literary figures, the issue was not so much the moral, political or philosophical impossibility of art after the Holocaust, but the conditional and historically limited nature of literature written to address very specific war conditions. By the Fifties, Kathleen Raine was referring to the idea of the witness or reporter-poet who wrote: ‘poems descriptive of events in place and time as such, mostly from the war years, that seem now as dead as any other journalism’ (Raine 1956, xiv). Alan Ross commented that: ‘The war was on too huge a scale for any writer to avoid war poetry. […] When the war ended, there was a kind of numbness, an inarticulateness about what was really going on’ (Ross 1950, 923). War poetry, they suggested, had emerged as a type of necessary response to events: its significance and value as ‘art’ lapsed as the peace-time readership moved through a period of post-hoc shock and fatigue. Second World War poetry was, therefore, located quite quickly as meaningful primarily in relation to its precise circumstances, that is, to the ‘live’ experience of war, whilst selected First World War poets were accorded universal status. Anthony Thwaite in his Contemporary English Poetry (1957) wrote, alongside an analysis of the wartime poetry of David Gascoyne, Sidney Keyes, Keith Douglas, Alun Lewis and Drummond Allison, that ‘the implicit feeling amongst most poets seemed to be that Wilfred Owen had said everything worth saying about war itself’ (Thwaite 1959, 122). Thwaite and several later critics (for example, Shires, 1985) focussed on a small canon of 1939-45 war poets ‘proper’, viewing only a few as worthy of serious literary attention and the ‘war poet’ status. This approach has not been entirely without its counter-voices, however. Maurice Wollman’s anthology Poems of the War Years put forward the view that radical and transformational effects had been brought about by war: ‘The War destroyed much that had impaired and clogged English poetry of
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