World War One British Poets

The First World War was immortalized by poets – some who were active participants, and others who waited while sons, husbands, friends, or lovers went to war. This brief collection is a representative sample of war poems by British authors, including a couple of women. The brief biographical sketch that precedes the work of each poet let me know instantly whether or not that poet survived the war. It is frustrating that a few of the bios mention poems that are not included in this collection. Possibly those poems are still under copyright and could not be included in the collection. (Dover seems to keep its prices low by republishing material in the public domain.)

Only a couple of poems were familiar to me before I read the show more collection: “The Soldier” by Rupert Brooke (If I should die, think only this of me: That there's some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England...) and “In Flanders Fields” by John McCrae. Of the new to me poems in the collection, the one that will linger most is “The Next War” by Robert Graves. I found it eerily prescient on this side of World War II:

You young friskies who today
Jump and fight in Father's hay
With bows and arrows and wooden spears,
Playing at Royal Welch Fusiliers,
Happy though these hours you spend,
Have they warned you how games end?... show less

A small, but representative selection of poems by some of the great WWI poets (Sassoon, Owen, Graves, Brooke). While reading [Regeneration], I realized that I had never read a poem by Siegfried Sassoon and I found that a lack, so I pulled this slim volume off the shelf to read. It's amazing to me that I can read all I have been reading about WWI, and yet some of these poems made it more alive than anything else I've read. The power of poetry...

An excellent little collection of the poetry of the Great War.

A perfect book for Veterans Day reading to remind us of how horrific WWI was for those who fought and any war is for any soldier, a valuable anthology.