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Georgian poet. Born at Rugby. Educated at Rugby School and King's
College, Cambridge. He was an atheist and active Socialist.
He was a friend of Edward Marsh and worked with him to prepare
and promote the first Georgian Anthology of poetry.
After travelling in Germany, and, following his nervous breakdown
he went on a long tour to recuperate, taking in the USA, Canada,
Honolulu, Samoa, Fiji, New Zealand, and Tahiti.
After hesitation about what course of action to take at the start
of the First World War he joined the navy. He was a witness at the
siege of Antwerp before writing his famous set of five sonnets
called 1914. Though he had seen the devastation and suffering
created by the war he kept it all at an emotional distance from
himself, denying the realities of war.
He had a deeply confused personality - given to both ecstatic
enthusiasm and suicidal doubt.
Following a mosquito bite he died of acute blood poisoning on
board ship on his way to Gallipoli, and was buried on the Greek
Island of Skyros.
Minds at War and Out in the Dark contain all five of Brooke's
1914 war sonnets, plus his sombre and realistic last poem, Soon to
Die.
Minds at War contains a further thirteen
and a half pages of discussion of Brooke's ideas, and extracts from
his letters which reveal something of the way his mind worked, and
the origins of some of the ideas in his sonnets.
There are five pages of information about
Brooke, and extracts from his letters in Out in the Dark.
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Born in London. Well known as an author of children's stories.
She was a close personal friend of Helen and Edward Thomas in the
last few years of his life. She loved Edward, but knew that
expressing her feelings to him would mean the immediate end of their
friendship. They often visited each other and went on long country
walks together. She typed his poems for him and submitted them, on
his behalf, under the pseudonym of Edward Eastaway, to various
publications.
Helen was aware of Eleanor's feelings towards Edward and was
perfectly content with the situation, believing that it might help
to make Edward a little happier.
There are two of her poems in Minds at War
and one in Out in the Dark. The poem that is common to both books is
"Now that you, too" which is a moving poem about saying goodbye to
Edward Thomas for the last time.
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Educated at Eton, and Balliol College, Oxford. He joined the army
in 1910. He seemed to take a psychopathic joy in killing people. His
poem Into Battle is said to be the most anthologised poem of the
First World War.
He died of wounds on 30th April, 1915, a few days after sending
his poem to The Times.
Into Battle appears in both Minds at War
and Out in the Dark.
Born in Gloucester. Educated at King's School Gloucester and the
Royal College of Music. He wrote poetry and music from before the
war.
He volunteered to fight and was initially turned down because of
his poor eyesight. He was gassed and wounded and returned to
Britain.
Mental illness developed. He was diagnosed as a paranoid
schizophrenic in 1922. He was committed to mental hospital where he
continued to write poetry and compose - sometimes believing that he
was still taking part in the war. He died of tuberculosis.
Three of his poems appear in Minds at War
and two in Out in the Dark.
Born in Bombay. As a small child he was sent to England (Southsea)
to be educated. He was desperately miserable for some years. He was
principally educated at the United Services College, Westward Ho!
Before the war he favoured re-armament. He was vigorous in his
opposition to Germany. After his only son was killed in the Battle
of the Loos,in September 1915, Kipling's confident and simple verse
faltered briefly.
He is best known for his classic children's books - especially
the Jungle Books (1894, 1895). He was awarded the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1907.
During the First World War he was Director of Propaganda to the
British Colonies.
In Minds at War there are six of his war
poems, plus an extract from A Song of the English. In Out in the
Dark there are four full poems and two extracts.
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HENRY NEWBOLT, SIR,
1862-1924.
Born in Bilston, Staffordshire. Educated at Clifton College,
Bristol and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Barrister, then
professional poet.
Keenly interested in naval matters he wrote the official British
naval history of the war. Best selling imperialist poet.
Establishment literary figure.
There are seven examples of his fighting
verse in Minds at War and five in Out in the Dark.
Born Oswestry, Shropshire. Educated at Birkenhead Institute and
Shrewsbury Technical College.
From the age of nineteen Owen wanted to be a poet and immersed
himself in poetry, being especially impressed by Keats and Shelley.
He wrote almost no poetry of importance until he saw action in
France in 1917.
