillusionment and vow never to forget, never to "misremember what once they learnt with pain" (Edward Shanks, 'The Old Soldiers', pg. 16). One reads the flawless 'Dulce et Decorum Est' and vows never to repeat the 'old Lie' that Wilfred Owen died to tell us about, just a week shy of the armistice. show less