Preface

Occasions of anthologizing war poetry vary greatly throughout history. The earliest attempts as such functioned to record what happened about the war as a national or communal memory, but there have been other anthologizing occasions, for instance, to launch wars,mobilize recruits, inspire morale, and constantly encourage combatants in the battle field. For the present occasion, anthologizing becomes an attitude towards the topic of all wars, reflects ourselves and others for a better humanity, and even more, evokes such sublime objectives as academic construction and examination of knowledge.

Although the genre of“war poetry”is a largely 20 ^th century invention, the anthology of war writing in general and war poetry in particular spans over the Anglo-American history,beginning with the wars of British national formation, American colonial wars of the 18 ^th century, and ending with the Gulf Wars or“Wars on Terror”. Such anthologizing often comes at those very occasions as has been stated above, for instance, specifically at the beginning and end of the respectively American Civil War, the First World War, the Second World War,and so on. Collecting poems together is what anthologies do, and anthologies of poetic writing have played a central role in the construction and reconstruction of what has been defined as the‘war poem’and‘war poet’.

As for war-discoursing and self-reflection, there have also been many modern and contemporary attempts: there were such as Frederick Brereton's An Anthology of War Poems (1930), Julian Symons's An Anthology of War Poetry (1942), Oscar Williams's The War Poets: An Anthology of the War Poetry of the 20th Century (1945), Jon Silkin's The Penguin Book of First World War Poetry (1979); and there were also such as Jon Stallworthy's The Oxford Book of War Poetry (1984), Kenneth Baker's The Faber Book of War Poetry (1996), Lorrie Goldensohn's American War Poetry: An Anthology (2006), Pinaki Roy's The Scarlet Critique: A Critical Anthology of War Poetry (2010), and Jon Stallworthy's recent collection The New Oxford Book of War Poetry (2014); other numerous anthologies of different and specific wars in history including such as Lee Steinmetz's The Poetry of the American Civil War (1991),Tim Kendall's Poetry of the First World War: An Anthology (2013), Harvey Shapiro's Poets of World War II (2003), and a great number of anthologies of individual war poems or poets with collective identity in the war such as gender, race and class.

From the first anthology directed against‘the false glamour of war’in Bertram Lloyd's Poems Written During the Great War 1914—1918 , to Sam Hamil's Poets Against the War ,selected from 11,000 poems and posted on <poetsagainstthewar.org> in 2003 on the eve of the US-led invasion of Iraq, war poetry had developed from conventional expressions of patriotic feeling to the expression of‘war neurosis’and critique, culminating in ferocious documentary works like Owen's‘Dulce et Decorum Est’and Sassoon's“Does it Matter?”Those celebrated lines or slogans,“The glamour from the sword is gone,”“newspaper-warriors”,“cheerful patriotic citizens”, and“professional diplomatists, politicians and statesmen”, have constantly overwhelmed the reading public with a sense of conscientious enlightenment.

As we are experiencing a world marked by unprecedented changes unseen for the past century, globalization has now encountered waves of conflicts, regional wars turned rampant,terrorism horrified the populace, and a new world order is to be conceived in looming regional, sectional, and global wars. It is now high time that we have to reflect ourselves,our history and our culture itself. It is thus also necessary to compile an anthology of Anglo-American war poetry as a tribute to the new reflection and evaluation. Called‘a critical anthology’, the present efforts aim to reevaluate wars not only from a new critical perspective that will be categorized as‘A Critique of Cultural Pathology’, but also from new materials of war writing that will shed new light on the horizon of contemporary cognition of this pan-historical phenomenon.

The critical anthology has originally planned to include a more comprehensive selection of war poetry, especially including those war poems that have been ignored or neglected in the past anthologies. In addition, due to the corresponding international copyright laws and those items concerned with the doctrine of‘fair use’, the anthology limited its selection of the quoted excerpts in the review or criticism for purposes of illustration or comment, scholarly or technical illustration or clarification, or any summary of main ideas tip toeing on copyright issues for contemporary poets.

Another important category about poetic anthology is related with its writing mechanics or printing format. The anthology has followed the most commonly anthologized format, and when those selected poems are of digital medium, double-check and proofreading have been done by consulting with various versions of the selected. Despite all these efforts, mistakes,or even blunders, may be found here and there, requiring of its reader's apology and further examination.

Acknowledgements should at first go to those friends and colleagues concerned at Institute of International Studies, National University of Defense Technology, to whom I owe an immense debt of gratitude. Secondly, for her expertise of editorial advice and support, it gives me pleasure to acknowledge Miss Dong Ying of Nanjing University Press, with whom I have many years of happy cooperation, and to whom I am especially grateful to. I cannot mention everyone who has helped me, but it would be wrong not to mention my wife, to whom I owe a lot: Her sense and sensitivity, and her kindness and emotional generosity, have always been a source of strength inspiring me to go on with the present work.