The five poets considered thus far in this study testify to the vitality of some of the poetry written by those serving in the military between 1939 and 1945. But there is great breadth to the Anglophone poetry written by those directly affected by the Second World War. This should not be surprising, of course: it was fought on many more fronts than any other war in human history; advancements in military technology meant it was also much more of a global civilians’ war than the Great War had been; and a large chunk of the Anglophone world – the USA – was far more involved, and for considerably longer, than it had been in that earlier war. This chapter provides an overview of some of the other rich and varied English-language poetry from and about the Second World War.

Louis Simpson and Charles Causley wrote most memorably of war only after they had come home. And perhaps, for all their brilliance, the war killed both Keith Douglas and Alun Lewis before either had written what would have been his finest poetry. Spare a thought, then, for Drummond Allison and Sidney Keyes, two poets who met in wartime Oxford, and who were both killed in action in 1943 at the even younger ages of twenty-two and twenty, respectively. Had they lived it is possible we might now talk about them – or at least about Keyes – in the same breath as Douglas and Lewis.

Allison went up to Oxford from Bishop Stortford College, a minor public school, almost at the same time Hitler invaded Poland. Initially, he was a pacifist; this changed when he came to understand something of the true nature of Nazism, but still he managed to put off conscription until 1943 – the same year that his only collection of poems, The Yellow Night, was published. His war began in Italy that October, at the Battle of Monte Cassino, and ended less than two weeks later when he was killed in action.

His poetry has its admirers, among them Geoffrey Hill and Anthony Thwaite, and has been the subject of a complimentary biography by Ross Davies, published in 2009. However, his work is largely derivative: he emulated the rhythms and constructions of Dylan Thomas one minute, Auden and MacNeice the next, and died before finding out quite what he sounded like himself.