Poetry of the II World War - Book Reading

Join us at The London Archives as Tim Kendall, Professor of English Literature at the University of Exeter, gives a talk on the Poetry of the Second World War to celebrate the release of his new anthology.

For generations of readers brought up on the poetry of 1914-1918, it may come as a surprise to discover that the Second World War produced any poetry at all. In this talk, Tim Kendall explores the Second World War poets’ relationship with their predecessors and some of the reasons why they have never managed to reach such a wide audience. The Second World War contrived to be both unprecedented and catastrophically familiar; its poets were constantly aware that they inhabited two realms at once, conversing with ghosts as they went to fight a war shadowed by their fathers’ experiences. Struggling with that inheritance, they wrote some of the most important poetry of the century.