THIS is a finicky book about a huge subject. I'm not sure editor is driving at.
Kenneth Baker has been Minister for Education and Home Secretary in the present alarming British administration. During his national service in the Fifties he was a lieutenant in the Artillery in North Africa and an artillery instructor to the Libyan Army. I presume that he was not unaware of the deliberations of Mrs Thatcher's war cabinet during, the Falklands War. But the politician and the soldier cancel each other out. As a result, his introduction and the rubrics with which he prefaces each section read blandly. "Wars are caused by the failure of politicians," he suggests, "and yet they are sustained by the participation of quite ordinary people." You can say that again, Mr Baker. Is he being deadpan or glib?
The anthology is fussily divided into nearly seventy sections which include "Spying", "Climate and Circumstances", "Useful Tips" and "Old Ships", as well as more pertinent topics such as "Death in Action", "Civilian Victims" and "The Bereaved". There's something disagreeable about this obsessive categorising, with many sections too daintily organised to do justice to their themes. The first poem in the first section is Swift's version of Horace's ode which contains the famous words "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori." Wilfred Owen's denunciation of that sentiment as "The Old Lie" follows only one page later. The arrangement leaves no space for reverberation, for echoes to chime and clash across the centuries. It might have made more sense to end the book with Owen's great poem, and allow him and Horace the first and the last say. Cheek by jowl they are hard to hear.
Baker's subdividing and labelling are the obverse of fine discrimination. Everything seems homogenised, as though the book had been compiled by a committee. Desk-bound poems about war are given as much weight as poems written at the extremes of suffering. Because they fit into the anthologist's artificial framework, precious space is taken up by Tennyson's schoolboyish "Battle of Brunanburh" and Chesterton's - chubby "Lepanto" as well as yards of raucous verse by Kipling. The Holocaust, which Baker describes as "the greatest crime against humanity the world has ever seen", gets only five pages.
The cataclysms of the 20th century render already out of date Bakir's historical perspective; gender disproportionate his desire for a sense of proportion. The cavalry charges of earlier days and the infantry's muddy thumpings with broad swords can't have been much fun. But no one then could have imagined the carnage that would be caused by machine-guns, howitzers, poison gas, grenades, landmines, guided missiles, the atomic bomb in our own age of industrialised slaughter.
The miracle is that a Keatsian - sensibility such as Owen's could, in the shambles of the trenches, harness the English lyric to a tragic vision. His great war poems are matched only by Isaac Rosenberg's "Dead Man's Dump", in which he cries out like a young Aeschylus staggering down the line to death. Surprisingly, Baker does not include this towering masterpiece. He does, though, represent with four marvellous poems the next great war poet in English, Keith Douglas, who died on the Normandy beaches, nearly thirty years later, at the age of twenty-four. Douglas toughened the lyric in his own way and absorbed into it the horrors of tank battles and desert warfare. This anthology could more sensitively demonstrate how poetry's lyric impulse has adapted and metamorphosed in order to survive the filthiest tribulations.
Of course, many wonderful poems do get in, among them the stunning sonnet "When you see millions of the mouthless dead" by Charles Sorley, who was killed in October 1915 at the age of twenty. In a powerful anti-patriotic letter home he hoped that - "after the war all brave men will renounce their country and confess that they are strangers and pilgrims on the earth". I have already mentioned "Dulce et decorum est", Owen's evocation of a gas attack. Its terrible lines stain all our cenotaphs with blood "gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs/Obscene as cancer..."
(Brecht suggested that cenotaphs should be inscribed with the one word most soldiers utter at the moment of death: "Shit".) In the Preface he drafted for a planned collection of his poems, Owen began by stating, "This book is not about heroes. English Poetry is not yet fit to speak of them." Kenneth Baker has not yet realised what Owen meant.