ANTHOLOGY WITHOUT END: INCOMPLETENESS AS A CONSTITUTIVE PROPERTY OF THE COMBATANT COLLECTION IN BRITISH TRENCH POETRY OF THE FIRST WORLD WAR AND CONTEMPORARY UKRAINIAN POETRY OF THE INVASION

Abstract

The article substantiates the thesis that incompleteness is a constitutive, genre-structural rather than accidental property of the combatant poetry anthology written and published during an ongoing war. The study draws on two historically distant yet structurally comparable traditions – British trench poetry of 1914–1918 and contemporary Ukrainian poetry of the invasion of 2022–2026. Analysis of the material demonstrates that the combatant anthology functions not as a finished monument but as a principally open textual form whose integrity is regularly broken by the death of contributors in the interval between the submission of the text and its publication. The research combines comparative analysis with the theoretical framework of G. Genette’s paratext and J.-L. Nancy’s désœuvrement. J. Campbell’s notion of combat gnosticism and P. Bourdieu’s concept of the field of restricted production are applied to the postwar mechanisms of canonization. The primary corpus consists of Soldier Poets: Songs of the Fighting Men (1916), More Songs by the Fighting Men (1917), The Muse in Arms (1917), and #Frontmeny (2025); the paraanthological periphery includes the trench journal The Wipers Times, the anthology #Holosy (2023), the national portal Poetry of the Free, and the military literature competition “4.5.0.”. The article proposes the term “anthology without end” for collections in which the date of the poet’s death is inscribed into the body of the publication alongside the dedication and foreword. Through the cases of J. W. Streets (killed on 1 July 1916; his poems appearing in Soldier Poets in September of the same year) and M. Kryvtsov (killed on 7 January 2024; his texts included posthumously in #Frontmeny in 2025), supported by a broader corpus of Ukrainian examples (I. Chernilevskyi, Ya. Chornohuz-Semeniuk and others), structural symmetry between both traditions is demonstrated. It is established that the combatant anthologies of 1916–1918 and 2022–2026 constitute the primary rather than a derivative form of wartime writing, in which the death of the author does not destroy the text but becomes a structural element of the publication. The taxonomy of the closed postwar anthology that dominated twentieth-century criticism conceals this primary form. It is concluded that the study of anthological incompleteness as a constitutive property of the combatant collection opens a path towards reconceiving the war canon in both traditions and offers Ukrainian scholars a structural tool for engaging with poetry being written and published right now.