For British readers, the poetry of the Second World War has always been overshadowed by the conflict that preceded it. In many ways, the contrast couldn’t be clearer: the story of the trenches is often told through the experiences of the soldiers who wrote and died in them, from the initial flush of patriotism to the slaughter at the Somme. Meanwhile, the poetry of the Second World War, at least in English, has little hold on the popular imagination; most of our shared cultural references come from Hollywood. ‘For generations brought up on the poetry of 1914-1918’, Tim Kendall suggests in the introduction to his new selection – the latest attempt to rewrite that balance – ‘it may come as a surprise to discover that the later war produced any poetry at all.’

That lacuna has nothing to do with the quality of British verse. From Keith Douglas in North Africa to Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas on the Home Front, some of the best poems of the 20th century were written between 1939 and 1945. Why, then, aren’t they better known? In the first place, the very existence of the older ‘war poets’ counted against the new ones. On the one hand, the sheer weight of expectation blinded critics to the fact that the new poetry would, inevitably, be new. ‘Here we are faced with an undeniable repetition of history’, the Times Literary Supplement suggested, while Robert Graves was ‘unable to imagine soldier-poetry different from the kind that he himself had written in the previous war’. On the other, much of the literary establishment of the 1930s, perhaps fearing (rightly, as it happened) that they were about to be made obsolete, appeared actively hostile: the influential editor Cyril Connolly consciously excluded younger writers from Horizon magazine, though he made an exception for Alun Lewis.

That sense of lateness weighed on the war poets themselves, who wondered whether they had anything new to say. Often, they invoked their predecessors directly: in ‘All Day It Has Rained’, Alun Lewis conjures up Edward Thomas, while, in ‘Desert Flowers’, Keith Douglas veers off violently in the second line to address Isaac Rosenberg:

Living in a wide landscape are the flowers –

Rosenberg I only repeat what you were saying –

the shell and the hawk every hour

are slaying men and jerboas, slaying…

The weight of history was a new note. It was also an awful truth: like Rosenberg, who was killed in 1918, Douglas died in France, hit by a shell three days after D-Day. He was just 24. But poems like ‘Desert Flowers’, ‘Vergissmeinnicht’ and ‘How to Kill’ also marked a new voice, an icy lyricism that was entirely Douglas’ own. In ‘How to Kill’, he describes looking down ‘my dial of glass’ at ‘a soldier who is going to die’:

The weightless mosquito touches

Her tiny shadow on the stone,

And with how like, how infinite

A lightness, man and shadow meet.

They fuse. A shadow is man

When the mosquito death approaches.

Further confounding expectations, many of the best war poets did not see active service at all. In London, Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas bore witness to the spectacle and destruction of the Blitz, while E.J. Scovell was one step removed again, watching refugees arrive in Oxford. The bombs, Kendall notes, were almost impossible to render in verse. Edith Sitwell has them as rain, falling ‘with a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to a hammer-beat’, while Louis MacNeice turned the entire raid into a band of trolls, ‘humming to themselves like morons’ or ‘barging and lunging out of the clouds, a daft / Descent of no-good gods’. For all their stylistic differences, MacNeice and Thomas’ Blitz poems are both marked by their defiance in the face of faceless death, a ‘refusal to mourn’, in Thomas’ words, or to explain away or prettify the destruction.

There were more prosaic reasons for the neglect, too. The Second World war was a vastly more complex conflict than the first: warfare was increasingly professionalised and took place across a greater variety of theatres. There is a mismatch between the war we tend to remember, and the war British poets lived through; many of the best, like Douglas and Lewis, were based in North Africa.

Meanwhile, poetry’s relationship with the public had changed. The poets of the Second World war were competing with the radio and the cinema, while poetry itself had been blown apart by modernism in the wake of the First World War and put back together in ways the public didn’t always recognise. The war was, perversely, good to poets: verse sold well, despite the shortage of paper, and many on the Home Front found work in the cultural organs of the state: ‘the bigger the machine of government becomes’, George Orwell noted at the time, ‘the more loose ends and forgotten corners there are in it’.

Orwell wondered whether radio might encourage a renaissance of spoken word and so become ‘the instrument by which poetry could be brought back to the common people’. In the short term, something like this really did happen – it is hard to imagine, say, Dylan Thomas’ Under Milk Wood (1955) without the wartime experiments at the BBC. In the long-term, it looks more like a blip.

Arguably, the greatest challenge facing the poets of the Second World War was a moral one: the forces it unleashed were unspeakable. Kendall argues, convincingly, that Douglas and MacNeice ‘have claims to be the two most important poets’ in the anthology because they tested the ethics of means and ends ‘beyond breaking point’. MacNeice’s ‘Notes for an Autobiography’ records his response to bombing of Hiroshima:

When I first read the news, to my shame I was glad;

When I next read the news I thought man had gone mad.

Poetry of the Second World War is a remarkably slim volume for a war which produced such a range and quantity of verse: at times it feels as if Kendall is attempting to establish a discrete canon comparable with the poets of the First World War. The great virtue of Kendall’s selection is that he isn’t afraid to assert his own taste. So, poets like Douglas get their due, as do less familiar voices like Scovell, who was one of the revelations of the anthology for me. But an anthology like this simply can’t afford to ignore the so-called ‘apocalypse’ poets, or else should make the case for their exclusion.

Also largely missing is the long shadow the war cast over the rest of the century. As Kendall notes, most postwar poetry, from Hughes to Hill, could be fairly described as ‘war poetry’. You have to draw the line somewhere. But the nature of the conflict meant that many of the horrors of 1939-45 were only written about years or even decades later. Of the many significant British Jewish poets, refugees and otherwise, who wrestled with the Holocaust and its legacy after the war, Kendall only has room for two staggering poems by Karen Gershon, who escaped to Britain from Germany in 1938 as part of the Kindertransport and whose parents were murdered by the Nazis:

Both my parents died in camps

I was not there to comfort them

I was not there they were alone

my mind refuses to conceive the life

the death they must have known

‘The Second World War exposed the unsettling truth that there are places the human imagination cannot reach’, Kendall writes. ‘Its poetry was all the more important because it embraced that failure.’ Eighty years on, with the memory of the war increasingly flattened, contested and abused in conflicts around the globe, and warped out of all recognition on social media, the example its poets set is more important than ever.