Each age has poets and poems circumscribed by environmental pressures and the politics of the emotions of the age. It is not just the manner in which feelings are expressed but these feelings—the very impact of a situation, seems to be different in every age. But a poet or poets survive through their magic with words through and beyond the time factor of an age, a war, or even two wars. The Spirit Above Wars can only mean being outside the clutch of immediacy, the clutch of a personal horror or pain and seeing the whole experience as a human, universal factor.
From Larger Day to Huger Night
Monika Varma
SPIRIT ABOVE WARS: A STUDY OF THE ENGLISH POETRY OF THE TWO WORLD WARS by A. Banerjee Macmillan, New Delhi, 1976, 232 pp., 55.00
April 1976, volume 1, No 2