No More War! (book)

Question

Given that "A Treasury of War Poetry" was published in 1917, mid-World War I, how might its dedication "To all those who have fought for freedom" and the inclusion of epigraphs celebrating honor and duty shape the reader's immediate perception of the war, and what unstated expectations might this create for the poems within?

Synthesized answer

The passages do not include the dedication "To all those who have fought for freedom" or any epigraphs celebrating honor and duty. The book's title page and introduction are provided, but they contain no such dedication or epigraphs [1][2]. Therefore, the passages cannot directly address how these elements shape the reader's perception or what unstated expectations they create.

What the passages do reveal is the editor's stated intent: the anthology aims to present war poetry "humanly hospitable rather than academically critical," valuing "sincere transcripts of personal experience" from soldiers [3]. The introduction also frames war as potentially necessary for "justice and liberty," stating that one "will be proud to battle, if battle he must, for the sake of those foundations" [2]. This suggests the collection leans toward a sympathetic, even patriotic, view of the war, but without the specific dedication and epigraphs mentioned in the question, the passages are insufficient to analyze their immediate perceptual impact or unstated expectations.

Synthesized from the book passages below. Chat with the book on Feynman for follow-up.

From the book

← A Treasury of War Poetry: British and American Poems of the World War, 1914—1919 ( 1917 ) by George Herbert Clarke CONTENTS , ACKNOWLEDGMENTS , INTRODUCTION → 171861 A Treasury of War Poetry: British and American Poems of the World War, 1914—1919 — CONTENTS , ACKNOWLEDGMENTS , INTRODUCTION 1917 George Herbert Clarke ​ A TREASURY OF WAR POETRY BRITISH AND AMERICAN POEMS OF THE WORLD WAR, 1914-1919 EDITED, WITH INTRODUCTION AND NOTES , BY GEORGE HERBERT CLARKE Professor of English in the University of Tennessee HODDER AND STOUGHTON LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO ​ Copyright, 1917, by George Herbert…
Passage [2]
("Edward Melbourne"). ​ Mr. John Murray:—"Before Action" and "Back to Rest," from Verse and Prose , by W. Noel Hodgson . The Princeton University Press:—"To France," by Herbert Jones , from A Book of Princeton Verse. Messrs. Tyrell's, Limited, Sydney, Australia: "Song of the Dardanelles," and "Fighting Hard," by Henry Lawson , from My Army, O, My Army . ​ INTRODUCTION B ECAUSE man is both militant and pacific, he has expressed in literature, as indeed in the other forms of art, his pacific and militant moods. Nor are these moods, of necessity, incompatible. War may become the price of peace,…
Passage [28]
ollowing pages will attest, English and American literatures have both received genuine accessions during the Great War. With its close, the attempt to review and assemble its poetic voices becomes measurably possible. In the present Anthology the editorial policy has been humanly hospitable rather than academically critical, especially in the case of some of the verses written by soldiers at the Front, which, however slight in certain instances their technical merit may be, are yet of psychological value as sincere ​ transcripts of personal experience, and will, it is thought, for that very…
Passage [44]
legislators of the world," and he meant by legislation the guidance and determination of the verdicts of the human soul. In the collection as a whole, the receptive reader will find many suggestions, finely and sensitively expressed, touching the poetic truth (the "essential truth") of War, and the spiritual reciprocities that relate our personal lives to our national and international struggles. G. H. C. ↑ Sir Henry Newbolt: A New Study of English Poetry (Constable). ↑ Carveth Read: The Function of Relations in Thought ( The British Journal of Psychology , December, 1911). Cf. the graphic…
Passage [47]
nced, to present pretty freely the best of what has been found available in contemporary British and American war verse. It must speak for itself, and in not a few instances it does so with unusual sympathy and with living power; sometimes, too, with that quietly intimate companionableness which we find in Gray's Elegy , rightly indicated by John Masefield as a prime quality in English poetry. But if this quality appears in Chaucer and the pre-Romanticists and Wordsworth, it appears also in Longfellow and Lowell, in Emerson and Lanier, and in William Vaughn Moody; for American poetry is,…
Passage [45]

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