My paperback edition was published in 2007 I discovered it in Blackwell’s Book Shop on Charing Cross Road in London last September. (Kipling, so often associated with British Imperialism, developed into a harsh critic of the war and the British government.) It’s been reprinted several times since 1964, especially to update the short biographies of each poet in the appendix. The collection was, and remains, a broad one, covering not only life at the front but also war on the different fronts, life at home during wartime, and the sorrow of a devastated parent like Rudyard Kipling, whose only son was killed in action. Entitled Up the Line of Death: The War Poets 1914-1918, it included poems by 72 poets, 21 of whom had died in the war. Milne.įifty years ago, author Brian Gardner assembled an anthology of poems by the War Poets to commemorate the Great War (overshadowed as it had been by World War II). Housman, William Butler Yeats, and even A.A.

cummings, Herbert Asquith (son of the prime minister), Thomas Hardy, Seigfried Sassoon, Robert Service, A.P. They fought and died on the western front, mostly in Flanders and northeastern France.īut there were other fronts-Turkey, Iraq, Germany, East Africa-and other poets, some of whose names are still quite well known: Rudyard Kipling, Robert Graves, e.e. The more familiar members of this group, many of whom died in battle or from disease, were poets like Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, and perhaps Isaac Rosenberg, who were most typically represented in our high school and college textbooks. For many of the English-speaking generations since then, few things have shaped our idea of World War I than a group of British writers collectively known as the “War Poets.” The Great War, “The War to End All Wars, ” started 100 years ago this coming August.

Down and Out by Wilfred De'Ath