The title "Treasury" implies value and preservation. What does the act of compiling and presenting war poetry as a "treasury" during wartime suggest about the perceived cultural or emotional function of poetry itself in times of national conflict?

From the book

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,…

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…

ity, of creative insight? But since life is whole, the artistic interpretation of life tends progressively toward unity. Poetry, says a true poet, "is, on the one hand, a spirit, animating one individual here and another there; on the other hand, in its outward manifestations, it is a collection of works produced by that spirit working in individuals." So Shelley speaks of "that great poem which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world." And Sir William Watson writes:— " . . . 'neath the unifying sun, Many the songs—but Song…

e and memories of country days as proclaiming the delight of battle, or even the loftier summons of patriotism and duty. Some of this work of to-day, as we all know, transcends the lyrical faculty which is the frequent appanage of youth, and reaches the level of true poetry; some of it is made sacred by the death of the writer, and cannot be coldly weighed in the balance." Whether or not, then, he be privileged to see war with the eye of sense, and to share its rigours and ardours with fellow-soldiers, the first duty of the war-poet toward his art is to be a poet, to discover the timeless and…

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…