The 250 poems included in this acclaimed anthology span centuries of human conflict - from David's lament for Saul and Jonathan, and Homer's Iliad, to the finest poems of the Second World War, Vietnam, Northern Ireland, and El Salvador, as well as the chilling visions of the 'Next War'.

Includes bibliographical references (p.341-350) and indices.

From The Book of Exodus -- from The Second Book of Samuel -- from The Iliad / Homer (c.900 BC) -- Thermopylae / Simonides (c.556-c.468 BC) -- Hymn to the Fallen / Anonymous (4th century B.C.) -- from The Aeneid / Virgil (70-19 BC) -- from The Odes / Horace (65-8 BC) -- from The Gododdin / Aneirin (6th century) -- Lament of the Frontier Guard / Rihaku (8th century) -- The Finnesburh Fragment / Anonymous (8th century) -- The Battle of Brunanburh / Anonymous (10th century) -- The Battle of Maldon / Anonymous (11th century) -- from The Song of Roland / Anonymous (12th century) -- The Lament of Maev Leith-Dherg / Anonymous (12th century) -- from The Knight's Tale / Geoffrey Chaucer (1343-1400) -- To the Cambro-Britons, and their harp, his Ballad of Agincourt / Michael Drayton (1563-1631) -- from Astrophel, A Pastorall Elegie Upon the Death of the Most Noble and Valorous Knight, Sir Philip Sidney / Edmund Spenser (1552-1599) -- from The Civil Wars between the Two Houses of Lancaster and York / Samuel Daniel (1562-1619) -- 'Norfolk sprang thee, Lambeth holds thee dead' / Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey (1517-1547) -- from The Fruits of War / George Gascoigne (?1525-1577) -- Farewell to Arms / George Peele (?1558-1596) -- A Burnt Ship / John Donne (1572-1631) -- The Soldier Going to the Field / Sir William Davenant (1606-1668) -- To Lucasta, Going to the Wars / Richard Lovelace (1618-1658) -- An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland / Andrew Marvell (1621-1678) -- On the Late Massacre in Piedmont ; from Paradise Lost / John Milton (1608-1674) -- Song: Written at Sea in the First Dutch War (1665), the Night Before an Engagement / Charles Sackville, Earl of Dorset (1638-1706) -- from Annus Mirabilis / John Dryden (1631-1700) -- from The Spanish Descent / Daniel DeFoe (1660-1731) -- from The Campaign, A Poem to His Grace the Duke of Marlborough / Joseph Addison (1672-1719) -- The Battle of Blenheim / Robert Southey (1774-1843) -- Rule, Brittania! / James Thomson (1700-1748) -- from The Vanity of Human Wishes / Samuel Johnson (1709-1784) -- The Drum / John Scott of Amwell (1730-1783) -- Ye Mariners of England ; Hohenlinden / Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) Fears in Solitude / Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) -- Old Man Travelling ; "It is not to be thought of that the flood" ; To the Men of Kent ; November, 1806 / William Wordsworth (1770-1850) -- from The Revolt of Islam / Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) -- The Burial of Sir John Moore after Corunna / Charles Wolfe (1791-1823) -- Advice to a Raven in Russia / Joel Barlow (1754-1812) -- The Year 1812 / Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855) -- Russia 1812 / Victor Hugo (1802-1885) -- At Vshchizh / Fyodor Tyutchev (1803-1873) -- Incident of the French Camp / Robert Browning (1812-1889) -- from The Dynasts / Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) -- The Destruction of Sennacherib ; from Child Harold's Pilgrimage ; from Don Juan ; On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year / George Gordon Noel, Lord Byron (1788-1824) -- from Horatius / Thomas Babington Macaulay, Lord Macaulay (1800-1859) -- from Edinburgh after Flodden / William Edmondstoune Aytoun (1813-1865) -- from Sohrab and Rustum / Matthew Arnold (1822-1888) -- The Revenge ; The Charge of the Light Brigade ; from Maud / Alfred, Lord Tennyson -- The Due of the Dead / William Makepeace Thackeray (1811-1863) -- Concord Hymn / Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) -- Beat! Beat! Drums! ; Come Up from the Fields Father ; Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night ; The Wound-Dresser ; Reconciliation / Walt Whitman (1819-1892) -- The Portent ; Ball's Bluff ; Shiloh ; The College Colonel / Herman Melville (1819-1891) -- "My Portion is Defeat...Today..." ; "My Triumph Lasted till the Drums" / Emily Dickinson (1830-1886) -- "Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind" / Stephen Crane (1871-1900) -- from Ode Recited at the Harvard Commemoration / James Russell Lowell (1819-1891) -- The Battle Hymn of the Republic / Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910) -- Ode to the Confederate Dead / Allen Tate (1889-1979) -- Last Evening / Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) -- from Eighteen-Seventy / Arthur Rimbaud (1854-1891) -- Arithmetic on the Frontier ; Tommy / Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) -- He Fell Among Thieves ; Vitaï Lampada / Sir Henry Newbolt (1862-1938) Embarcation ; The Colonel's Soliloquy ; A Christmas Ghost-Story ; Drummer Hodge ; A Wife in London ; The Man He Killed / Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) -- "On the idle hill of summer" ; "Soldier from the wars returning" ; Grenadier ; Lancer ; Astronomy / A.E. Housman (1859-1936) -- Slain / T.W.H. Crosland (1865-1924) -- War / Edgar Wallace (1875-1932) -- Bridge-Guard in the Karroo ; The Dykes / Rudyard Kipling (1865-1936) -- Men Who March Away ; In Time of the "Breaking of Nations" / Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) -- Peace ; The Dead ; The Soldier / Rupert Brooke -- The Volunteer / Herbert Asquith (1881-1947) -- Into Battle / Julian Grenfell (1888-1915) -- In Flanders Fields / John McCrae (1872-1918) -- "All the hills and vales along" ; "When you see millions of the mouthless dead" / Charles Sorley (1895-1915) -- Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries / A.E. Housman (1859-1936) -- Another Epitaph on an Army of Mercenaries / Hugh MacDiarmid (1892-1978) -- Grass / Carl Sandburg (1878-1967) -- Range-Finding / Robert Frost (1874-1963) -- The Death of a Soldier / Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) -- Calligram, 15 May 1915 / Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) -- Little Song of the Maimed / Benjamin Péret (1899-1959) -- On Being Asked for a War Poem ; Easter 1916 ; Sixteen Dead Men ; An Irish Airman Foresees His Death ; Reprisals / W.B. Yeats (1865-1939) -- "They" ; The Hero ; The Rear-Guard ; The General ; Glory of Women ; Everyone Sang / Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967) -- In Memoriam (Easter 1915) ; The Cherry Trees ; Rain ; As the Team's Head Brass / Edward Thomas (1878-1917) -- To His Love ; Ballad of the Three Spectres ; The Silent One / Ivor Gurney (1890-1937) -- On Receiving News of the War ; August 1914 ; Break of Day in the Trenches ; Dead Man's Dump ; Returning, We Hear the Larks / Isaac Rosenbert (1890-1918) -- Anthem for Doomed Youth ; Dulce Et Decorum Est ; Exposure ; Insensibility ; The Send-Off ; Futility ; Strange Meeting / Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) -- Sergeant-Major Money ; Recalling War ; The Persian Version / Robert Graves (1895-1985) -- Two Voices ; The Zonnebeke Road ; Vlamertinghe, Passing the Château, July 1917 ; Report on Experience / Edmund Blunden (1896-1974) -- Battlefield / Richard Aldington (1892-1962) -- Winter Warfare / Edgell Rickword (1898-1982) -- "my sweet old etcetera" ; "Next to of course god america i" ; "i sing of Olaf glad and big" / E.E. Cummings (1894-1962) In the Dordogne / John Peale Bishop (1892-1944) -- from In Parenthesis / David Jones (1895-1974) -- For the Fallen / Laurence Binyon (1869-1943) -- from Hugh Selwyn Mauberley / Ezra Pound (1885-1972) -- Triumphal March / T.S. Eliot (1888-1965) -- Elegy in a Country Churchyard / G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936) -- Subalterns / Elizabeth Daryush (1887-1977) -- Rouen / May Wedderburn Cannan (1893-1973) -- MCMXIV / Philip Larkin (1922-1985) -- The Great War / Vernon Scannell (1922- ) -- Six