War poems from the air

Why is war poetry so often relegated to the Great War? Who determines which war poets are included in the canon? These questions are just a sample of the ones Daniel Swift addresses in Bomber Country: the Lost Airmen of World War Two. What began as research about his pilot grandfather’s disappearance over Holland in 1943 evolved into what David Herman at the New Statesman calls “an exciting new kind of criticism - part literary readings, part history and part personal memoir.” Swift not only challenges why certain war poets fade to obscurity, but examines the confines of the cannon and introduces little-known verse by airmen like his grandfather:

One of the many achievements of Daniel Swift's book is to set this record straight. The conventional wisdom is wrong. The Second World War, he argues, produced a considerable body of British and American poetry, by veterans and civilians alike. Robert Conquest, Dylan Thomas, Stephen Spender and Day Lewis are among the British poets. The airmen Randall Jarrell, John Ciardi and James Dickey are among the Americans. And Swift does a fascinating job of arguing for some of the great poems of the 1930s and 1940s - T S Eliot's "Four Quartets" and W H Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" - to be seen in their historical context as responses to the wars of the time. It is no coincidence, he argues, that Auden paid such attention to Bruegel's Icarus. He and Christopher Isherwood were in Brussels in December 1938 finishing their book Journey to a War, an account of their trip, during the Sino-Japanese war, to China, where Auden witnessed the new aerial warfare and reflected on "the best way of watching an air battle if you don't want a stiff neck".