According to the critic Cyril Connolly, in the early years of the Second World War, newspaper columnists often asked, ‘Where are the war poets?’ The idea of war poetry fulfilling a kind of public service had become established after the First World War, when Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and other combatants sang of the new horror of trench warfare. Connolly’s answer to the question, given in the middle of the Blitz, was: ‘under your nose’. ‘War poets’, he wrote, ‘are not a new kind of being, they are only peace poets who have assimilated the material of war. As the war lasts, the poetry which is written becomes war poetry, just as inevitably as the lungs of Londoners grow black with soot.’

The poetry of the Second World War, as Connolly saw, would be more diffused – like soot – among the population than that of the Great War, composed on the home front as well as overseas. It would also prove to be much more dispersed across time. In January 1945, the anthology War Poems from the Sunday Times returned to the question ‘Where are the war poets?’ and suggested, ‘We still await the masterpieces of war poetry, and it may be a lifetime before some village Hardy finds his powers summoned forth by the events which we know only too well and he knew not at all.’

Like browsing a bombed library, anthologising the poetry of the Second World War is a matter of digging out what survived. In his compact and absorbing new volume, Poetry of the Second World War, Tim Kendall sets clear limits to the salvage operation. He rules out the inclusion of a