MEN WHO MARCH AWAY: POEMS OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR.

Chatto & Windus, London, 1968, 4th impression. 192 pp, 8vo (8 11/16" H), hard cover in dust jacket. Ex-library. "The first world war produced a far greater body of good poetry than any other war in which Britain has been engaged. Now, from a distance of fifty years, we can get both the war an d the poetry in perspective, accepting not only the ordeals and disillusionments suffered by soldier poets, but also the 'visions of glory' which fired some of them in 1914. Mr. Parsons has made a broad but rigorous selection of the poetry w h i c h r e sulted. His anthology contains work by the famous front-line poets - Owen Rosenberg, Sassoon, Edward Thomas, Blunden, Graves - and by others, less known today, who wrote truthfully and well out of their experience. There are poems, to o, b y ol d er p oets who were deeply affected by the war though they could not take an active part in it - Hardy, Yeats, Kipling, Lawrence, and Walter de la Mare. Mr. Parsons has divided his anthology into seven sections which reflect not only t he cho no log ic al pr ogress of the war, but also the changing emotional attitudes of poets towards it, and prefaced it with a critical introduction." Ex-library copy with areas of surface paper loss at top/bottom of pastedown endpapers, several pa ges wit h a cor ner crea se, sixteen poems with tiny pen 'x' mark against title, one poem title has minor pen correction, library stamp/numbers on copyright page, library stamp and very light soiling on fore-edge of textblock, minor wrinkling at top /bot tom of s pine . Dust jacket is price clipped, has very light edge wrinkling, ghost label mark on spine, spine is faded, panels slightly faded. Good reading copy only..