Charles Sorley and Others

Abstract

In September 1916 Galloway Kyle’s anthology, Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men, was published. His Preface declared that the poems

define, record and illustrate the aspirations, emotions, impressions and experiences of men of all ranks … and they reveal a unity of spirit, of exultant sincerity and unconquerable idealism that makes the reader very proud and very humble…. The note of pessimism and decadence is absent, together with the flamboyant and hectic, the morose and mawkish. The soldier poets leave the maudlin and the mock-heroic, the gruesome and fearful handling of Death … to the neurotic civilian who stayed behind to gloat on imagined horrors and conveniences and anticipate the uncomfortable demise of friends…. It is not a new spirit, but a new bright efflorescence—a survival and a revival. ‘The half-men, with their dirty songs and dreary’ were stricken dumb by the storm—at the most, they whimpered in safety with none to heed them: the braver spirits were shocked into poetry and like the larks are heard between the roaring of the guns—the articulate voices of millions of fighting men, giving to poetry a new value and significance.