The War Poets

A moving anthology of First World War poetry, including well-known poets alongside some lesser-known voices.

Reissued in a larger format with a new cover, this evocative collection brings you 80 poems from the First World War, from a broad selection of 24 poets including Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, Edward Thomas and Rupert Brooke. Also featured are less famous poets such as Leslie Coulson, the American poet Alan Seeger, and Charles Sorley, whom the midcentury Poet Laureate John Masefield considered the greatest loss of all the poets during the war. Many of the poets featured in the book were tragically killed during the war itself.

Some of the classic war poems appear here, such as John McCrae’s ‘In Flanders Fields’, Wilfred Owen’s 'Dulce Et Decorum Est' and W. B. Yeats’s 'An Irish Airman Foresees His Death’, alongside some less familiar verse from soldiers such as ‘A Listening Post’ by R. E. Vernède and the heartbreaking ‘To My Daughter Betty’, penned by T. M. Kettle four days before the poet’s death in action in 1916.

Together, the poems in this book give a powerful sense of the futility and horror of the war, with some lighter moments of beauty and cameraderie, and help to keep the memory of these fallen heroes alive.