Page:More songs by the fighting men, soldier poets, second series, 1917.djvu/11

 Preface

N Introduction to this second series of "Soldier Poets" is superfluous. What was said by way of Foreword to the original volume is equally true of its successor. There is the less need for repetition because that original Introduction and the poems that followed have been the text of many articles, sermons, and speeches, including an address by the President of the Board of Education, who allows us to paraphrase his remarks on the characteristic features, already noted, of the remarkable outburst of lyrical poetry from the seat of war. The poems are remarkedly individual, he pointed out: they are entirely free from hate and execration. There is no reviling of the enemy. Our young soldiers look to poetry as a deliverance from the grim necessities of the hour rather than as a means of expressing martial emotion. They do not gush concerning patriotism, but they feel it none the less, and express it soberly, seriously, and with intense conviction.

The same characteristics, the same yearning over the beloved country left behind and of tender feeling for parents and home, are found in all the poems that have come to us from men in the fighting forces since the former volume was collected. And here we may repeat, that while these volumes are typical of the lyrical efflorescence of the fighting men, they do not pretend to be exhaustive: the larger task of sifting already published work and compiling a more complete anthology has been undertaken by a devoted advocate of the significance of the soldier poets' work and its claim to recognition. 7