• An indispensable reference for the study of both war poetry and modern poetry more generally
• Covers a large number of the twentieth century's most important poets, from Thomas Hardy and Rudyard Kipling to Seamus Heaney and Paul Muldoon
• Provides a panoramic view of the twentieth century, enabling readers to appreciate continuities and discontinuities between poets of different wars

Readership: Scholars and students of twentieth-century poetry

Edited by Tim Kendall, Professor of English, University of Exeter

"...Kendall has assembled a wide range of fresh and important critical persepctives of a remarkably high quality." - Tom Walker The Cambridge Quarterly

"Kendall has assembled a wide range of fresh and important critical perspectives of a remarkably high quality." - Tom Walker, Cambridge Quarterly

"If a definitive edition of Great War poetry criticism were possible, then this would be it... a vast scholarly effort... a large and rich achievement, with an infectious quality of 'browsability'... it addresses an academic need ambitiously and comprehensively." - James Bridges, Ivor Gurney Society Journal

"...the real quality of most of the essays. Again and again they are illuminating, thoughtful, and challenging. The array of contributors that Kendall has assembled is stellar, and the result a fine collection, one that will reward turning to again and again." - Janis P. Stout, Review of English Studies

"...for the non-specialist, this Handbook acts as a master-class in the reading and understanding of the works considered, whether familiar or not. For the specialists, it promises a never-ending source for debate... For once I have to agree with the publisher's claim that this Handbook 'is an essential resource for both scholars of particular poets and forthose interested in wider debates about modern poetry.' I should add that it provides much of value to the non-academic also." - David Page, Kipling Journal

"rich and wide-ranging... a thorough, inclusive, and invaluable guide to the field, combining accessible and informative overviews with the original and insightful research." - Jo Gill, Modern Language Review

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