He was deeply attached to his mother to whom most of his 664
letters are addressed. (She saved every one.) He was a committed
Christian and became lay assistant to the vicar of Dunsden near
Reading 1911-1913 - teaching Bible classes and leading prayer
meetings - as well as visiting parishioners and helping in other
ways.
From 1913 to 1915 he worked as a language tutor in France.
He felt pressured by the propaganda to become a soldier and
volunteered on 21st October 1915. He spent the last day of 1916 in a
tent in France joining the Second Manchesters. He was full of boyish
high spirits at being a soldier.
Within a week he had been transported to the front line in a
cattle wagon and was "sleeping" 70 or 80 yards from a heavy gun
which fired every minute or so. He was soon wading miles along
trenches two feet deep in water. Within a few days he was
experiencing gas attacks and was horrified by the stench of the
rotting dead; his sentry was blinded, his company then slept out in
deep snow and intense frost till the end of January. That month was
a profound shock for him: he now understood the meaning of war. "The
people of England needn't hope. They must agitate," he wrote home.
(See his poems The Sentry and Exposure.)
He escaped bullets until the last week of the war, but he saw a
good deal of front-line action: he was blown up, concussed and
suffered shell-shock. At Craiglockhart, the psychiatric hospital in
Edinburgh, he met Siegfried Sassoon who inspired him to develop his
war poetry.
He was sent back to the trenches in September, 1918 and in
October won the Military Cross by seizing a German machine-gun and
using it to kill a number of Germans.
On 4th November he was shot and killed near the village of Ors.
The news of his death reached his parents home as the Armistice
bells were ringing on 11 November.
Owen is widely accepted as the greatest writer of war poetry in
the English language.
There are 27 of his war poems in Minds at
War and 19 in Out in the Dark. Both anthologies contain additional
information, comment, and extracts from his letters.
More about Wilfred Owen, including
pictures.
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Educated at Shrewsbury and Clare College, Cambridge. Professor of
Literature at Newcastle (1890). Editor of Punch (1906-1932).
He was encouraged to write for the war effort by the Government's
Secret Bureau for Propaganda. His verse is a clear, competent call
to support official Government policy.
Four of his poems are included in Minds at
War.
Born in Kent. Educated at Marlborough, and Clare College,
Cambridge. He was a keen sportsman, loving cricket and foxhunting.
He was the first war poet to volunteer - 3 August 1914.
Disillusion set in slowly. His first critical poem, In the Pink, was
written in February 1916. He was the only English disillusioned
First World War poet who made an effort to be politically effective.
As a captain in the Royal Welch Fusiliers he met and became a
friend of Robert Graves. He became wildly angry at the death of one
of his friends and fought recklessly, winning the Military Cross. He
was wounded in the shoulder and later was shot in the head
accidentally by one of his own men. The wound was a graze, but
serious enough to put him out of the action for good from July 1918.
It was when convalescing from his shoulder wound in the summer of
1917 that he made his famous protest about the war. As a result of
this he was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh. There
he met and encouraged Wilfred Owen with his poetry.
He began to feel guilty about not fighting alongside his old
comrades and returned to active service in November 1917.
After the war he became literary editor of the Herald, returned
to his country pursuits and wrote a number of autobiographical
books. He married and had one son. He became a Roman Catholic in
1957.
Second only to Owen as a war poet, he recorded the war and his
developing responses with uncompromising honesty.
Thirty three of his war poems are to be
found in Minds at War, twenty-seven in Out in the Dark.
There are seven pages of additional
information and extracts from his diaries in Out in the Dark.
In Minds at War there are twelve additional
pages about Sassoon, including Arnold Bennet's response to Sassoon's
defiance of military authority.
Both anthologies include Sassoon's famous
statement, In Defiance of Military Authority.
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He was born in London and educated at St Paul's School, and
Lincoln College, Oxford.
His first book was published when he was eighteen and in the next
eighteen years he wrote over 30 books and thousands of articles and
reviews. In spite of his output he was treated meanly by publishers
and was often troubled by a shortage of money.
He was a friend of Gordon Bottomley, Walter de la Mare, Lascelles
Abercrombie, Harold Monro, Eleanor Farjeon, the Meynells and friend
and spokesman for the American poet, Robert Frost.
It was Frost who encouraged Thomas to write poetry. Starting in
December 1914 and finishing in December 1916 Thomas wrote 144 poems
- mainly about the English countryside, weather, the seasons - all
of them written in England, in a straight, unadorned style - a
number of them darkly influenced by the war.
