This timely book traces ideas of pacifism in English literature, particularly poetry. Early chapters, drawing on religious and secular traditions, provide intellectual contexts. There follows a chronological analysis of literature which rejects war and celebrates peace, from the Middle Ages to the present day.

R.S. WHITE is Professor of English at the University of Western Australia. He has published extensively on Shakespeare and on Romanticism, and is the author of Natural Law in English Renaissance Literature (1996) and Natural Rights and the Birth of Romanticism in the 1790s (2005).