In his new book, Jon Stallworthy, author of biographies of the poets Wilfred Owen and Louis MacNeice and editor of Owen's Complete Poems and Fragments, set out to follow the writings of men and women on violent conflicts and the connections between art and war. Titled Survivors’ Songs: From Maldon to the Somme, the book concentrates on the poets and writers of the two world wars, while briefly touching on earlier and later conflicts (from Maldon to Vietnam). Specifically, it focuses on works written in Britain and the United States. Stallworthy, citing W. H. Auden, believes that in the short-term “poetry makes nothing happen.” In the longer term, however, writers can be credited with shaping general social attitude to warfare (194). Defining poetry—again after Auden—as “memorable speech,” Stallworthy wishes to widen the category of “War Poetry” so that it will include “any poem about any aspect of war” (178).

The book reads as a collection of short literary essays on such poems. It begins with a generalized statement that while the heroic epic poems of The Iliad and Beowulf linked war with glory, courage, and chivalry, modern poetry, in contrast, has been antiwar and antiheroic and has emphasized the human cost of violence. It was specifically the poets of the First World War that set out to expose what Owen called “The Old Lie: Dulce et decorum est Pro patria mori” (14). Indeed, the poets of the First World War and its aftermath are the main focus of the essays in the book. Chapter 4, for example, explores the role of laughter in Rupert Brooke's life and poetry, showing how he tied it to questions of life and death. The chapter suggests that Brooke was not a War Poet but rather “a poet of peace, a celebrant of friendship, love and laughter” (54). An exploration of Siegfried Sassoon's autobiography and poems in chapter 5 offers that he was not simply a War Poet but also a religious poet. Sassoon's search for ideal companions and substitute fathers (among them the distinguished neurologist W. H. R. Rivers) led to his religious conversion later in his life, Stallworthy claims, although religious themes, terminology, and imagery could be traced in his earlier war poems. Next, Stallworthy addresses Owen's legacy and the ways in which Owen was “a poet's poet,” as this writer proudly told his mother (68). On one level, Owen was “a poet's poet” since he envisioned himself an heir to John Keats and the romantic tradition. Before he joined the army—only to later suffer from shell shock and be hospitalized at Craiglockhart—Owen even believed that what would hold him together in the battlefield would be the sense that he was “perpetuating the language in which Keats and the rest of them wrote!” (71). On another level, Owen was “a poet's poet” because after his death his words were, as Auden puts it, “modified in the guts of the living” (72). Owen's poems would be repeated and reproduced in different editions and inspire his postwar successors in a unique way. A chapter on “Owen and his editors” shows, however, how it was not until the Second World War that Owen's reputation became truly international, mainly because of Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (1962), the popular work that made use of Owen's poems. The last part of the book deals with the writings of the interwar and Second World War eras and ends with Vietnam. It seeks to show that while the First World War formally ended in 1918, it was not over as far as literature and poetry were concerned. Rather, it figured at the center of works such as T. S. Eliot's Waste Land, Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, D. H. Lawrence's Women in Love, and, later on, L. P. Hartley's The Go-Between. While the images of trenches and of “a war fought on the ground” were central to those writing on the First World War, as the 1930s progressed, new images, such as that of the aviator and of “war in the air” took hold among those imagining a new war. Interestingly, the war in the air was sometimes imagined in positive terms. Writer Richard Hillary, for example, recalled how he initially believed that in a fighter plane an exciting way was found “to return to war as it ought to be, war which is individual combat between two people, in which one either kills or is killed” (149). His views were to radically change as he was later burned almost beyond recognition and began to view air raids against civilians not only as a crime but as “anti-life” and as “Evil itself” (152). In the last chapter, Stallworthy claims that most post–Second World War poems—especially those of the Vietnam era—had not reached the level of high art of the earlier battlefield poetry.

As a whole, Stallworthy's book would benefit from a greater overall methodological approach to material frequently dealt with in a fragmented way that obscures wide-ranging arguments. A broader historical context and a deeper engagement with the current extensive historiography of this field are also missing, with chapter 8 on the legacy of the Somme being perhaps the strongest case in point. A more fully developed discussion of the similarities and differences of the literature of the First World War and that of the Second would have been a welcome contribution to the field as this still remains a gap in the existing scholarship. Given the fact that modern war poetry and literature have received a comprehensive and sophisticated treatment by previous scholars, Stallworthy's book offers more of an engaging literary commentary rather than a detailed historical discussion or a new theorization of this material.