Thirty-seven chapters, written by leading literary critics from across the world, describe the latest thinking about twentieth-century war poetry. The book maps both the uniqueness of each war and the continuities between poets of different wars, while the interconnections between the literatures of war and peacetime, and between combatant and civilian poets, are fully considered. The focus is on Britain and Ireland, but links are drawn with the poetry of the United States and continental Europe. The Oxford Handbook feeds a growing interest in war poetry and offers, in toto, a definitive survey of the terrain. It is intended for a broad audience, made up of specialists and also graduates and undergraduates, and is an essential resource for both scholars of particular poets and for those interested in wider debates about modern poetry. This scholarly and readable assessment of the field will provide an important point of reference for decades to come.

Introduction, Tim Kendall Beginnings 1. Fighting Talk: Victorian War Poetry, Matthew Bevis 2. Graver Things, Braver Things: Hardy's Martial Zest, Ralph Pite 3. From Dark Defile to Gethsemane: Rudyard Kipling's War Poetry, Daniel Karlin The Great War 4. First World War Poetry and the Realm of the Senses, Santanu Das 5. Many Sisters to Many Brothers: Woman Poets of the Great War, Stacy Gillis 6. Wilfred Owen, Mark Rawlinson 7. Shakespeare and the Great War, John Lee 8. Was there a Scottish War Literature? Scotland, Poetry, and the First World War, David Goldie 9. War Poetry, or the Poetry of War? Isaac Rosenberg, David Jones, Ivor Gurney, Vivien Noakes 10. The Great War and Modernist Poetry in England, Vincent Sherry 11. A War of Friendship: Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, Fran Brearton 12. 'Easter, 1916': Yeats's World War I Poem, Marjorie Perloff Entre Deux Guerres 13. 'What the dawn will bring to light': Credulity and Commitment in the Ideological Construction of 'Spain', Stan Smith 14. Unwriting the Good Fight: Auden's 'Spain' and its Contexts, Rainer Emig 15. War, Politics and Disappearing Poetry: Auden, Yeats, Empson, John Lyon The Second World War 16. 'Others have come before you': the Influence of the Great War on Second World War Poets, Dawn Bellamy 17. Death's Proletariat: Scottish Poets of the Second World War, Roderick Watson 18. New Territory: Alun Llywelyn-Williams and Welsh Poetry of the Second World War, Gerwyn Wiliams 19. The Muse that Failed: Poetry and Patriotism during the Second World War, Helen Goethals 20. 'Since Munich, What?': Louis MacNeice's Poetry of the Second World War, Peter McDonald 21. Sidney Keyes in Historical Perspective, Geoffrey Hill Continuities in Modern War Poetry 22. Anthologizing War, Hugh Haughton 23. Mina Loy and E. J. Scovell: Defining Women's War Poetry, Simon Featherstone 24. War Pastorals, 1914-2004, Edna Longley 25. The Poetry of Pain, Sarah Cole 26. 'Down in the terraces between the targets': Civilians, Peter Robinson 27. Complicate Me When I'm Dead: The War Remains of Keith Douglas and Ted Hughes, Cornelia D. J. Pearsall 28. 'For Isaac Rosenberg': Geoffrey Hill, Michael Longley, Cathal O'Searcaigh, Tara Christie 29. The Fury and the Mire, Jon Stallworthy 'Post-war' poetry 30. 'This is plenty. This is more than enough': Poetry and the Memory of the Second World War, Gareth Reeves 31. British Holocaust Poetry: Songs of Experience, Claire M. Tylee 32. Quiet Americans: Responses to War in some British and American Poets of the 1960s, Alan Marshall 33. Pointing to East and West: British Cold War Poetry, Adam Piette 34. Dichtung und Wahrheit: Contemporary War and the Non-Combatant Poet, David Wheatley Northern Ireland 35. Constructing and Deconstructing the Epic - Contemporary Northern Irish Poetry, Paul Volsik 36. 'Stalled in the Pre-Articulate': Heaney, Poetry, and War, Brendan Corcoran 37. Unavowed Engagement: Paul Muldoon as War Poet, April Warman Notes on Contributors