His poetry was rejected as fast as it was submitted to newspapers
and periodicals, using his pseudonym, Edward Eastaway.
He was a shy, self -effacing man who suffered from depression and
came close to suicide. Having volunteered for the front, after
eighteen months training, he went to France with the Royal Garrison
Artillery at the end of January 1917. He was killed ten weeks later,
on 9th April, leaving a wife and three children.
The gentleness, subtle melancholy, plainness and direct honesty
of Thomas's verse is both moving and impressive.
There are ten of his poems in Minds at War and thirteen in Out in
the Dark.
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Born in Newcastle under Lyme, Staffordshire, and grew up in
Macclesfield and Buxton.
Her Testament of Youth is one of the outstanding biographies of
the First World War.
She felt compelled to play a part, and worked as a VAD nurse in
England, France (where her first task was looking after wounded
German prisoners) and Malta. She was moved to the verge of a nervous
breakdown by her experiences in the war and the loss of a close
friend, her fiancé and brother.
She wrote her Testament of Youth to record the effect of the war
on her generation. Her interest in politics sprang from a desire to
understand the causes of the war which, in turn, she hoped might
help to prevent a recurrence of such a human catastrophe. She
continued her biography in Testament of Experience.
As a pacifist, supporter of the League of Nations, and feminist
she wrote prolifically and lectured in Britain, the USA and Canada.
There are five of Vera Brittain's war poems in
Minds at War and two in Out in the Dark.
There are brief extracts from Vera
Brittain's biography, Testament of Youth in both books.
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Educated at Eton. Worked in the family tobacco business.
Best-selling novelist (World Without End, 1943).
Volunteered at the start of the war. He fought at Loos, Ypres and
on the Somme. In spite of the bitter tone of some of his poetry he
was an intense patriot and supporter of the war throughout. - At his
own request, perhaps realising that he could not suppress the trauma
much longer, he was transferred from the front line to staff work at
the end of 1916 - propaganda in Italy.
His brother, Jack, was killed in November 1917. He was invalided
out of the war in February 1918 with shell-shock.
He served in the RAF as a Squadron Leader in World War II. He
married three times.
There are three full poems by Frankau and one extract from a poem
in Minds at War, and one of his poems in Out in the Dark.
Born in London. Educated at Charterhouse. His mother was German.
As a child he spent five summer holidays at his grandfather's home
in Germany.
Went straight from school into the Royal Welch Fusiliers at the
age of nineteen. He became a friend of Sassoon, Nichols and Owen. In
July 1916 shrapnel from an exploding shell pierced his lungs and he
was invalided out of the front line with major injuries and
shell-shock.
His autobiography Goodbye to All That (1929) is the most racily
readable personal account of the First World War.
Highly regarded as a love poet. During his second marriage (to
his loving and long-suffering wife Beryl) and as he grew older, he
developed amorous, but doomed relationships with a series of
attractive young women. He was generous to a fault and commercially
naive.
Oxford Professor of Poetry 1961-1966. His historical novels I
Claudius and Claudius the God were best sellers.
He lived most of his life in Majorca. During his life he
suppressed most of his war poems, probably because he was not happy
with the quality of them.
There are ten of his poems in Minds at War.
Several have not been in print for over half a century.
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Born at Higher-Bockhampton near Dorchester. Educated at a private
school in Dorchester.
His pre-war poetry was admired by Sassoon. Wessex Poems (1898),
Poems of Past and Present (1901), Times Laughing Stock (1909) and
the dramatic epic of the Napoleonic Wars, The Dynasts (1904 - 1908).
Best known as a classic novelist. His novels include Far from the
Madding Crowd (1874), The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), Tess of the
D'Urbervilles (1891).
He staunchly supported the war until it was over. A member of the
Fight for Right Movement and the Secret Bureau for Propaganda.
Nine of Hardy's war poems are to be found in both Minds at War
and Out in the Dark.
Born in Canada. Educated at McGill University. Although a doctor
originally he fought on the Western Front in the artillery. In
Flanders Field, one of the most famous poems of the war, was written
during the Second Battle of Ypres.
He was put in charge of the No 3 General Hospital at Boulogne
before being appointed Medical consultant to all the British Armies
in France. He died of pneumonia, on 28th January, 1918, before
taking up the appointment.
