World War One British Poets: Brooke, Owen, Sassoon, Rosenberg and Others (Unabridged)

by Candace Ward (Editor)

Paperback, 1997

Status

Available

Call number

821.91 Wor

Call number

821.91 Wor

Barcode

6329

Collection

Publication

Dover Publications (1997), Edition: 1, 80 pages

Description

Ironically, the horrors of World War One produced a splendid flowering of British verse as young poets, many of them combatants, confronted their own morality, the death of dear friends, the loss of innocence, the failure of civilization, and the madness of war itself. This volume contains a rich selection of poems from that time by Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and others known especially for their war poetry -- as well as poems by such major poets as Robert Graves, Thomas Hardy, A. E. Housman, Robert Bridges, and Rudyard Kipling. Included among a wealth of memorable verses are Rupert Brooke's "The Soldier," Wilfred Owen's "Anthem for Doomed Youth," "In the Pink" by Siegfried Sassoon, "In Flanders Fields" by Lieut. Col. McCrae, Robert Bridges' "To the United States of America," Thomas Hardy's "In Time of 'The Breaking of Nations,'" as well as works by Walter de la Mare, May Wedderburn Cannan, Ivor Gurney, Alice Meynell, and Edward Thomas. Moving and powerful, this carefully chosen collection offers today's readers an excellent overview of the brutal range of verse produced as poets responded to the carnage on the fields of Belgium and France.… (more)

Original publication date

1997

User reviews

LibraryThing member cbl_tn
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
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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 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?...
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LibraryThing member tloeffler
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
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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...
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Rating

(31 ratings; 4.3)

Pages

80
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