There can be no area of human experience that has generated a wider range of powerful feelings than war. The 250 poems spanning centuries of human experience of war, from David's Lament for Saul and Jonathan, and Homer's Iliad, to the finest poems of the Second World War, Vietnam, the conflicts in Northern Ireland and El Salvador, and chilling visions of the 'Next War' Reflecting the feelings of poets as diverse as Byron, Hardy, Owen, Sassoon, and Heaney, they reveal a great shift in social awareness from man's early celebratory 'war-songs' to the more recent 'anti-war' attitudes of poets responding to 'man's inhumanity to man' - and to women and children.