Six chapters focus on each year of war and its aftermath, offering an adroit biographical and historical overview, followed by a selection of poems that chronicle the writers’ spirits, as they changed “from enthusiasm to pitiful weariness,” from hope to disillusion. During the war, Egremont writes, “the poets began to be lionized,” invited to give readings in elite salons and sought by publishers. Many of the author’s subjects are likely to be familiar to readers, including Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas, Wilfred Owen and Robert Graves others, such as Edmund Blunden and Julian Grenfell, are lesser known today. On the centennial anniversary of the start of World War I, historian Egremont ( Forgotten Land: Journeys Among the Ghosts of East Prussia, 2011, etc.) considers the intersecting lives and work of 11 British poets who were soldiers and esteemed contributors to the burgeoning genre of war poetry. Poetry reveals the devastating trajectory of war.
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