This chapter argues that a generation of poets substantially defined and transformed Australian literature following World War II. Accessing European and Asian poets in translation, they countered previous insularity and anti-intellectualism. The chapter examines Douglas Stewart’s sympathetic treatment of Aborigines and Afghans in “The Birdsville Track” (1955) alongside aspects of cultural appropriation in his later Rutherford (1962). It outlines the influence of painting on Rosemary Dobson and her development of ekphrasis. The chapter also discusses James McAuley’s investigation of war, love, and spirituality, Vincent Buckley’s devotional writing, and David Campbell’s writing of war, urban excess, and Aboriginal rock art. The chapter outlines a generational turn to explorer narratives to shore up a sense of national identity, pointing to significant variations from McAuley’s awareness of colonial violence to Francis Webb’s focus on doomed figures. The chapter includes an analysis of Webb’s representation of war and mental health, and engages with the provocative poetry of A. D. Hope.

Lowell’s intense creative engagement with Herman Melville was long-standing, evident from his first published poetry (notably and specifically in "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket") to his last works, particularly his trilogy of verse dramas The Old Glory. Tracking Melville in Lowell is relatively straightforward in terms of allusion, but there are deeper and more significant traits that the two writers shared. Both are Miltonic in terms of their literary and intellectual heritage, both reflect on the legacy of New England; on guilt, violence, power and the imagining of the United States. The Old Glory includes Lowell’s dramatic verse refiguring of Benito Cereno where the 1855 novella is aligned with key public and political themes of the 1960s: racial inequality and unrest; the cold war; American nuclear capability. These have a disturbing and discomforting resonance in our own times, and usefully remind us of Lowell as a public and political poet.

This chapter provides a brief summary of the historical context particular to Italy before moving into an overview of key literary themes and concerns of wartime poets, including a consideration of the difference between the poet-soldier and the soldier-poet; the early enthusiasm for intervention and what was seen by some as war’s potential for national renewal; and a later ambivalence about the war on the part of many poets. Individual sections dedicated to Gabriele D’Annunzio, Vittorio Locchi, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, Ardengo Soffici, Clemente Rebora, Piero Jahier, Corrado Alvaro, Ugo Betti, and Umberto Saba explore and contrast the very different experiences, attitudes and styles of these nine literary figures, some far better-known than others. The final section focuses on the work of Ada Negri, one of the most important Italian women poets of the era, and her descriptions of maternal anguish on the home front.

This chapter provides a brief account of the history of Serbian war poetry, written during the First World War and in the interwar period. By examining its relationship to different geopolitical constellations (Serbian, Balkan, Austro-Hungarian, Yugoslav) and literary contexts (the revival of war poetry during the Balkan wars, the poetry of pre- and post-war Modernism), it tries to show how Serbian war poetry was shaped by the dominant poetic idiom and by the collective and public representations of the First World War. Although selective, this account will essentially highlight the turning points in the history of Serbian poetry, where the possibilities and limits of expression were expanded or challenged in contact with a subject matter as unprecedented as the First World War.

This chapter considers the network of poets orientated around the Georgian Poetry publications that appeared in a series from 1912 to 1922, edited by the influential literary and artistic champion Edward Marsh. It discusses the innovations advanced by contributing writers even as they consciously adhered to a lyric inheritance that stressed continuity over rupture. With some exceptions, it argues that these poets relied on a pastoral palate to articulate complex emotional and sensical realities while they contended – implicitly and, more rarely, explicitly – with the jarring physical and psychological assaults of the First World War. Finally, it addresses the ways in which the editors and established contributors used the publication as a platform to promote emerging and important literary voices, including the likes of Wilfred Owen and Isaac Rosenberg.

This chapter explores the First World War poetry of Mary Borden, placing it against the backdrop of her critically acclaimed prose record, The Forbidden Zone (1929). Borden published her poetic responses to her war experience as a post script to this text. Like the other fragments and short stories, these poems draw on her experience with the Hopital Chirurgical Mobile No. 1, inviting the reader to see, hear, smell, and interpret the war along with the poilus whom she treated. Borden’s poems offer a record like no other, often adopting stylistic tropes of modernism to articulate the unspeakable. The chapter also examines some very different wartime poems that document her love affair with her future husband, Edward Spears. Powerful and erotically charged, these poems encapsulate a very different kind of war experience, enabling Borden to speak with a range of poetic voices.

A History of World War One Poetry aims to represent the global and multifaceted poetry that emerged from 1914–1918. While poetry did and does not occupy the same place in all national imaginaries, it was a literary genre that flourished during the Great War.The Introduction interrogates not only the term ‘war poetry’ but also the question of ‘who is entitled to write war poetry’.It argues that the poetry that emerged from World War One extended far beyond the British soldier-poet canon, reinforced by influential studies such as Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory. Rather, as the chapters demonstrate, it was generated and read by men and by women, combatant and non-combatant, and across a continuum in which protest and patriotism, modernity and tradition, propaganda and remembrance, humour and pathos, co-existed, if uneasily.

While many critics have noted ways in which Bishop writes indirectly and obliquely about war, it should also be noted that when her first volume, North & South, appeared in 1946, Louise Bogan, reviewing the book in The New Yorker, had no difficulty registering the presence of war in Bishop’s poetry, declaring that it “contains all manner of references to war and warriors.” Life-long readers of Bishop understand how the profound, insinuative workings of her layered language allows them at times to focus on how she was able to keep war at a distance, while also opening her poetic consciousness to its inexorable

presence. She lived and wrote both inside and outside the camp. With the end of WW II and the coming of the Atomic Age, a new note of apocalyptic threat emerges in Bishop’s poetry. Her Cold War poetry reflects the sense that no one is any longer a “civilian.”

Given the gender segregation of the times, Irish women poets in the decades between the Famine and the revolutionary period often wrote about events they had witnessed but not participated in at first hand. Nowhere is this gap more noticeable than in representations of conflict and the valorous male warriors who waged it. In the mid-nineteenth century the poets of the Nation, including Francesca Elgee (‘Speranza’) employed ballad forms to orient women’s poetry firmly towards nationalist self-assertion. In Revivalist times Katharine Tynan wrote sensitively of Anglo-Irish relations, and of soldiers’ lives in the First World War, a conflict in which two of her sons served. Martyred Irish manhood is a classic nationalist trope, but acquires wider resonances when applied to First World War elegies too. The neglected work of Winifred Letts is also considered, helping to build a larger picture of the connections between Irish and English traditions at a time of conflict and transition.