Anthem for Doomed Youth: Twelve Soldier Poets of the First World War

by Prof Jon Stallworthy (Author)

• Used

  Paperback
  2005

  $3.39

  Leading poet and former professor of English Literature, Jon Stallworthy, tells the story of the lives and work of twelve major poets of the First World War and provides selections of their best work.

  The First World War began with flag-waving, parades and poets inspired by abstract ideals. In part this reflected the national mood , but it revealed an almost universal failure to understand what modern mass warfare would really mean. The story of the 'war poets' is also the story of an awakening to the full horror of what the twentieth century came to know as 'The Great War'.

  Wilfred Owen said, 'My subject is War - and the pity of War'. He also said 'true Poets must be truthful'. The best war poetry was the work of writers who were also serving soldiers and was born out of their desire to tell the truth about what it was to be a soldier in the trenches - what it felt like, what it did to you and what it did to your fellow soldiers, friend or foe. The greatness of the poetry lay not just in the writer's talent, but in the unflinching accuracy with which it portrayed their terrible circumstances.

• Used

  Hardcover
  2002

  $3.39

  In time of war and national calamity, numbers of people seldom seen in church will suddenly turn to religion for consolation and inspiration - and perhaps more surprisingly, just as many turn to poetry. Never was the phenomenon more clearly marked than in that war we still know as the Great War. Hundreds of what came to be known as the war poets saw their work in print between 1914 and 1918; others - including some of the best - were not published until afterwards. That rather unsatisfactory label includes very different kinds of writers - Owen and Sassoon, with their poems of passionate indignation, are a far cry from Edward Thomas's bleak and oblique rural ruminations. In this collection Stallworthy has gathered some of the most moving and unforgettable poetry born out of the horror of the trenches. He includes brief accounts of the lives and work of 12 of the most powerful of those poets who experienced and wrote about the worst war the world has ever known.