Customer Reviews

The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (Penguin Classics)

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This book is, as its title says, a book of "First World War Poetry." Thus it includes anyone who simply wrote poetry during that time. So we have Robert Frost, Edith Sitwell, and Nancy Cunard, among others, whom I have never particularly associated with the Great War.

But a more irritating aspect of the book is its lack of a proper index of poets and a table of contents listing the poems by author. Thus one has to rummage around looking for a particular poet, whose name, for an equally mystifying reason, is not given until the end of the poem.

The Introduction by the editor, George Walter, is excellent, as is, for the most part, his choice of poems, with the obvious exceptions. But the layout of the book itself is exasperating, even irritating.

In contrast to the other two reviewers, I find the organization and format of this anthology to be quite sensible: 5 clearly identifiable thematic sections, brief biographies of all the poets in the anthology, with the poems in the anthology clearly listed by name as well as the original source from which the poem was drawn, and a combined index of poems by first line and title. The introduction and the notes are especially useful for college students being introduced to British Trench Poets. I spent quite a bit of time considering anthologies of British Trench Poetry for a college course and decided upon Walter's because of its organization, biographies, index, notes, and sourcing--and also because it included not only the best known pieces by the best known poets --Owen, Sassoon, Brooke, Rosenberg et al--but also lesser known works by poets rarely included in WWI poetry anthologies. Editors are forced to make choices, and I feel Walter made some excellent ones--my students, too, have no trouble using this book. This anthology so obviously does not attempt to include poets/poems from other countries, to criticize it for not doing so would be like criticizing an anthology of German WWI poetry for not having included British WWI poetry.

This is a complete letdown. The formatting is very broken with the numbers "10" and "20" appearing at random within the text. The lack of a proper index adds insult to injury. This mess of formatting should be free.