Books by Samuel Hynes

Retired fighter pilot and English professor combines lifelong interests in war and literature in essays on how writers struggled to comprehend warfare.

The pattern in Hardy's poetry is the eternal conflict between irreconcilables that was, for him, the first principle, and indeed the only principle, of universal order. Hynes analyzes this pattern as it is manifested in the philosophical context of the poems, their structure, diction, and imagery. Originally published in 1961.

Between the opulent Edwardian years and the 1920s the First World War opens like a gap in time.

Samuel Hynes considers the principal areas of conflict - politics, science, the arts and the relations between men and women - and fills them with a wide-ranging cast of characters: Tories, Liberals and Socialists, artists and reformers, psychoanalysts and psychic researchers, sexologists, suffragettes and censors.

This is a study of a literary generation writing in a period of expanding fears and ever more urgent political and social crises. For those who came of literary age - Auden, Day Lewis, MacNeice, Spender, Graham Greene, Isherwood and Orwell among them - writing became a form of action.