There can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war. The 250 poems in Jon Stallworthy's classic and celebrated anthology span centuries of human experience of war, from David's Lament for Saul and Jonathan, and Homer's Iliad, to the finest poems of the First and Second World Wars, and beyond. Reflecting the feelings of poets as diverse as Byron, Hardy, Owen, Sassoon, and Heaney, they chart a great shift in human awareness - from man's early celebratory 'war-songs' to the twentieth century's darker poetic responses to 'man's inhumanity to man'.