Young Men / Ted Hughes (1930- ) -- War Blinded / Douglas Dunn (1942- ) -- from Autumn Journal / Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) -- A Letter from Aragon ; Full Moon at Tierz, Before the Storming of Huesca ; To Margot Heinemann / John Cornford (1915-1936) -- "The Italian soldier shook my hand" / George Orwell (1903-1950) -- "Eyes of men running, falling, screaming" / Anonymous (mid 1930s) -- A Moment of War / Laurie Lee (1914- ) -- Benicasim / Sylvia Townsend Warner (1893-1978) -- Spain 1937 / W.H. Auden (1907-1973) -- Two Armies ; Ultima Ratio Regum / Stephen Spender (1909- ) -- A Thousand Killed / Bernard Spencer (1909-1963) -- To a Conscript of 1940 / Herbert Read (1893-1968) -- The Lilacs and the Roses / Louis Aragon (1897-1983) -- The Stand-To ; Where are the War Poets? / G. Day Lewis (1904-1972) -- Ecce Homo / David Gascoyne (1916- ) -- Still Falls the Rain / Edith Sitwell (1887-1964) -- from The Walls Do Not Fall / H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961) -- The Streets of Laredo / Louis MacNeice (1907-1963) -- Unseen Fire / R.N. Currey (1907- ) -- Prize for Good Conduct / Kenneth Allott (1912-1973) -- Lessons of the War / Henry Reed (1914-1986) -- All day it has rained... ; Dawn on the East Coast ; Goodbye; Song / Alun Lewis (1915-1944) -- from The Foreign Gate ; Timoshenko ; from The Wilderness / Sidney Keyes (1922-1943) -- Gallantry ; Vergissmeinnicht ; Aristocrats / Keith Douglas (1920-1944) -- Green, Green is El Aghir / Norman Cameron (1905-1953) -- Soldiers Bathing / F.T. Prince (1912- ) -- The Middle of a War / Roy Fuller (1912- ) -- When a Beau Goes In / Gavin Ewart (1916- ) -- In Distrust of Merits / Marianne Moore (1887-1972) -- The Fury of Aerial Bombardment / Richard Eberhart (1904- ) -- Eighth Air Force ; The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner ; A Camp in the Prussian Forest ; A Front / Randall Jarrell (1914-1965) -- "After Experience Taught Me..." / W.D. Snodgrass (1926- ) Carentan O Carentan ; Memories of a Lost War ; The Battle ; The Heroes / Louis Simpson (1923- ) -- First Snow in Alsace / Richard Wilbur (1921- ) -- Rank ; Foresight / Lincoln Kirstein (1907- ) -- Walking Wounded / Vernon Scannell (1922- ) -- St. Aubin D'Aubigné / Paul Dehn (1912-1976) -- The hand that signed the paper / Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) -- The Firebombing / James Dickey (1923- ) -- Elegy for a Dead Soldier / Karl Shapiro (1913- ) -- Shipment to Maidanek / Ephim Fogel (1920- ) -- from Sonnets from China / W.H. Auden (1907-1973) -- "More Light! More Light!" / Anthony Hecht (1923- ) -- Claus Von Stauffenberg / Thom Gunn (1929- ) -- Armistice Day / At the British War Cemetery, Bayeux / Charles Causley (1917- ) -- In Memory of Basil, Marquess of Dufferin and Ava / Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984) -- A Fable of the War ; Redeployment / Howard Nemerov (1920- ) -- Memorial Rain / Archibald MacLeish (1892-1982) -- For Johnny / John Pudney (1909-1977) -- The Lost Pilot / James Tate (1943- ) -- The Land-Mine / George MacBeth (1932- ) -- Off Brighton Pier / Alan Ross (1922- ) -- A Letter from Berlin / Jon Stallworthy (1935- ) -- September Song / Geoffrey Hill (1932- ) -- I am Goya / Andrei Voznesensky (1933- ) -- Fall 1961 ; For the Union Dead / Robert Lowell (1917-1977) -- A Vow / Allen Ginsberg (1926- ) -- What Were They Like? / Denise Levertov (1923- ) -- Vapor Trail Reflected in the Frog Pond / Galway Kinnell (1927- ) -- How Much Longer? / Robert Mezey (1935- ) -- It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers / Margaret Atwood (1939- ) -- To Whom It May Concern / Adrian Mitchell (1932- ) -- Dead Soldiers / James Fenton (1949- ) -- Requiem for the Croppies ; Whatever You Say Say Nothing ; The Strand at Lough Beg / Seamus Heaney (1939- ) -- The Colonel / Carolyn Forché (1951- ) -- Advice to a Prophet / Richard Wilbur (1921- ) -- At the Bomb Testing Site / William Stafford (1914- ) -- Your Attention Please / Peter Porter (1929- ).