In Flanders Fields appears in both Minds at War and Out in the
Dark.
Educated Winchester and Oxford. He was in the trenches for only a
few weeks before being invalided out with shell-shock and syphilis
in 1915, never to return. Worked for Ministries of Labour and
Information.
He was a friend of Brooke and Sassoon. Georgian poet.
Nichols' intense poem, Noon, is in both anthologies.
Popular novelist and poet. During the First World War his poetry
sold over a million volumes, showing him to be the most popular poet
at that time. His hymn, For the Men at the Front, is reputed to have
sold eight million copies.
Oxenham's support for the war is expressed in terms of Christian
idealism and total faith in God's Divine Love and Purpose. Every
soldier was sure of his place in Heaven.
For the Men at the Front is in both anthologies.
There are three further poems and two extracts in Minds at War,
and one more Oxenham poem and an extract in Out in the Dark
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Born in Leicester. Educated at Craven House, Leicester and North
London Collegiate School. Popular journalist and versifier. Regular
contributor to Punch, The Daily Mail, and The Daily Express.
Owen originally addressed Dulce et Decorum Est to her.
Two of her poems appear in Minds at War and one in Out in the
Dark.
Born in Kirbymoorside, Yorkshire, the son of a farmer. Educated
at Leeds University.
Before the war he was a Socialist, and internationalist, yet he
volunteered in January 1915, joining the Yorkshire Regiment.
Promoted to rank of captain. He was a natural leader and derived
great satisfaction from his role. He was courageous, and daring.
Awarded the Military Cross, and the DSO - an award just short of the
Victoria Cross.
His 21-year-old brother, Charles, was killed in France in
October, 1918.
He married the girl he had loved since before the war, in 1919.
Leading art critic. Anarchist theorist. Distinguished academic
career. - A complex and brilliant man.- Knighted 1953.
His moving poem about a deserter, The Execution of Cornelius
Vane, and four other war poems are to be found in Minds at War.
Born in Bristol, educated in London's East End and Slade School
of Art. He was an artist and engraver as well as a poet, but finding
no work he volunteered in October 1915.
Killed 1 April 1918. His war poetry is increasingly admired and
was praised by Sassoon.
There are nine of his poems in Minds at War, and ten in Out in
the Dark, plus a little further background material.
Born in New York. Educated at Harvard. After graduating he lived
in Greenwich Village for two years by sponging off his friends. He
was aimless, anti-social and scruffy. His parents sent him to
continue his studies in Paris.
He saw the war as a liberation from the dullness of everyday
life. On its outbreak he rushed to join the French Foreign Legion.
He dreamed of leading heroic charges in the thick of battle.
He was killed at Belloy-en-Santerre on the fourth day of the
Battle of the Somme, 4 July, 1916.
His deservedly famous and moving poem, Rendezvous, is included in
both anthologies.
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Born in Aberdeen. Educated at Marlborough, University College,
Oxford, and for six months in Germany at Schwerin and Jena.
He loved Germany and hated the idea of the war and fighting for
England. Consciously yielding to psychological pressure he enlisted
in 1914, joining the Suffolk Regiment. He was promoted to Captain in
August 1915 and killed in the Battle of Loos, 13 October 1915, at
the age of twenty.
Robert Graves was very impressed by Sorley's poetry.
Five of his poems in both anthologies.
Born in London. Thomas Hardy described her poetry as
"superlatively good."
Her poem, Forgotten Dead, I salute You, is
to be found in Minds at War.
Born in Clondalkin, County Dublin. Educated Siena Convent,
Drogheda. During the war she had a son serving in Palestine and
another in France. Friend of W B Yeats.
Both anthologies contain her poem, Joining
the Colours.
Educated at Blundell's and Oxford. Enlisted with the Public
School's Battalion in February 1915.
He grew to hate the war, and lost his faith in God. He was
convinced he should protest or desert but could not find the courage
to do so.
He was killed by a sniper's bullet, 3 April, 1917 at Bapaume. His
war diary, The Diary of a Dead Officer, which contained his poetry,
was published in 1919.
West wrote two particularly powerful war
poems: God, How I Hate You, and Night Patrol. The full texts of both
appear in both anthologies.
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Minds at War
The classic poems of First
World War and more |
Out
in the Dark
Anthology of First World War poetry recommended for students
and the general reader |
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