ABSTRACT
Roy Fuller published two collections of poetry during the war, both with thematically resonant titles, The Middle of a War (1942) and The Lost Season
(1944). The former contains 'January 1940', a brief satirical history of English
poetry, which concludes with the lines:
As the original title indicates, the poem was written during the strange period
of the Phoney War, which lasted from September 1939 to April 1940, when Hitler occupied Denmark and Norway and went on to invade and conquer
Holland, Belgium and France. In January 1940 all that lay in the future, as did the Battle of Britain and the bombing of London. Roy Fuller himself was still a civilian, and the encounter with death on which the poem dwells, though
already a possibility, was not yet an immediate one. When Fuller's Collected
Poems appeared in 1962 the title had been changed to 'War Poet', which gave
the poem a rather different significance. Fuller had served in the navy and survived the war, had written a distinguished body of poetry in response to it,
and had himself been placed in the category of 'war poet'.
