Some Corner of a Foreign Field: Poetry of The Great War

By: James Bentley

An anthology of some of the best known authors and illustrators from the First World War This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316888990
• ISBN13: 9780316888998
• Release Date: January 1992
• Publisher: Little Brown and Co
• Length: 120 Pages
• Weight: 1.25 lbs.

Customer Reviews

A compact gem of a book, introducing poetry and paintings of the First World War

This book is an intense and lovely small treasure. First ... there's the poetry! It contains 48 English-language poems written during the First World War. All but two of the poets were from England, Scotland, Wales, or Ireland. Editor James Bentley included the most well-known poems of Rupert Brooke ("If I should die, think only this of me"), John McRae ("In Flanders fields the poppies blow"), W. B. Yeats ("I know that I shall meet my fate/Somewhere among the clouds above"), and Alan Seeger ("I have a rendezvous with death"). Nine poems were written by Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, officers who turned against the war even as they stayed in the field. (The 1997 film "Regeneration" -- titled "Behind the Lines" in its American release -- tells the story of these two poets while they were hospitalized.) War poems by celebrated authors Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, Rudyard Kipling, and G. K. Chesterton are also included. Rounding out the collection are poems by Charles Hamilton Sorley, G. A. Studdert Kennedy, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, T. E. Hulme, Francis Ledwidge, Hugh MacNaghten, Alice Maynell, and Katharine Tynan. Bentley thematically divided the anthology into four serviceable themes, "Home and Abroad," "Courage and Chivalry," "Bitterness and Rage," and "Compassion and Reconciliation." His short introduction well sets up these themes, and there are excellent short biographic notes on the twenty-one poets. My guess is that the poems and notes will prompt many readers to turn to Wikipedia to learn more. Reviewers are not usually shy about second-guessing an editor's choices. Why this poem and not another? Why not this or that author? How could he have missed my favorite? Bentley by any measure has put together a superb collection, so I'll resist the temptation. Keep in mind, too, that this volume is only an introduction to the field. This reader's favorite new poem? "First Time In" by Ivor Gurney -- green troops overnight with a Welsh regiment, feel the grace of their song, and set aside the old prejudices they had learned about "Welsh pit boys." And ... there's the art! The poems are accompanied by 52 paintings from the war, most from the Imperial War Museum. (The artists are William P. Roberts, Colin U. Gill, Walter Bayes, John Nash, Frank Dobson, Paul Nash, William Orpen, Harold Gilman, Geoffrey S. Allfree, Eric H. Kennington, Gwen John, David Bomberg, Dora Carrington, Richard C. Carline, Sydney W. Carline, C.R.W. Nevinson, Edward Wadsworth, Herbert A. Budd, Bernard Meninsky, Miss Oliver, Elliott Seabrooke, George Clausen, Austin O. Spare, Dorthy J. Coke, William T. Wood, Henry Lamb, Randolphe Schwabe, W. Bernard Adeney, Francis Dodd, Percy Wyndham Lewis, Georges Leroux, Edmund Dulac, A. Neville Lewis, Stanley Spencer, Mark Gertler, and John Singer Sergeant.) The paintings are so striking -- pastoral memories of home, wasted land at the front, men as cogs or replacement parts in the war machine,