Survivors' Songs: From Maldon to the Somme
Cambridge University Press, 10/30/2008
EAN 9780521899062, ISBN10: 0521899060
Hardcover, 240 pages, 22.1 x 14.3 x 1.7 cm
Language: English
From Homer to Heaney, the voices of men and women have seldom been more piercing, more poignant, than in time of conflict. For fifty years, Jon Stallworthy has been attuned to such voices. In Survivors' Songs he explores a series of poetic encounters with war, with essays on Rupert Brooke, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, and others. Beautifully written, this moving book sets the poetry and prose of the First World War and its aftermath in the wider context of writing about warfare from prehistoric Troy to Anglo-Saxon England; from Agincourt to Flanders; from El Alamein to Vietnam; from the wars of yesterday to the wars of tomorrow.
1. The death of the hero
2. Survivors' songs
3. England's epic?
4. Who was Rupert Brooke?
5. Christ and the soldier
6. Owen's afterlife
7. Owen and his editors
8. The legacy of the Somme
9. The iconography of the waste land
10. War and peace
11. The fire from heaven
12. Henry Reed and the great good place
13. The fury and the mire
Index.