Anthem for Doomed Youth [Hardcover]

'Celebrate[s] not just the strength but the variousness of Great War poetry.'

'Tells again the story of young Britons whose response to their experience on the Western Front has become a crucial part of our 'myth' of the Great War.'

'Movingly blends selections of poetry with commentary and documents.'

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.

Jon Stallworthy, Senior Research Fellow of Wolfson College and formerly Professor of English Literature at Oxford, is the author of a number of books of poetry, of criticism and the biographies of Wilfred Owen and Louis Macniece.