Selected Poetry of World War One

If there be any subject that can bring the multitudes to poetic expression it must certainly be war. This was definitely true of the First World War. Among its poets, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfrid Owen most assuredly rank at the top. Winner of the military cross, English Captain Siegfried Sassoon's poetry is heralded for its brutal realism and its satirizing of overly patriotic pro-war rhetoric. Wilfrid Owen would meet his mentor, Sassoon, at the Craiglockhart War Hospital and follow in Sassoon's footsteps in lyrically relating the horrors of trench life. Owen died just one week before the final armistice. His poems come to us in several collected volumes, the first of which is included in this anthology. Further poems by Ivor Gurney, Isaac Rosenberg, Vera Brittain, Rupert Brooke, Alan Seeger, Robert Graves, Charles Sorley, Edgell Rickword, and others, are gathered here in this anthology. Together these poems provide a diverse perspective of the war seen through the eyes of the people who faced it in service to their country. In sharp contrast to the great loss which produced it, these lines stand as an enduringly beautiful testament to the war to end all wars.