Misplaced Pages

This is an old revision of this page, as edited by Carcharoth (talk | contribs) at 15:23, 10 January 2010 (start article on The Muse in Arms). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.

The Muse in Arms is an anthology of British war poetry published in November 1917 during World War I. It was one of several collections of war poetry published during the war. The editor was Edward Boland Osborn (1867-1938), and the book was printed in London by the publishers John Murray. The anthology, which sold well, was reprinted in February 1918. It has been described as "the most celebrated collection of the war years".

Contents

The anthology's title page describes the book as "A collection of war poems, for the most part written in the field of action, by seamen, soldiers, and flying men who are serving, or have served, in the Great War". The dedication is to the journalist and editor Bruce Lyttelton Richmond (1871–1964).

The first edition of the book contained 38 pages of prefatory material, including publication details, the dedication, an introduction by the editor, acknowledgments, a list of authors, and a list of contents. This is followed by 131 poems over 295 pages, by 46 authors. The book is divided into fourteen thematic sections: The Mother Land; Before Action; Battle Pieces; The Sea Affair; War in the Air; In Memoriam; The Future Hope; The Christian Soldier; School and College; Chivalry of Sport; The Ghostly Company; Songs; Loving and Living; and Moods and Memories.

Poets

At the time of publication in November 1917, sixteen of the forty-two authors listed had been killed during the war. Those published in this book were: Gordon Alchin; Herbert Asquith; Rupert Brooke; Noel M. F. Corbett; Leslie Coulson; Richard M. Dennys; Gilbert Frankau; H. S. Graham; Robert Graves; Julian Grenfell; Gerald William Grenfell ; Ivor Gurney; F. W. Harvey; Aubrey Herbert; William Noel Hodgson; Geoffrey Howard; Dyneley Hussey; Lessel Hutcheon; Ronald A. Hopwood ; William M. James; A. L. Jenkins; Joseph Lee ; W. H. Littlejohn; Patrick MacGill; Harley Matthews ; Colin Scott-Moncrieff ; E. A. Mackintosh; Robert Nichols; Robert Palmer ; Victor Perowne; Colwyn Philipps; Max Plowman; A. Victor Ratcliffe; Alexander Robertson ; George V. Robins; J. M. Rose-Troup; Siegfried Sassoon; Edward Shanks; Osbert Sitwell; Charles H. Sorley; R. W. Sterling; John W. Streets; E. Wyndham Tennant; Willoughby Weaving; Eric F. Wilkinson; Cyril W. Winterbotham.

Reception

The Muse at Arms has been described as one of several "important anthologies in the canonization of poetic taste", including work by Siegfried Sassoon and Rupert Brooke. While other major war poets such as Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg are absent from the book,, the collection has also been noted for its inclusion of poems by "servicemen who perished during wartime and whose literary output was strictly limited". The collection was published at the point in the war where there was a shift from patriotism and romanticism to a more realistic verse that reflected the "brutal reality" of trench wafare,, answering "to a public demand, particularly strong during the period of the great battles of 1915-17, for poetry from the trenches". The introduction by Osborn has been described as articulating the "appallingly anachronistic concept of war as a game". In his 2007 work, Sillars draws further attention to the imagery used in the introduction by Osborn, and concludes that The Muse in Arms and similar anthologies of that period of the war used poetry to locate the war "within a spiritual landscape that makes mystical the English countryside by endowing it with heroic virtues". The symbolic meaning of the anthology and the works it contains has also been examined, with Haughton (2007) describing the title of the work as representing a "muse enlisted in the service of the State, Church and British Army".

Notes and references

1. ^ Fields of Agony: British Poetry of the First World War, Stuart Sillars, 2007
2. ^ The Muse in Arms, E. B. Osborne (Ed), 1917
3. Gerald Grenfell was the son of William Grenfell, 1st Baron Desborough and brother of Julian Grenfell.
4. Further biographical details for Hopwood are available from oldpoetry.com: Rear Admiral Ronald Arthur Hopwood (1868 - 1949).
5. Further biographical details for Matthews are available from the Australian Dictionary of Biography: Harley Matthews (1889–1968).
6. Colin Scott-Moncrieff was the brother of Charles Kenneth Scott Moncrieff.
7. Robert Palmer was the son of William Palmer, 2nd Earl of Selborne.
8. Further biographical details for Robertson are available from the records of the Commonwealth War Graves Commission: Casualty Details: Alexander Robertson
9. Female Poets of the First World War, Randy Cummings, American Council of Learned Societies, Occasional Paper No. 29
10. Robert Graves and Literary Survival, Paul O’Prey, War Poetry Review, 2007
11. The Muse in Arms - Introduction, FirstWorldWar.com
12. “Went to War with Rupert Brooke and Came Home with Siegfried Sassoon”: The Poetic Fad of the First World War, Argha Banerjee, Working With English: Medieval and Modern Language, Literature and Drama 2.1: Literary Fads and Fashions (2006): pp. 1-11
13. Anthologies of British Poetry - Critical Perspectives from Literary and Cultural Studies, Peter Preston, 2003
14. Survivors' Songs - From Maldon to the Somme, 2008, Jon Stallworthy, Cambridge University Press
15. The Oxford handbook of British and Irish war poetry, Tim Kendall (Ed), Chapter 22 'Anthologizing War', Hugh Haughton, Oxford University Press, 2007

External links

• The muse in arms, a collection of war poems, for the most part written in the field of action (1917) (Internet Archive)

This poetry-related article is a stub. You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it.

• v
• t
• e

• Poetry stubs
• 1917 books
• Poetry anthologies