Into the stuff of his thought and utterance, whether he be on active
service or not, the poet-interpreter of war weaves these intentions, and
cooeperates with his fellows in building up a little higher and better,
from time to time, that edifice of truth for whose completion can be
spared no human experience, no human hope.

As already suggested, English and American literatures have both
received genuine accessions, even thus early, arising out of the present
great conflict, and we may be sure that other equally notable
contributions will be made. The present Anthology contains a number of
representative poems produced by English-speaking men and women. The
editorial policy has been humanly hospitable, rather than academically
critical, especially in the case of some of the verses written by
soldiers at the Front, which, however slight in certain instances their
technical merit may be, are yet psychologically interesting as sincere
transcripts of personal experience, and will, it is thought, for that
very reason, peculiarly attract and interest the reader. It goes without
saying that there are several poems in this group which conspicuously
succeed also as works of art. For the rest, the attempt has been made,
within such limitations as have been experienced, to present pretty
freely the best of what has been found available in contemporary British
and American war verse. It must speak for itself, and the reader will
find that in not a few instances it does so with sensitive sympathy and
with living power; sometimes, too, with that quietly intimate
companionableness which we find in Gray's _Elegy_, and which John
Masefield, while lecturing in America in 1916, so often indicated as a
prime quality in English poetry. But if this quality appears in Chaucer
and the pre-Romantics and Wordsworth, it appears also in Longfellow and
Lowell, in Emerson and Lanier, and in William Vaughn Moody; for American