If any poet may be regarded as the British "war poet" of World War II, it is Alun Lewis. Though he never saw action, he wrote with great authenticity of the experience of war as encountered by his generation; and it was through the war that his poetry found its real power. He gave classic expression to the experience of being caught up in the machinery of war--to the boredom and waiting, the loves and separations that made up the lives of those in the services. For his last year Lewis was in India, exiled from home in a strange culture, as were many other British soldiers. His poetry is haunted by the central problems of life and death, seen in the perspective that the final purpose of all his activities as a soldier was to kill others. Lewis was characteristic of intellectuals of his generation in contemplating...