. . . Poems are an integral part of the underground movements in the occupied countries of Europe, but few of them have reached us.  Nevertheless the war has already stimulated poets everywhere so much that an anthology like this one can provide a fair sample of the poetry of the anti-Fascist struggle.

We have included in our definition of the war every conflict that has taken place since Hitler's first rise to power; the ten-year-long fight of China, the tragic battle of Republican Spain against Fascism, and the lonely struggles of German and Austrian anti-Fascists are as much part of the great crisis of our time as what is happening today in Africa.  Thus we have been able to include the magnificent fighting poems of German and Spanish refugees, as well as poetry from many Latin American countries not actually at war.  We have unfortunately been unable, in the time at our disposal, to procure poems from Jugoslavia, Greece, Belgium, and Holland.  Our French section consists almost entirely of poems printed under Vichy, and gains a peculiar interest through the ingenuity with which its authors express anti-Fascist sentiment in veiled language.  The section from the British Empire has been deliberately limited by us in order to exclude certain defeatist and appeaser elements which are fortunately losing their quondam influence on renascent British poetry.

In the section devoted to the United States, we have concentrated on the work of new poets developed by the war, some of whom are actually in the armed forces; although most of the great names of American poetry are also represented.   The Soviet Russian section is unique in being itself a small anthology of the war poems of many different Soviet Republics, including Central Asian peoples whose very names are little known here.